Friday: Think About Life, Tuneyards, Bayonets @ The Polish Combatants Hall, May 22
If you’re gonna have a summer to remember, you’re gonna need a soundtrack. Gone are the days when bi-curious party girls and umbrella-wielding pop tarts ruled your ears; in 2009, Think About Life will make you bust out the patio lanterns and screw your roommate on the porch. You’ll probably regret it, but then you’ll blast Think About Life's “Johanna” and the recklessness of youth will just seem like abandon.
The night began seemingly innocuously at the rec room–like digs of Toronto’s Polish Combatants Hall. As old school Europeans sold drink tickets to the city’s indie elite, which included Gentlemen Reg and members of Tokyo Police Club, Hooded Fang, Ruby Coast and Born Ruffians (word to the wise: the buffalo-decked Polish brew Zubr packs a powerful punch), we clustered near the stage for a brief set by Alberta’s Bayonets. A zany punk band as cast by John Waters, each one-minute track was announced with a dedication. “This song is for Roy Rogers,” announced Blake, Bryan, Bryan and Brosey, hedging into a blistering chorus that simply repeated the adage “If you build it, they will come”. The perfect warm-up act, it was refreshing to see a band having more fun than anyone.
Tune-Yards, the solo project from anarchist puppeteer/seasoned Portland musician Merill Garbus, opened with tribal drumming and soft gasps. As the Zubr took hold, the first reaction from the bemused crowd was one of confusion. Eventually incorporating looping, Garbus broke out her electric ukulele and began a series of sophisticated, transient rock songs that recalled everything from The Blow’s syncopated speech-singing to Bob Dylan gone electric. With a rough baritone that reminded me of Tracy Chapman, Tune-Yards’ magnetic presence and self-effacing demeanour made us swoon, and left our minds fully blown.
But we still needed to get down. Though the darkened pallor of the Polish Combatants Hall isn’t exactly Madison Square Garden, the three members of Think About Life still graced the stage like stadium headliners. Clad in a bedazzled baseball cap, frontman Martin Caesar worked the crowd, shimmying and shaking to the broken-down beats of “The Wizzard”, while the red-headed Graham Van Pelt (a.k.a. Miracle Fortress) maintained a mysterious reticence. The songs from their brand-new disc, Family, are definite barn-burners whose great psychosexual lyrics illustrate romantic confusion with disarming honesty (“Young Hearts” reprises Air’s “Playground Love” by adding a funk baseline). With a mosh-pit clustering near the front of the stage, Caesar took flight, crowd-surfing for the beginning of “Set Me On Fire” as patches of sweat bloomed under his armpits. Next, they added a female singer who acted more as a hype woman, making the male/female tensions that Think About Life professes both easy to relate to, and arresting. (“Havin’ My Baby” may be the only summer jam to dissect abortion.) While the single “Paul Cries” grew heated during Van Pelt’s thunderous synthesizer coda, the audience were dumfounded by Caesar’s emotional intensity on the chorus of “The Veldt,” a rewrite of The Temptations “My Girl.” (“Why can’t you say, what you really want to say,” he crooned in a Curtis Mayfield–like falsetto.) Begging the band for an encore, the crowd took over the stage for the positively charming “Sweet Sixteen," which turns MTV reality fodder into a tale of trying to awkwardly romance a teen runaway. Think About Life get to the bottom of why we go out at night — we’re looking for a whole lot of love, but more than that, we want someone to hold our hearts. CHANDLER LEVACK
Saturday: The Budos Band, wordPEOPLE, DJ John Kong @ Polish Combatants Hall, May 23Nothing says Brooklynite crate-digging afrobeat/soul revivalists like… a Polish veteran's hall? Between the painfully brightly–lit rear bar area and the darkened high-school auditorium look of the rest of the Polish Combatants Hall, the contrast was the perfect embodiment of the show itself — a glammed up College Street–style crowd rubbing somewhat uncomfortably against the fringes of a DIY indie-rock festival. But who cares, really, when the music is right?
After some always-masterful spinning by Do Right! label head John Kong, Toronto’s own wordPEOPLE took to the stage with a sack of tunes from their
People’s Eatery disc and a boho vibe in full effect. Apparently pop-hop can be competently performed, full of crowd interaction and sound generally alright, and still have the rancid whiff of college-party-band Black Eyed Peas–style goofiness. It doesn’t seem fair, but there’s no getting around the fact that copping a ska feel in 2009 = fail.
At first blush, The Budos Band seemed to be taking a warm-up lap. Both their conga player and their tenor saxist were missing, as was one of their two trumpet players, and initially, their Ethiopian-influenced grooves came across as more simpering than smouldering.
Their trumpet player was in scorching form, however, producing solos full of spicy flourishes that turned up the heat in the room, if not the humidity — the crowd’s dancing remained sporadic. The rhythm section were as solid as those we’ve come to know in the band’s two celebrated Daptone Records discs, but baritone sax player Jared Tankel appeared to be having equipment trouble, and after a few more tunes, asked the crowd whether anybody had “one of those little screwdrivers that you fix your eyeglasses with,” and promptly disappeared off-stage, leaving the band to vamp somewhat aimlessly until he returned. It was kind of like watching a veteran slugger waiting for his turn at the plate, trying out different bats with light swings designed not to strain his chops. When the crowd started dwindling, things were not looking good for our visiting heroes.
It didn’t take long for those of us who stayed to be rewarded for our patience. When Tankel returned, the band seemed to hit their stride; there was an electricity to the rhythm section’s interaction that had been missing, and they wasted no time getting down to business — suddenly guitarist Thomas Brenneck seemed to be inserting his percussive little hits with a sniper’s precision, bassist Daniel Foder pushed the groove along and the bluesy sax and trumpet solos morphed from aimless to aggressive. Blame it on the glorious Tyskie beer, but by the time they finished with a lengthy jam and exited the stage, the applause that brought them back seemed long, loud and wholly deserved.
DAVE MORRIS