Have a ball with new bands collaborations and old favourites
Look out festival season is coming up and fast! Sled Island the Folk Fest Jazz Fest Fest Fest — if you don’t start training now for the marathon of live music chugging around the bend you could find yourself left behind disoriented and pathetically weak in the exhaustion tent. Don’t let the gentle fanning of your dehydrated face be the only music you hear this summer. Let’s get started clenching those pumping fists and kicking those dancing legs!
Diving right into the weird end of the pool Thursday May 7 will hold a unique set of avant-garde sounds from the deep subconscious of men-about-town and ambitious experimentalists Chris Dadge and Scott Munro as the Bent Spoon Duo joined by Calgary’s golden boy Chad VanGaalen with a host of circuit-bending doodads and other strange toys. There’s no telling what heights the collected talents of these three will take listeners to but my bet’s on somewhere in outer space.
If you’re the type that tends to get easily bummed-out by the post-weekend slump of Mondays the Soda has a night of bouncing bumping and blissing for the more electronically inclined on Monday May 11. DJ Geosphere Honeey Mustard Danny Henry and Local Luminary will douse listeners in beats and a soothing ambient wash all night.
May 15 and 16 will see the triumphant return of Moustache Rock to Broken City featuring a boatload of local talent all concentrated into one bristly upper lip of a weekend. The Ramblin’ Ambassadors The Brenda Vaqueros Woodpigeon Blood Alley Beija Flor Cripple Creek Fairies The Outlaws of Ravenhurst and others will take to the floor poised to stir those old familiar festival-going feelings into a pungent brew of excitement.
Also stoking the music festival fires on May 16 will be the bewilderingly talented lineup of the Flemish Eye Ball going down at the No. 1 Legion. After having gone on their own epic globe-trotting adventure Flemish Eye artists Women Pale Air Singers (featuring members of Calgary’s Cape May and Victoria’s Run Chico Run) and Chad Van Gaalen (featuring Halifax indie-pop treasure Julie Doiron) will be joined by fellow Calgary dreamcatchers Azeda Booth Ghostkeeper and No More Shapes for the event.
I see my motivational music listings aren’t quite getting all of you amped enough so let me introduce the Calgary music scene’s pump-up team of 2009 Puberty . With enough shouting pounding and buzzing to get even the most sunstroked listener on their feet the all-girl garage-pop trio is ready to let their feverish blend of Sonic Youth-style static and subtle pop hooks loose on the town this summer. As guitarist-singer Nicole Brunel and drummer-singer Jen Clement tell Fast Forward Weekly even though the band is fresh out of the oven they’re only running their engines hotter and hotter as they go.
“We’re quite fast at writing songs we’ve decided” Clement says confidently. “We pretty much say ‘We want to write a garage rock song’ and Sydney writes a bass line. Usually Sydney writes a bass line and then we start playing.”
“Every practice we get more excited” says Brunel. “And then we do an awesome thing.”
While bassist Sydney Koke has temporarily escaped to Japan for the month of May (“To wear kimonos and walk through graveyards at night” Brunel says in apparent sincerity) they won’t let anything stop the rock. Sharp Ends bassist Dan Laplante will do his best bass-babe impression when the trio gets the party started with an opening slot for the irresistible garage rock of King Kahn & the Shrines on May 19 at the Warehouse.
Finally the faithfully 1960s pop styling of The Lions will fill the Tropicana in Marda Loop for a CD release party on Friday May 29. The band promises three full sets of material: acoustic old and brand spanking new.
