The only way to survive the final day of a music festival is to avoid idleness. It’s hard to crash if you’re still moving. The final day of Halifax Pop Explosion was heavy on early shows and, having only two days to cram in as much as I could, I couldn’t resist.
Which is why, after a quick coffee and sun-soak at the waterfront, I found myself at the Company House, a small bar near the Propeller brewery, on a beautiful Halifax afternoon.
Local music blog Herohill and Saved By Vinyl records took it upon themselves to bring a little bit of SXSW flavour to the East Coast with complimentary pulled pork sliders, chicken meatballs and Molson M (try though I did, I couldn’t avoid the damn stuff). After unfortunately missing a collaboration between Nova Scotia luminaries Shotgun Jimmie and Jon Mckiel, I was there in time to catch Deadhorse, a Calgary rock band that somehow looked like it stepped out of three different decades. The music was just as all over the place, veering between garage, stoner rock and country-roots, and occasionally blending into coherence.
After some heavy duty fish and chips, it was off to the Converse Pavillion, an all-ages punk venue next to a skate park. I’ve seen Fucked Up more times than I can count in the past year, but it was cool to see them play a room so aligned with their hardcore roots. And it turned out to be the perfect arena for lead shouter Damian Abraham, who handed out bottles of water to the crowd and used the venue’s low-hanging beams to surf across the crowd. Maybe that’s why he’s lost so much weight?
Fucked Up would be playing again later that night at the Palace (the controversy surrounding their name printed on the cover of local alt-weekly The Coast made them one of the most buzzed about bands at Halifax Pop Explosion), but I headed over much earlier for a set by Montreal’s No Joy.
The band’s gorgeously skuzzy noise-pop evokes all sorts of classics from the ‘90s shoegaze scene, but it’s even more evident live, where the guitars are amped up to 11, the vocals are swathed in reverb and lead pair Laura Lloyd and Jasamine White-Gluz hide behind their face-obscuring blonde locks.
As usual at Canadian festivals, one of the more popular showcases at Halifax Pop Explosion belonged to CBC Radio 3, who put together a solid front-to-back lineup at the Olympic Community Hall. It was a good space for Montreal’s Suuns, whose dark, sexy groove was accompanied by a modest psychedelic light show. The band’s mix of wobbly synths and noisy guitars seem to get tighter every time they play, which hopefully means they’ll just continue to explode.
Miracle Fortress had a much more coordinated light show, but it didn’t obscure the fact that there wasn’t a lot going on onstage. Graham Van Pelt’s throwback dark disco sounds great on record, but live it sounds nearly exactly the same. It didn’t help that the venue was quickly filling to capacity, erecting a wall of heat between the outside and the inside of the venue.
By the time headliner Chad VanGaalen took the stage, Olympic Community Hall was an all-out sweatbox. The Calgary DIY songwriter is held back by all the things that make him so lovable: his goofy personality, ramshackle genre-hopping and distaste for conventions. More intent on noise-jamming than song-playing, his messy live show will probably always be frustrating. The fact that the packed venue nearly emptied out by the time he was finished wasn’t a good sign, either.
Now it’s back to Toronto, satisfied by my dalliance with the Halifax music scene and covered in Donair sauce.
Read part one of NOW’s Halifax Pop Explosion coverage here.
