Osheaga Day 2!

Day 2 of Osheaga and security is more uptight than ever. Yesterday’s bag check was but a brief glimpse inside my purse and as a result I decide it’s a brilliant idea to sneak a half mickey of vodka into the festival today. Turns out Sunday is the new Saturday and ignorance is passé. Today’s security guard behaviour trend really encourages intense bag checks and straight up pat downs. This is either because Snoop Dogg is playing later and they are prejudice ‘haytahs’ or because the three-quarters of the festival ground was littered with 24s of Southern Comfort by the end of last night. I notice this as I approach the festival gates and swiftly turn around. Will they kick me out of the festival if someone catches me trying to ditch my stash? There are security guards everywhere and I am strangely intimidated, even though I could probably take 75% of them in a fight. My two saving graces were the vending machines and singular Porta Potty just outside the bag check. New plan: buy orange juice, head to bathroom, mix a big ol’ ‘drank’ and await the arrival of Nina, who I planned to meet just outside the fest, then we’d share it as previously promised. I get out of the shack of a bathroom, only to see Nina has just crossed the bag check into the festival. She sees me and motions to hurry, and when Nina in a rush you don’t fucking piss her off. I quickly down the bottle of spiked OJ and stumble into the festival. It’s 1:30 pm and I’m already drunk. I am still morally against purchasing overpriced Osheaga food, don’t have a water bottle and it’s significantly hotter than yesterday. I basically figure I’m fucked.  

First up today is Montreal’s Ian Kelly, who I should like 'cause my name and his last name are the same. As we are basically the same person, I would expect Mr. Kelly to have at least a decent taste in music-making, but it turns out his output is not my bag. The vocals are rather whiney, which is something I either totally dig or despise in music. As this voice was paired with fairly tepid, folk tinged mellow rock, it just didn’t do it for me. Acts like Ian Kelly are why no one comes to Osheaga before 4 pm. No one wants to see ‘fine’ music that’s not bad enough to be laughable or good enough to be enjoyable. Worthwhile live music should evoke emotion During Kelly’s set I emoted about half as much as I would watching an episode of Will and Grace because there’s nothing else on TV. Even though I completely hated yesterday’s Unsettler’s set, at least it got me thinking about how much it pissed me off and why. You can have a bunch of fun being angry and putting people down. You can have no fun if you feel nothing whatsoever. And this point in the day, that’s exactly what I feel. The next act I’ve scheduled for myself to see is Hannah Georgas. I’m so out of the loop when it comes to this sort of music, so I ask Nina who this person is and she responds by saying “Some indie folk singer, she’s big on the CBC”. I roll my eyes as if to say “NO THANKS, not after this soundtrack to my elevator trip TO HELL!” 

It turns out Hannah Georgas isn’t so bad after all. We catch a bit of her set (which apparently sounded much different than whatever they play on the CBC) and I do really like her voice because it’s nice and yelpy, much better than the fembot SS (singer songwriter) crew we experienced yesterday. From the few songs I hear, the lyrics seem to evoke the essence of constant pain in my ass Ke$ha (dancing until the cops come, that sort of thing), which is just plain strange but whatever. I decide this chick makes music that sounds like a less electronic and intense Metric, which surprisingly works. Again, not really my sort of music but I can admit I was impressed.  

All I really need to say about Blitzen Trapper can be summed up in the description of the couple standing beside me. He is wearing no shirt and has a white wife beater shirt tucked into the back pocket of his jeans, flip flop sandals, Ed Hardy sunglasses, small hoop earrings and a baseball cap that’s holding back his long, greasy hair. He also has a nipple ring and is jamming out to the alternative tinged country rock tunes with his Bacardi Breezer. She is grown woman sporting pigtails and a pink baseball cap, a frilly pink gingham shirt with denim overall shorts and running shoes. You get the idea. The only aspect of the band you probably didn’t already conjure up in your imagination is that they have a synthesiser and pretty killer vocal harmonies.  

I think I would have loved The Antlers when I was in super down with indie music in high school. Their set was kind of perfect indie pop with a refreshing loudness that seemed to be lacking in most ‘indie darling’ cases. It wasn’t cutesy, which I liked, and was almost loud enough to cover the ridiculously obnoxious ‘blip blop’ sounds of the Piknic Electronik stage just to our left. The vocals are great, helping to push the music out of the realm of the expected and their synthesizer is perfect in tone, for some reason reminding me of the Cold War Kids, who I always had a soft spot for, if they were included on the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack. 

We Are Wolves were also great. A lot less synth- and electro-oriented than I remembered, which was cool. Their set is loud, dark, danceable and freaky which is exactly what this festival is missing. In this context, they seem pretty fucking hardcore goth and they bring out all kinds of odd and entertaining people. For example, the woman dancing in front of me is some sort of 45 year old Hot Topic goth with pink hair, skanky leather outfit and a tattoo on her back of what seems to be a cartoon version of herself with devil horns. She was really into it. Lots of their songs sound surprisingly single-worthy, only too noisy to be played on mainstream radio which basically makes it excellent music with the exception of a few of the more electronic tunes that bordered on cheesy. The band also should have played later on in the evening when the atmosphere would have seemed more appropriate. No one really wants to dance their ass off in broad daylight though it’s certainly hard to resist. 

I decide to wait in the crowd for Sonic Youth while Snoop Dogg is playing the stage next door. There is at least half an hour where there is literally nothing else to see, so the entire festival is packed into a quarter of the festival grounds. I watch his performance on the screen near our stage and it’s pretty good. His drummer is incredible and the Doggy Dogg is sticking to the classics. He totally knows how to work an audience, which today consists almost exclusively of dorky white kids who love Judd Apatow movies. Surprisingly, a good chunk of the crowd is able to sing along to most of the set and they do so enthusiastically, waving and going nuts if they see themselves on one of the stage’s gigantic screens. The set was pretty sensational and overall enjoyable, even though part of me just wants it to be over because it’s SONIC YOUTH TIME! 

I can’t review Sonic Youth’s set. It wouldn’t be in the least bit objective and it would probably consists of something like: “HOLY SHIT OH MY GOD I AM SO CLOSE TO THURSTON MOORE HOLY SHIT I LOVE SONIC YOUTH SO MUCH THEY ARE BEING SO AWESOME RIGHT NOW AND KIM GORDON IS STILL SO BEAUTIFUL AND I JUST DON’T WANT THIS TO END EVER!” So basically I’ll leave you with this: I love Sonic Youth and they are the best band at Osheaga. So much beautiful noise! 

After I regain consciousness from passing out due to basically seeing God, we rush over to Devo who also put on a great performance despite being, well, a little old for dance music. I’m astonished they have a bunch of energy and sound just as great as in their prime. The crowd’s smaller than I expected but we’re all having a great time. The video stuff playing in the background mixed with their light show is a little overwhelming though. So many blown up images and bright colours kind of distract me from the music and also kind of hurt my eyes. I figure I can handle it for another hour, but this ends up not being the case. After hearing a chunk of great new and old material, my friends and I all suffer from sensory overload and we decide to go see Weezer cover Lady Gaga and MGMT. They do this at every show on this tour and two of us have already seen it in Ottawa but we decide it would be fun anyway. We get drunker and experience our first overwhelming urge to dance, which is funny as none of us really dig the band anymore. We ‘ironically’ dance like the dudes of the Jersey Shore, which totally backfires when I punch myself in the head pretty hard and break my sunglasses. Whoops. After Rivers Cuomo takes off his long, blonde wig, we decide to head to the metro and back to reality. It smells like beer and body odour as we shove ourselves into a car already packed to the brim with tired festival goers.  

All in all Osheaga was good. Not great, but good. Unfortunately, I discovered most local and Canadian groups chosen to play the festival who have any chance of achieving commercial success and notoriety mostly blow. So, if you are reading this, go start a band and make it interesting. We need to work together to fight this growing trend of cringe-worthy, dull and cheesy Canadian music. We are making ourselves look awful. Seriously, what the fuck is our problem?