V Fest Toronto 2009
By: Richard Trapunski
Posted: September 5, 2009 – Toronto, Canada
Critiquing the Virgin Festival has become an annual event for Toronto music writers. In the four years since Richard Branson dramatically announced its arrival in Toronto—via helicopter, naturally—headliners have cancelled (Massive Attack in 2006), noise curfews have cut sets short (The Flaming Lips, also in 2006), and outspoken Brit rock icons have been attacked on stage (Noel Gallagher in 2008). With so much history, and little of it positive, festival organizers decided to move this year's festival out of Toronto and into Nowheresville, Ontario. But given Virgin's track record, it was no great surprise that when the plan failed, with only three weeks to spare, the festival was moved back to Toronto in a last-ditch attempt to salvage ticket sales. Watching the Virgin Festival screw up is almost as exciting as watching the bands perform, and heading to the Molson Amphitheatre early Saturday afternoon, I was ready for a full weekend of both.
I arrived just in time to catch an early Virgin Mobile Stage set by Grizzly Bear, whose bassist, Chris Taylor, was apparently celebrating a birthday. Well happy fucking birthday, Chris Taylor—you're performing for more empty seats than fans. After a banner year that saw the Brooklyn art-rock band ascend Radiohead-like heights of critical acceptance and even flirt with the Billboard charts (no small feat for a heady indie-rock band), it was jarring to see them play to such a paltry crowd. But despite a strangely drum-and-bass-heavy sound mix, the band's transcendent harmonies and intricate, yet surprisingly lightweight, chamber rock arrangements managed to sound as impeccable as always in the unfavourable setting.
On the other side of Ontario Place, the Virgin Radio Stage felt a little more performer-friendly. (Poor attendance is less noticeable with no seats to fill.) However, due to an oddly Top-40-skewed lineup (Sean Kingston, really?), I only made a single foray there all weekend. Canada's Thunderheist are better suited to late-night dance-floor-bumping club gigs than daytime second-stage festival shows, but Toronto's MC Isis, wearing a men's button-down shirt as a dress, had more than enough charisma to rock a midday crowd. Bolstered by a live drummer, Montreal's Grahm Zilla held down the electro beats while Isis cracked wise ("buy our CD...or bootleg it...just consume it somehow"), shamelessly flirted with the front row and indulged in some crowd-surfing during "Jerk It". Fun stuff all around.
The entrance back to the mainstage was so bottlenecked that I was forced to miss Sloan, and despite my best efforts I happened to overhear a few bars of Paulo Nutini's white boy soul between $10 tall cans of Molson. But Franz Ferdinand managed to resurrect the day with a set of infectious dance-rock hits including "This Fire" and "Do You Want To". Nevertheless, when "Take Me Out" and "Ulysses" came and went, I wondered just how much longer they could play. Frankly, an hour is too long for a band whose songs essentially follow the same formula (as upbeat and catchy that formula may be), and by the time they reached an uncharacteristic instrumental blowout, they had already lost my attention.
To be fair, I may have just been impatient. Up next was one of my favourite bands of all time: The Pixies. Perhaps due to vanity (the years haven't exactly been kind to the band), there were intense media restrictions that barred even photographers from the general admission area. But with the use of some clever misdirection, I managed to secure myself a spot in the very front row. From this privileged vantage point, I was able to catch a view of a band that (gasp) actually seemed to be having fun. Kim Deal never stopped smiling, Joey Santiago wore his orgasm face during every guitar squeal (including a bit of Thurston Moore-style noise soloing during "Vamos"), and Frank Black...well...performed the whole set without his sunglasses.
There were some initial reports that this would be the first stop on the Pixies' Doolittle Tour, in which they would play every track off their seminal 1989 album, but I doubt that playing Doolittle from start to finish could have lived up to the endless hit parade that The Pixies delivered—an epic 80-minute set full of classics from all four albums: "Hey", "Where Is My Mind?", "Here Comes Your Man", "Head On". The list just goes on. Twenty years removed from the band's heyday, Black could still make that effortless transition from subdued croon to piercing yelp on the drop of a dime; Deal more than held her own during "Gigantic" and "Into The White"; and the band even pandered to the Canadian crowd with a cover of Neil Young's "Winterlong". You'd be surprised how many songs you can play when most of your tracks barely exceed the two-minute mark.
Serotonin still high, I rushed over to the Boardwalk Stage for a between-headliners set by Toronto's The Rural Alberta Advantage. Riding a big ol' wave of hype (including a stamp of approval from Pitchfork), the band displayed an enviable knack for melody. But on a tiny, overcrowded Boardwalk Stage, Nils Edenloff couldn't seem to muster his regular propensity for singing himself exhausted (both emotionally and physically). Plus, with a barely elevated playing surface, it was nearly impossible to see the percussive wizardry of Amy Cole or Paul Banwatt. Still, even a below-average performance by The RAA is worth catching, and the band's mix or earnestness and timeless songwriting certainly seemed to win over a few unfamiliar fans.
Back on the mainstage, so-called headliners Ben Harper and The Relentless 7 were already working through a rote, by-the-numbers blues performance. Sure, Harper has some slide guitar chops, but there was so little distinguishing them from any faceless casino blues band that I wondered how they secured headliner status, which can only be viewed as a slap in the face to The Pixies. After what could have been three songs, or seven—it's hard to differentiate when they're all mid-tempo jams—I couldn't find the exit quickly enough.
Day Two started much the same as Day One, with a critically lauded band playing to a pathetically meagre audience. This time it was Denmark's Mew, whose self-described "pretentious art rock"—a mix of confounding time signatures, soaring synth lines and reverb-soaked guitars—seemed to bewilder a noticeably black-clad audience. The Nine Inch Nails fans were already out in full force and much of the day's festivities felt like a glorified opening act for the world's most popular industrial rock band.
NIN fans can be a hard group to impress, but New Orleans' MUTEMATH sure gave it their all. On record, their '90s alterna-rock has always failed to impress, but their live performance is a whole different beast. It may be a cheap trick, but any show that ends with every member playing percussion, stage objects becoming instruments and the lead singer doing somersaults over his organ will demand attention, and the mainstage audience, diminutive as it may have been, retorted with a spontaneous standing ovation.
After the surprise success of MUTEMATH (seriously, had you heard of MUTEMATH?), the better-known Cold War Kids managed to suck all the energy out of the building with songs that relied more on over-indulgent vocals than actual fleshed-out songs. Someone needs to tell lead singer Nathan Willett that volume does not equal passion.
With more than a few people batting back yawns, N.E.R.D. took it upon themselves to get the crowd up and moving. The group has an archaic rap/rock/funk-metal sound, but it was so much fun that it even managed to persuade some of the indie-biased notebook-yielding music critics to put their hands up in the air and wave them like they just didn't care. (People still do that, right?) At one time or another, there were at least 30 people on stage, including a guitarist, bassist, two drummers, about four or five hype men, and any number of audience members invited up on stage to dance. If his work with The Neptunes has taught us anything, it's that Pharrell Williams knows how to appeal to the masses, and his admission that "our job is to warm it up for Trent" proved that unlike many other afternoon bands, his ambition didn't overextend his time slot.
It may be a symptom of Virgin's clueless programming, but many of the most intriguing Sunday bands were on the Boardwalk Stage, a makeshift venue so small it was barely there. Nevertheless, The D'Urberville's adept, breakneck drumming, dancey bass lines, upbeat post-punk melodies, and John O'Regan's spastic dance moves (recalling a nerdier, bespectacled Ian Curtis) attracted the attention of more than a few passersby, and by the end of the set they had a long queue of freshly enlightened festival-goers waiting to tell them, "That fuckin' rocked, man."
Conspicuously attired in a leather jacket, sunglasses and carefully dishevelled hair, it was easy to spot Von Bondies lead singer Jason Stollsteimer scoping out the D'Urbervilles show, but it turns out he was actually readying a makeshift platform, a brilliant idea on the barely elevated "stage". Jack White's fist may have lent The Von Bondies a career-elevating dose of anti-cachet, but they proved on Sunday that they can easily hold their own without the extra publicity. At the beginning of their set, Stollsteimer claimed "we're only doing fast songs tonight," and then proceeded to do just that, thrashing through a whiplash-inducing set of loud, dirty Detroit garage rock that made me wish I had packed a pair of earplugs (although I've pretty much accepted tinnitus as a necessary part of my life destiny).
Making the transition from The Von Bondies to The Pet Shop Boys was a bit jarring, but Virgin Festival programmers seemed to have been reaching for every demographic at once (again I scoff at the inclusion of Sean Kingston). Pet Shop Boys have two things going for them: camp and nostalgia. I'm too young for the latter, but I could easily appreciate the former. It's all but necessary for a synth-pop band to put on a visually stimulating live show if they aren't doing a lot instrumentally, and The Pet Shop Boys certainly achieved that.
Where every other band settled for the barely decorated mainstage (unless you call ads for Virgin Mobile an adornment), Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe mounted a stage full of Tetris-style white boxes, costumed backup dancers and LED video screens. Most people in attendance were obviously there for Nine Inch Nails, but there was at least a small segment of the crowd that appreciated the row of hits—"Always On My Mind", "Go West" and "West End Girls", plus a cover of "Viva La Vida" that turned the overwrought Coldplay hit into, well, a Pet Shop Boys song.
Any mistakes made by the Virgin Festival programmers (and there were oh so many) were more than eradicated by booking Nine Inch Nails for their "last ever Canadian performance". By the time Trent Reznor and the boys hit the stage, all the empty seats from the night before were now easily filled and you could feel the anticipation in the air. Say what you will about Nine Inch Nails, but their status as one of the world's best live bands is indisputable.
Utilizing every moment of the allotted two-hour time slot, the band played songs from every period of their storied career and invested every track with a full dose of emotion, which often manifested itself as intensity. (It only took until the end of the second song for the first guitar to be destroyed.) Still, in performances of chill-inducing, lighter-waving versions of "Something I Can Never Have", "The Day The World Went Away" and "Hurt", it was nothing but vulnerability. Not content to settle for just the hits, Reznor pulled out a medley of atmospheric album tracks from 1999's The Fragile, a highlight cover of Joy Division's "Dead Souls" and a tempo-shifting rendition of "March of the Pigs".
Throughout the set, the audience was on its feet, and Reznor had them all wrapped around his little finger. The band masterfully measured the set with highs and lows, making the final combo of "The Hand That Feeds" and "Head Like a Hole" an all-out catharsis and a surprisingly strong ending to a corporate music festival that still has yet to find any semblance of momentum.
Still, after battling through low ticket sales, a last-minute venue change, a stadium setup that felt nothing at all like a European-style summer festival, and a set of "festravaganza" extras that were too lame for words —who wants to pay 30 bucks to get their hair cut at a music festival?—Virgin Festival managed to score a few memorable performances that will outlast the many gaffes. If only they could book Nine Inch Nails and The Pixies every year, they just might be onto something.
Photo Galleries:
DAY 1
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DAY 2
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