Day One - Crystal Antlers, Red Mass, Dinosaur Bones, Pig
By: Alison Lang
Posted: October 22, 2009 – Halifax, Canada
It was the first night of the Halifax Pop Explosion and the creatures of the night were emerging from their caves. You could see them trudging along the street, buying smokes from the convenience stores, fingering their press passes and guitar picks: the scraggly underfed young men in tight jeans, leather jackets and plaid, betoqued and bescarved for the long night ahead, with their female counterparts clad in leggings and big black boots. It was a night for new friends and old ones, a night where you might buy a Jamaican patty in the Paragon basement alongside barely-legal college kids you'd never see again, while your friends race from one venue to the other on battered bikes, the tires scraping along north end streets speckled with dead leaves and barely-bridled anticipation.
The first stop of the night was Gus' Pub, where festival organizers had lined up a early Christmas gift for the hardcore kids—a hearty lineup of metal acts leading up to an appearance from British noisemakers Architects. I showed up with SoundProof photographer Lindsay Duncan to check out the first act on the bill: Pig, from Truro, Nova Scotia. These youngsters have been playing all-ages shows and house parties for some time now and have garnered a reputation for being extremely loud and shatteringly experimental. We entered the bar to find the foursome accompanied by members of Halifax noise bands Fuck Montreal and Scribbler with various percussion instruments, backs mostly facing the early crowd. The group was surrounded by enormous array of battered amps piled on top of each other, girding in the sound like castle walls. The noise spewed out into the bar and surrounded us entirely. Sometimes Pig sounds like Sonic Youth at their noisiest and sometimes they just sound like total chaos; here and there, vocals would ebb out over the squalling noise like bits of ash floating away from an oil drum fire. When the final dissonant chord had faded out, a friend beside me sighed. "Ah, youth!" he said.
I moved on to the newly revamped Paragon Theatre (built upon the demise of hallowed former venue the Marquee Club) in time to catch most of Dinosaur Bones' set. The Toronto boys were nice to look at and seemed like sweet, fun people, but their melodic, straightforward indie-rock sound was a bit soporific and samey-sounding. The people around me swilled their beers and nodded along politely. I kept getting distracted by diminutive Jose Cuervo girls, clad in green short-shorts and yellow tank tops passing around free mini-shots of tequila. I feel I should make some kind of comment about how the economy has made Pop Explosion a more corporate event than ever and etc., but really, it seems unwise to bitch about free hooch.
Montreal's Red Mass represented the reason I really like doing Pop Explosion every year. You just know that every night promises at least one group that will give you thrills of delight, if not totally blow you off your ass. And these garage-synth weirdoes certainly laid claim to Tuesday night, seizing it in their dripping, red-face-painted jaws and shaking it like a game dog shakes a water fowl in its death throes. From the beer tossing drummer with beads slung around his neck to the hypeman/synth operator with a sweaty Jerry Only hairdo, crashing to the ground as his fingers still tweaked the right knobs, the experience was jarring and fucked and totally perfect. They seem to have that manic revolving member/psychedelic/psychotic feel that made the Brian Jonestown Massacre so good, and it will be exciting so see where they go from here.
Then it was time for Crystal Antlers, a band that seems to get the kids all riled up. I was surprised at how jammy they were (a spontaneous encore featured a five-minute taste-off with more or less the same four chords) but they were also tight with conviction and had a high energy that made them watchable. Again, props to the hype-man/cymbal/tambourine player, who played his instruments with an awesome, shirtless magnetism. (Are hype men the new thing? If so, I'm a believer.) But as I left the bar, exhausted already (and with four more late nights looming ahead) I kept thinking about Red Mass and that sweaty punk falling on the floor with his synths, and that secret smile took me all the way home.
Video: "Male Models" by Red Mass
