An hour into my first Pop Montreal experience, it already felt like time for something a little more straightforward.
I'd just made my exit from Saphir, a hole in the wall on St. Laurent where a gentleman was cranking out jangly synth-pop - rather good jangly synth-pop, actually - garbed in a skin-tight silver space suit straight off the set of an Ed Wood movie. As he and his two similarly clad female bandmates wrapped up their set, The World Provider - whose bulging eyes and exaggerated dance moves, combined with the uniform, made him look like some sort of Jim Carrey circa-In Living Color creation - took issue with how he'd been billed in the festival's guide. "I have never, ever worn a codpiece," he announced. On the other hand, he welcomed being referred to as "the Crispin Glover of the Montreal music scene."
The "sparse, organ-driven pop" of Vancouver's Bontempi, which the guide promised would harken back to "the whole 1992 indie Cancon thing," seemed in order at this point. Except that, when the time came for them to take the stage at the equally intimate Korova, the first sound to be heard was a DJ loop. And then, an excited female cry from the bar: "Ooohhh ... they've got a robot!"
This was evidently not Bontempi. It was instead one guy doing some fairly generic DJing, and another clad in a 1950s robot costume, moving to the beats. It was a clever gimmick for about one song, at which point it got a little tired. But it did provide an important early lesson about Canada's hottest music event: It could not be covered or experienced the same way as Toronto's North by Northeast festival earlier in the year. And ironically, it also shed some light on why the Montreal event is so much more successful: an inherent understanding of how music should be enjoyed.
At the Hogtown gathering, everything ran like clockwork. With Swiss efficiency, bands were shepherded onto the stage at their allotted times and given roughly half an hour to play. If they were late, that was their tough luck - their sets would be cut to 15 minutes. There were rarely exceptions, even for the last act on the bill - resulting, in some cases, in those that wanted to keep playing being drowned out by cranked-up house music.
If you're an industry weasel, a journalist or the sort of music geek who measures your cred by how many obscure bands you've seen, that's just the way you want your festival to be run. And conversely, you're liable to be enormously frustrated by Pop Montreal's controlled chaos. With lineups changing, bands running behind schedule and playing long sets, venues tough to get into at the last minute and bumper-to-bumper traffic along St. Laurent, catching a few minutes of one act and then hopping in a cab to see another isn't much of an option.
If, on the other hand, you actually like watching music the way normal people do, Pop Montreal is a godsend. Instead of industry showcases, venues serve up real concerts - complete with full headline sets, proper soundchecks and crowds that are there for pleasure, not business.
On Thursday, taking my cue on the pitfalls of venue-hopping from the dancing robot, I gave up on plans to try to catch bits and pieces of Antony & the Johnsons, the Ladies and Gentlemen, Billy Childish and Matt Mays within a 90-minute span, and settled in at Club Soda's hip-hop showcase.
There, among singing, dancing, arm-waving fans, South Africa's Tumi and the Volume served up nearly an hour of innovative, guitar-driven rap. And when they were done, K'Naan - the Somali-Canadian making a name for himself as one of the country's most compelling musicians of any genre - proved that his live act more than lives up to his dynamic debut disc, lighting the place up with a lengthy set that got better as it went along.
The next night it was over to Cabaret to off the bat. In another perfectly constructed bill, the night led off with a revelation in the Sunday Sinners, a local girl group putting a surprisingly powerful spin on late '60s R & B; raised the soul quotient higher with Toronto stalwarts The Deadly Snakes; and nearly blew the roof off the place with a rapturously greeted set by Detroit garage-rock heroes the Dirtbombs. With other headliners going well into the night, there was still time to catch a long, laid-back set by part-time Broken Social Scenester Jason Collett at the other end of St. Laurent, plus the tail-end of Toronto's Ladies and Gentlemen rocking the tiny Les Minots, where the stage took up nearly half the floor.
The following night, back at Club Soda, Metric was busy continuing to prove that smart, anti-commercial types can also be rock gods - Emily Haines kicking off her shoes and commanding the stage so well that she had the frenetic kids at the front reaching toward her like some sort of indie messiah. It was just one of the night's many reminders of what makes Pop Montreal work. Earlier, following the weekend's second set by the rapidly improving Most Serene Republic, the Lovely Feathers - who tried in vain to motivate disinterested Toronto scenesters in a brief NXNE set - spent 45 minutes playing their hyperkinetic energy off each other and a warm hometown crowd. And to cap off the night down the road, Sam Roberts was allowed to set his own rules following a strong set by country-rockers Cuff the Duke at the Cabaret, showcasing new material in a gig that stretched until nearly 3:00 a.m - pausing only when his fellow Montrealers realized the occasion and serenaded him with Happy Birthday.
This was not the way the downloading era has conditioned us to seek out our music. But at a time when the compulsion to take in as many different artists as possible has indie fans loading up their iPods with thousands of songs they couldn't name, Pop Montreal carries an important lesson.
Rarely have there been so many exciting acts rising outside of the mainstream at once, and literally hundreds of them were here. But spending a few passing minutes on each does them - and us - a disservice. A festival that encourages us to just be concert-goers - having a beer, singing along, cheering for an encore, and coming away really knowing the band we just saw - is just what the doctor ordered.
