And what a weekend it was

by by JACK OATMON

It all began on Thursday night with the cutest indie rock show I’ve yet witnessed. The touchy-feely pop of Habitat opened the show at Friendship Cove. As one onlooker put it, “There’s no way these other bands can possibly live up to Habitat’s cuteness.” They sure as hell tried, though. The show and the crowd were so wonderfully wholesome and fulfilling that I almost started to retch. What a counterpoint it offered to the narcissism and general corruption witnessed at a club-night-that-shall-remain-nameless later on that evening. Ah, Montreal—a city of contrasts. I got the Habitat album, by the way, and it’s great.

Friday night, I managed to grift me a ticket for the Arcade Fire. I last saw them live in Halifax in 2004 and I must admit, I was a bit underwhelmed then. An aggravating crowd and what I recall to be a very non-engaging performance incited me to leave halfway through the show. This time around I had, literally, the exact opposite experience. A conspicuous lack of information about show times caused me to show up halfway through their set (I’m talking Magic Bullet conspicuous, here. I have had no less than three press releases sent to me regarding the show, not one of which could inform me as to the actual time of the performance). When I hit the scene, the band, which I had remembered as a rock ensemble with some classical touches, had made the transition to more of an orchestral arrangement taking its musical cues from rock ’ n’ roll. They were very tight, hitting the notes and changes like clockwork regardless of the large number of members. The songs were neatly composed and the band seemed to have laboured on the live stage a lot and gotten very comfortable together.

Perhaps the most interesting thing was the age distribution of the audience. The enthusiastic, well-dressed crowd seemed to be approximately late twenties to fifties, with an average age of perhaps 35. I guess that’s who’s organized enough to get tickets for this sort of thing. As I left the art-deco amphitheatre, I thought about the fact that, just a few blocks away, Malajube were probably tuning up their guitars, and I wondered if the universe might just collapse in on itself under the weight of all the hype.

Speaking of mind-boggling hype-storms, how ’bout that line-up at the SAT for MSTRKRFT on Saturday night? When we were on our way down, my buddy actually said, “Whoa! Look at the line for Club Soda. What’s goin’ on there tonight?” In case you don’t hang out much at the corner of St-Laurent and Ste-Catherine (Montreal’s cultural epicentre, soon to change names from Quartier des Wasted Urchins to Quartier des Spectacles), that would make the line almost an entire city block long. The organizers told me they turned away several hundred people, which is remarkable considering the girth and modular layout of the venue. It was easily the biggest queue and the most new faces I’ve ever seen there in a night. What’s more, it was the youngest audience I’ve witnessed at the SAT, as evidenced by all the adorably misled ’90s-revival accessories. So as the adults were in Mile-End enjoying the lasting mystique of the Arcade Fire, their kids were downtown babbling, romping and stumbling at the club.

The kids are alright… jack.oatmon@gmail.com