Props Montreal

by JACK OATMON

My wrists looked like pages from my ratty, tattered passport for the majority of last week, whimsically stamped all over with the hurried nonchalance of a customs officer. Except, instead of travelling through different cultures and countries, I was navigating the near-endless series of self-contained subcultural microcosms conjured up by Pop Montreal. Each show came complete with its own décor, music, fashion and general demeanour, like something from a human zoo on an alien spaceship. Actually, the smells in the venues were also quite diverse and engaging, in keeping with the zoo theme. I’ll leave the smells, from scent to stench, up to the reader’s imagination, but here are some other details I managed to observe, despite the generally compromised state of my senses.

It began with a glass or five-and-a-half of red wine at the festival’s opening booze ’n’ schmooze on Wednesday night. It was hosted in the beautifully renovated pool of Ecomusée du Fier Monde, a lovely venue that could do well to let rockers get soused in it more often. After a moody, pared-down rock interlude with le Husky, I bounded off toward the Ukrainian Federation, though I paused along the way for a few classically inclined folk tunes by the technically gifted Olympic Symphonium at O Patro Vys. Well, I’ll say Patti Smith and her band in the humbling Église St. Jean Baptiste on Friday was charming, but Smith and A Silver Mt. Zion at the Ukrainian Federation on Wednesday didn’t stop short of jaw-dropping. The intimate hall swayed with laughter and crude jokes, surprisingly sharp and lyrically pleasing poetry, and the trance-inducing jams of the band. What a treat. Afterwards at la Tulipe, Caribou surprised me with a full band that came off far more rockin’ and jammy than expected.

Thursday’s highlight for me was easily Library Science’s dinky melding of dub reggae and elevator funk. It was like Lee Perry running out of weed on a yacht cruise and opting for some borrowed Zoloft. CPC Gangbangs put on a cutthroat set at la Sala Rossa on Friday, adding an indulgent edge of psychedelia to the grating and thrashing. But the frigid, masculine crowd killed the buzz a bit, making Zoobombs at Academy the drunken, sweat-soaked, hootin’ and hollerin’ set of the night. I also dug Bocce’s energetic, crowd-pleasing jamboree at the sauna-like My Hero loft. I was pretty nonplussed by both Plants and Animals and Grizzly Bear, for the record.

A fabulous little sociology experiment was being conducted at the Just For Laughs complex when I arrived on Saturday night, as le Studio, full of sweaty, spiky, checkered adolescents, erupted to the seasoned punk ska of the Toasters while a similarly aged and sized crowd placidly and submissively received Islands right next door at Cabaret. While the contrast I witnessed walking back and forth was hilarious, the monolithic nervous tension and heaping helpings of feedback at the Islands show scared me off some quick.

The unparalleled height of the festival was when legendary trombonist Fred Wesley funktastically spazzmogrified and groove-pummelled la Sala Rossa with the ample aid of Socalled, Subtitle and Katie Moore. The crowd was a bit stiff at first, but nobody stood still when the band came back for an extended encore, beckoned by the most coherent chorus crooning I’ve ever witnessed from a club full of drunkards.

Gonna have a house par-tay! jack.oatmon@gmail.com