NO JOY, SANDRO PERRI and NAT BALDWIN as part of WAVELENGTH 12 at the Great Hall, Saturday, February 18. Rating: NNNN
Settling into the second half of its four day 12th anniversary festival, Wavelength took over the Great Hall with a typically eclectic batch of local heroes and visiting weirdos.
After the soft country-folk of the Weather Station and cosmic electro-psych of Off The International Radar (a veteran Wavelength band), it was up to classically-trained songwriter/sometimes Dirty Projections bassist Nat Baldwin to keep the crowd entertained.
The Maine native cut a lonely image, just him and his upright bass at the centre of the Great Hall’s sizeable stage. But he commanded the room well, his deep staccato bowing merging well with his soulful, melismatic vocals (somewhat reminiscent of the Dirty Projectors’ lead singer, Dave Longstreth), creating a pleasant indie pop aesthetic with an eye towards composition.
Sandro Perri took the stage next, armed with a crackpot band of familiar faces from the Tranzac scene. The well-respected Toronto songwriter found a nice balance between breezy soft rock, tropical rhythms and textured percussion/synth experiments that displayed his instrumental virtuosity without stepping too far outside conventional song structures.
By the time No Joy took the stage at 1 am, the crowd had thinned out a bit (likely rushing to catch the last subway) but despite the extra space not many moved towards the front of the stage. That had less to do with a lack of enthusiasm than an attempt to maintain their eardrums. The Montreal band is known for evoking the gut-crunching but oddly serene swashes of sound and ethereal, ‘verbed-out vocals as their ‘90s shoegaze forebears, which combined well with the stately Great Hall stage and General Chaos’ psychedelic projections.
No Joy’s two co-leaders Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd spent much of the set literally gazing at their shoes, or at least downwards, satisfyingly coaxing as much noise as they could possibly get out of their two guitars, their feature-obscuring blonde hair swinging wildly in their faces. I’ve seen the band three times now, but I’m still not sure what either of them actually looks like.
