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The At the Gates Slaughter of the Soul anniversary tour stopped in Montreal this past Friday. The seminal 1995 album turned 25 years old in 2020, and while the band was supposed to embark on a special tour that year to celebrate, virus-related delays resulted in the live dates getting postponed to this year. Thankfully At the Gates stayed true to their plans, touring the highly anticipated live set for North American audiences this year.

Although fans undoubtedly came for the headlining act, supporting acts Enforced and Municipal Waste made waiting for At the Gates a little bit easier. Sporting a broken arm supported in a sling, Enforced frontman Knox Colby commanded the stage with a lively performance, delivering his signature raw punk vocals to a packed Corona Theatre. Some of his instrumented counterparts could have done a little more than stand still while playing their guitars however, but the up-and-coming Richmond, Virginia crossover thrashers thankfully have an impressive catalogue of jumpy music to rely on which made for a good show.

Second opening act Municipal Waste may have stolen the night. Also from Richmond, Virginia, the crossover thrashers have been fan-favourites in the metal scene for over twenty years now, and for good reason. The energy in the room immediately went up a notch when the group took the stage, as the moshpit immediately doubled in size when the band’s chuggy thrashing onslaught began. And despite spending most of the night yelling into the microphone, frontman Tony Foresta was in a very welcoming mood, charismatically throwing smiles at the audience and engaging in fun banter between songs.

The group rifled through staple setlist tracks such as “You’re Cut Off,” “Sadistic Magician,” and “Breathe Grease.” During the anthemic “Wave of Death,” Foresta asked the audience to get as many people crowdsurfing as possible, and Montreal delivered. Boots and Converse were immediately flying through the air, as the frontman retrieved an empty recycling bin backstage and chucked it into the moshpit. Their set was a fun time.

Headlining act At the Gates finally took the stage, much to the crowd’s enjoyment. The Gothenburg legends played the entirety of the Slaughter of the Soul LP as promised, while also throwing other tracks into the mix, such as singles from their most recent record The Nightmare of Being, and 2018’s To Drink from the Night Itself.

In comparison to Enforced and Municipal Waste, who come from the same city and play the same style of music, At the Gates’ flavour of melodic death metal was quite refreshing to the ears. Still, their fast-paced yet sturdy songs got people bouncing around quite a bit, if not with a little help from the vibe-setting Municipal Waste prior. It was amazing to hear Slaughter of the Soul in its entirety, from mere melodic interludes to the heavy-hitting title track, which had the entire venue screaming along to the chorus. The group were also in top form, with original vocalist Tomas Lindberg bringing high energy alongside the other band members, one of which being live session guitarist Daniel Martinez, who also plays with technical death metal legends Atheist.

While there were no other complaints, an hour and a half of At the Gates’ music revealed how repetitive their material is. Although the group opened strong with their signature style, their tracks lacked variety, which created a lull towards the back half of their performance. Lindberg even hinted at the audience’s sapped energy, as he mockingly made a yawning gesture towards the crowd between vocal lines. To be fair, the waning energy may have been the result of the two high intensity openers.

Regardless, seeing At the Gates live, on top of hearing every song from the famous Slaughter of the Soul in-concert, was quite the treat. Although the tour has now concluded, please make sure to catch At the Gates, Municipal Waste, and/or Enforced the next chance you get.

Hunter co-hosts The Iron Club, your weekly guide to the dark and mysterious realm of underground metal, which airs every Sunday from 9:00 - 11:00 p.m.

While August in Blue seeks to celebrate the Afro-American contribution of blues music, the genre week that today comes to its close, also encourages us to reflect on the overall role the blues plays in our lives even when we’re not listening to the blues. To have the blues, is in part, to experience the blues music. The blues can be found everywhere, especially in literature.  And we owe it to blues musicians for furthering the ethos of ‘having the blues’ beyond music.

So, suppose you could write 240 mini love letters. Who would you address them to—what would you address them to? For writer Maggie Nelson, it was the color blue. In the 2009 experimental Bluets, Nelson melds memoir, poetry and philosophy and essay writing in attempts to transcend the signage of language by finding ways to discover what the color blue means to her, all while detailing her affinity for blue without any of the clichés of having the blues. As Nelson does so, she also grieves the loss of a lover.

Nelson obviously is not the first person to write about having the blues. Our notion of Melancholia as a self-reflexive state of being aware of our sadness and choose to continue wallowing within it as an “art” that heightens one’s appreciation for life comes from the late 19^th century Romantics. But even before poet John Keats wrote of Melancholy as a “wakeful anguish of the soul” and before William Wordsworth poeticized the bucolic vales “overflowing with the sound” of a nightingale’s “melancholy strain”, Melancholy was considered by the Ancient Greeks as one of the body’s Four Humours; the four bodily liquids that determined a person’s well-being. When a person was Melancholic, it meant that there was an excess of black bile in the spleen, and so the notion of treating any emotion under a clinical microscope formed how civilizations to come would rationalize feelings.

Take Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy for instance. In 1621, Burton publishes the first edition of the medical treatise addressing Melancholy (and what would be in many hundreds of years later, Nick Cave’s favorite book), in over 900 pages that explored what he believed was the nature, symptoms and causes of Melancholy (which to him we’re God, witches, and devils among other external forces), potential cures such as dieting and cleanses, as well as distinguishing between religious Melancholy and love Melancholy. And as history goes, women’s feelings of sadness or depression were always dismissed as delirium. But in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton also furthers the sexist trope of connecting a women’s melancholy to being sexually deprived whereas a man’s melancholy is continually associated with intellect—for instance, take the Romantic poet Lord Byron who is revered for being a brooding figure. In The Anatomy, Burton proposes that women ought to domesticate “those vicious vapours which come from menstrous blood” through marriage, under a chapter title that I’ll let speak for itself: “Maids', Nuns' and Widows' Melancholy.”

Nelson’s Bluets, however, is unapologetic. Most of her memories she recounts in the book are memories of “the fucking” between her and her former lover. Within the context of herstory and when Nelson writes “there is a color inside of the fucking, but it is not blue”, she subverts the sexism that’s pronounced in The Anatomy and the notion of associating Melancholy to sexuality as a whole; demonstrating how her blues are instead associated to trauma, by subsuming the color to the loss of her former lover who she coins as “the prince of blue.” Nelson also juxtaposes the visceral experience of feeling vs. the palpable experience of sight between her heartbreak and love for the color blue with her close friend who has become quadriplegic. What arises as a result, is a tension between what can and cannot be expressed about emotion, which blue intensifies for Nelson.

With the loss present in Nelson’s life, from the pains of heartbreak prompted from the ‘prince of blue’ and her close friend’s life-altering disability, my favorite moments from the book happen to be the ones that meditate on her consequential loneliness and nostalgia. One of the book’s themes is grappling with solitude, yet Bluets is anything but isolating with the writing stylistically reminiscent of a written letter; which perhaps is Nelson’s way of garnering closeness, even if it’s in the hands of some reader. This calls to mind when in Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka suggests, “writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts”, and Bluets' epistolary-like writing style also points to another realization Nelson must come to terms with: that writing to the prince of blue, and of the memories is to speak to an ideal that may never have been fully present.

It becomes apparent to readers that Nelson’s book of all things blue, is actually one of letting go, “for just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one’s life in a world made of it”; a reality fraught from nostalgia’s allure. She calls to mind an instance where Leonard Cohen, in an interview, admits that “he could no longer remember the specifics of the love triangle that the song ['Famous Blue Raincoat'] describes.” To which Nelson confesses, she “find[s] this forgetting quite heartening and quite tragic . . . for to wish to forget how much you loved someone- and then, to actually forget- can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.” Notions of the passing of time and the ephemeral come to the forefront without ever being directly addressed, but the heaviness lingers between the lines; the weight being left to sympathise with anybody who has experienced heartbreak and the torture of memory.

Silver spurs to cowboys are what leather jackets are to punks. Cowboys are emblems of non-conformity and free-spiritedness, though Orville Peck is truly unlike any other cowboy; hiding his identity behind a fringed leather mask and a moniker while bringing country music to the likes of new wave and occasionally even shoegaze. While he keeps a sense of anonymity, anyone who witnesses the rhinestone cowboy will see that despite his mysteriousness, how much he embodies his persona—or rather, how much his persona embodies him. And as the enigmatic Peck imbued the Corona Theater with his songs of heartbreak, loneliness and despair last night, I can attest on behalf of a crowd that donned cowboy hats and melancholy alongside Peck, just how much of his soul was bared.

There is something entrancing about Peck from the get-go. Perhaps it’s the anomaly of a cowboy in the indie music frontier but one of the most entrancing aspects of his performance art lives in his movements. Whether it’s a cowboy kick, or bucking back as he plays emphatic country guitar licks, or even a gesture as simple as pointing to emphasize a lyric, Peck doesn’t move because he feels like it; he moves because he has to—a release of all emotional currents aching throughout him. All of these moments culminated in Peck’s performance of his song, “Turn to Hate”, off of Pony (2019). The second song of the set epitomized all of what Peck’s discography represents: lyrical themes of being by your lonesome, guitars evoking the sound of a desert landscape with the orange glow of a sunset soon to fade, and brooding country vocals that place him at the center of it all.

Among all the countless times “Turn to Hate” has enraptured me into a desert of my own to roam, hearing it performed live made for a completely different experience. Wearing an all-black ensemble, with hints of gold accents on his belt and on the brims of his cowboy hat reminiscent of the album colors featured on his latest release, Bronco (2022), the song synthesized. With the support of his band consisting of Duncan Hay Jennings and Bria Salmena on guitar and Kris Bowering (“a gemini that we still trust”, per the words of Peck) on drums, the song drew on with hazy, sonic cascades transcending into the physical world, creating phantasms of desert winds as Peck delivered the outro: “walking back towards the gate / you’ll all be stars now, just you wait / done enough to take the bait / don’t let my sorrow turn to hate.” With such opaqueness, it’s hard not to enter Peck’s rodeo. A quality of Romanticism also pervades his music, calling to mind a similar experience of listening to the music of Lana Del Rey (which would be a collab from the heavens), for instance; only adding to the escapism of his music.

After delivering a couple songs Peck spoke to the audience and laid the groundwork for his shows—the three rules for everyone in the crowd. The first rule is to cry, as Peck says he’s “always crying through [his] own set”, the second rule being to sing, specifically encouraging “those who don’t know the lyrics to especially sing along” and the third: to dance. Throughout the set Peck also personally gave out roses to select members of the crowd who caught his eye for whatever reason, the first one being given out to a fan who he discerned having “such good vibes”, making him beam a gratitude so bright that even his mask couldn’t hide; a glimpse of Peck’s genuine being.

The show closed with an overwhelming encore of  “Take You Back (The Iron Cattle Call)” to which Peck requested everybody’s participation to whistle along. But the people did more than whistle; they stomped, hooted and sang along, all at the "Bronco 2022 Tour" in Montreal. 

*Some of the films featured in this article are contain content such as trauma and sexual misconduct allegations* 

Remi's picks:

For the second week of the festival, i've only Tuesday and Wednesday to get in as many films as possible while Fantasia is at the center of Concordia’s downtown campus. I also had some screenings that I got to view over the weekend. In between work and film viewing , I still made time for our first film from our Ben Kingsley retrospective, Gandhi, a 3 hour historical epic. Wednesday will be the biggest day of the festival, with three films back to back with a little 30 minute break between all of them, as well as hoping to catch an evening screening of Nope in IMAX since I really enjoyed it the first time around. 

Dark Nature can be described as a nature survivalist horror film, a not so common subgenre, from director Berkley Brady. After being the survivor of an abusive relationship Joy (Hannah Emily Anderson) is persuaded by her friend Carmine (Madison Walsh) to come on a nature retreat that involves hiking the Rocky Mountains amongst a group of survivors who are overcoming traumas holding them back. Leading this group of survivors and helping them would be Dr. Dunnley (Kyra Harper) who is a specialist in helping people overcome their traumas. As the track continues moving forward so do the flashbacks of past traumas, leading Joy to discover that they may not be alone out in the wilderness when flashbacks of her abusive partner start to resurface and open old wounds. It’s not many nature survivalist horror films that have an all female lead, reminiscent of The Decent (2005) where the female  characters are empowered and support each other rather than the cliché deaths of horror films. Berkly Brady is one of those directors that focuses on images and the sound design of the film, providing the audience with an immersive experience and pairs well with the short feature accompanying short film, Where The Witch Lives. 

When we think of Japan and Tokyo we can imagine a city that is full of life and electricity that would be a simple documentary to explore. Director Nao Yoshigai takes a different side of Japan to explore in a fairy-tale-like documentary Shari, that observes the remote town located near the Shiretoko Peninsula on the easternmost part of Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido. It is a culture shock to many who immediately associate Tokyo with Japan, not knowing about the small isolated town. We see the local community including a baker, deer hunters and a group of school children during the interviews about this nomadic town. There is also the reality of climate change issues having dramatic impactsto the natural and ecological society of the Shiretoko Peninsula. The closing of the film sees director Nao Yoshigai returning to Japan circa February 2020 right when the first of many COVID lockdowns would begin. 

Continuing with another documentary feature, Out In The Ring is not “Documentaries from the Edge” section of the festival, however I feel that it is one of the most important ones at the festival. Directed by Ry Levey the documentary explores the marginalized yet vibrant culture of LGBT2IA+ participation and expression when it comes to the professional sport of wrestling. Tracing back the early days of the sport itself wrestling had those members in their community, however their sexuality and expression was kept silent or hidden under the ring. During the ‘90s it became more of a form of entertainment when the WWF was formed still being plagued by that same machoism toxicity, homophobia and had issues with sexual misconduct. Charting a course to the present day, there are more independent wrestling organizations including AWE that present a positive environment for wrestlers to have the freedom of character and identity with no implications on their career or social life. Even though there has been some positivity, there has been some backlash against some wrestlers on internet comment forms and recently the sexual misconduct allegations have resurfaced in the WWE federation against founder Vince McMahon forcing him to step aside. 

One of the true experiences of the Fantasia Film Festival is when you go in with your expectation for a film but it turns out to be a different direction than you expected. So is the case with Chorokbam from director Yoon Seo-Jin. From the synopses of the film, being a dead cat hanging by its neck is the start of a bad omen for a family that is on the gradual course for a downfall in this horror debut. Where this film delves deep into the concepts of death, tragedy, grief and how these affect people differently at all stages. For example, a big fight breaks out against the siblings at a funeral procession for the father figure. There are still elements of horror in the film however they are done so in a meditative fashion to make the characters grapple with the notion of death, grief and tragedy. 

My final film of the night on Tuesday was screened at the Cinematheque Quebecoise was a retro screening of director Jean-Claude Lord’s first English feature Visiting Hours. Michael Ironside plays Colt Hawker,  a misogynistic killer that assaults a feminist journalist Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant) trying to defend an innocent victim of domestic abuse that is accused of killing her husband. When Deborah survives the attack she is sent to a hospital where she is cared for by a sympathetic nurse (Linda Purl) and co-worker (William Shatner). Soon the nurse and Deborah both find themselves in the crosshairs of Colt who will stop at nothing. Part of the early slasher boom of the ‘80s, this feature played well with the Fantasia audience in attendance who laughed at the campy moments of the film, and cheered when Deborah got her revenge on Colt. 

The two first films that I caught a screening of on Wednesday were more experimental features that have the common thread of an auditory and visual experience, rather than a concrete narrative structure. Topology of Sirens from director Jonathan Davies has somewhat of a narrative structure as Cas (Courtney Stephens) discovers some micro-cassettes hidden in her aunt's hurdy-gurdy instrument. This then leads her and the audience on a meditative audio mystery of environmental sounds and experimental music. Extremely reminiscent of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria that I saw this year. The film hits all the right notes in an audio sonic journey that anyone studying music, sound engineering or electro acoustics will enjoy. 

Happer’s Comet from director Tyler Taormina is more ambiguous when it comes to a clear narrative, however a description of the feature is a mid-night mosaic of a suburban town steeped into alienation. However some of the residents plan a sweet and swift escape into the Americana landscape. From the late night driver just trying to keep his eyes open on the road, another one having car issues being pushed by two teenagers, and the multiple characters rollerblading into the infinite night. There are strong themes of capturing environmental sound, but as well a visual mosaic of the Americana landscape of a small town when the COVID pandemic hit and all we wanted to do was go out into the infinite night, despite the government curfew. One thing that kept on resonating with me while watching this film was M83’s album Hurry Up, We’re Daydreaming which would be the perfect pairing soundtrack to this film.  

My final film viewing of the week got my first Letterboxd heart, for those familiar with the website. The Diabetic from director Mitchell Stafiej follows Alec, a type one diabetic, return to his home in Montreal’s West Island, which has become sort of a lonely wasteland in the hopes to catch up with his friends and relive his teenage glory days. His only friend that he reconnects with is Matt. As much as Matt has grown up and has moved on from his teenage days, Alec still tries his best to remember them and it sometimes gets him into trouble. A night on the town reconnecting with friends, old girlfriends and making new friends turns into a nightmare after a while for Alec, one he can’t wake up from and most confront. Alec’s character can be seen as a high anxiety inducing character that you may want to look away from and not support all of his choices as he escalates situations like Howard from Uncut Gems, even though the audience that I watched it with found some comedic elements.  Where this film truly finds it’s merit is the aesthetic nature of the film being filmed Hi-8 and then converted into 16mm shines through during Alec’s nightmare scenes. 

Sadly personal commitments foiled my plan at a second screening of Nope in IMAX, and i'm hoping to rectify this next week. BJ Novak's new film Vengeance is out in theaters and there is a rerelease of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. How does a cinephile contend to make time as the Fantasia Film Festival wraps up next week? Stay tuned to see how all fares in my film viewings. 

Danny Aubry's picks:

On Friday July 29, 2022, I found myself downtown at the Salle J.A. Deseve building of Concordia University attending the Fantasia Film Festival. There were three films in particular which really stood out to me that were scheduled to be shown on that day. One of which was a film I had expressed an interest in seeing within my previous Fantasia article. I spent about six hours in that auditorium watching those three films realizing that they all had an underlying theme in common pertaining to global issues. I feel that this theme is prevalent to talk about in our society today. 

SHARI is a documentary fairy tale film from Japan directed by Nao Yoshigai. The film focuses on a particular Japanese village known as Shari. Throughout the film we meet up with some very interesting people who live in this village, such as a Shepherd who loves to bake bread, a Hunter who has a taste for deer meat, and a collector who loves to collect rare items. However, the most interesting character in the film would undeniably be a beast covered in red fur known as the Red Thing. I was rather fond of the sound score of the film especially when eerie music would play every time the Red Thing was shown. There was also a comedic aspect of the film, as I personally found it funny how a group of elementary school kids reacted when they saw the Red Thing in person. On a more serious note, the film touches upon the climate crisis, indicating how it has impacted the village of Shari and its resources. This film was apparently Nao Yoshigai's directorial debut, and I applaud her for what she did with it, putting together a unique blend of eeriness, comedy, and also going out of her way to remind us of the seriousness of the climate crisis.

What's up Connection is a drama, comedy film from both Japan and Hong Kong directed by Masashi Yamamoto. Its main focus is a Chinese teenaged boy named Chi Gau Shin who lives with his family in a fishing village in Hong Kong. Gau Shin wins a trip to Japan, and then brings home some interesting characters once his trip is done, such as the tour guide he had throughout his trip and an eccentric kleptomaniac. However, that is not the worst of it, as a greedy Japanese business man somehow kept track of Gau Shin's footsteps and followed him back to Hong Kong. When the business man visited Gau Shin's family, he expressed an interest in purchasing the village they live in, so that he can have condo's placed within, which would involve them having to leave. All the members of Gau Shin's family, as well as the tour guide, and the kleptomaniac all get together to figure out ways to prevent the land from being taken from them. I really enjoyed this film because I found it to be quite funny, for example some of the crazy idea's Gau Shin's family came up with to chase away the greedy business man was funny, and the drunken stupidity that Gau Shin encountered throughout his trip to Japan was also comical. It also reminds us to be cautious of the corruption within the world we live in, indicating how the greedy fat cats love to leech off the little guy, so to speak.

Whether the Weather is Fine is a drama from the Philippines directed by Carlo Francisco Manatad. Its main characters of the film are Miguel, his mother Norma and his girlfriend Andrea. They are survivors of the natural disaster known as Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. This was a film I had mentioned within my previous article I had wanted to see, and fortunately it did not disappoint. The acting within it was up to par, I was especially impressed with the performance of Daniel Padilla who portrayed Miguel. Miguel was a character who had to put up with his quick-tempered girlfriend and his hysteric mother while trying to find ways to survive. Daniel Padilla portrayed the character in a fashion that made it easy to empathize with him. The film outlines the sad reality of what occurs after a natural disaster strikes, such as people losing their homes, being separated from their friends and family, and fighting with one another for food and possessions. This film is if anything a reminder to us to never take what we have for granted.

As aforementioned, global issues were themes each of these films had in common. For Shari, it was the climate crisis, for What's up Connection, it was corruption, and for Whether the Weather is Fine it was natural disasters. In order to avoid getting too political, I'll simply state that one sure way to lessen the seriousness of these issues and whatever else surrounds them, is for the human collective to unite as much as possible. United we stand, divided we fall. I would now like to finish off by extending my gratitude and thanks to all those who organized the Fantasia Film Festival this year and for providing us all with the opportunity to enjoy the Festival downtown once again.     

As always, bon cinéma!