Exploring North by Northeast
By Peter Webb
Rush frontman Geddy Lee is probably the last person you’d expect to see grooving in the front row at a hip-hop show. But there he was at Toronto’s Drake Hotel on June 10th to hear Somali-Canadian rapper K’naan deliver his infectious beats and socially conscious lyrics.
It’s a testament to how the annual North-by-Northeast music conference helps to forge a community out of Toronto’s notoriously hierarchical music scene. When aging prog-rockers meet rising hip-hoppers you know there’s musical diversity in the air.
A refugee of Somalia’s civil wars, K’naan is one Canada’s fastest-rising musical talents. Judging by his high-profile cameo at Live8 at Barrie’s Molson Park, however, he is beginning to attract the sort of attention that has already made K-OS and Swollen Members household names (well almost).
Accompanied on the Drake stage by a band comprised of acoustic guitar, congas, backup vocalist, and (the least conspicuous member) a Mac iBook, K’naan riveted the capacity Friday-night audience with his intelligent, poignant, sometimes funny tales of war, peace, and struggle in the new millennium.
Did I say diversity? Friday night at the Drake was like a jukebox on tilt. Starting the night was Winnipeg’s The Attics, a fresh-faced quartet whose jangly-guitar sound and inventive arrangements recall Television or early R.E.M. Next, the crowd was treated to Williamsburg, Virginia’s Erin McKeown, whose straightforward guitar-and-drums approach is the folkie’s answer to the guts-and-grits revolution spearheaded by Detroit’s the White Stripes.
McKeown’s good humour and patience showed when the club’s faulty stereo system superimposed noisy rock tunes on top of her minimalist shuffle for part of the set. Her invitation to the audience to gather round the stage, “so I don’t feel like I’m at a music conference,” endeared her to the crowd and set the atmosphere for K’naan’s bristling set.
That K’naan is a hard act to follow was made painfully obvious by the band obliged to follow him. Toronto’s Frontier Index is a four-piece alt-country combo in the Blue Rodeo/ Jayhawks mould whose most distinguishing characteristic was the cheesy white belts worn by the two front men. Despite their too-familiar sound, Frontier Index’s songs were tuneful and tightly constructed, and their skillful vocal harmonies made their Gram Parsons fixation more than just an affectation. They even beat Blue Rodeo at their own game by avoiding the half-baked instrumental odysseys that inevitably turn Blue Rodeo’s live shows into tuneless snore-fests (witness, for example, Cuddy-and-company’s cud-chewing performance at Live8).
The piece-de-resistance and night’s headliner was Novillero, the best band out of Winnipeg since the Teddy Boys—whose hyperactive new-wave sound they occasionally recall. Comprised of ex-members of bass-and-drums combo Duotang, Novillero seem destined for greatness if they can hitch onto the same machinery that is making Montreal’s Arcade Fire an international sensation. Although they match AF in songwriting talent and visual quirkiness, while similarly evoking late-70s pub rock (skinny ties, warbly voices, impressionistic lyrics), Novillero has a harder and more streamlined sound—Elvis Costello and the Attractions to AF’s Talking Heads.
Friday night at the Drake was just one musical capsule of many to be found each year at North-by-Northeast. Other highlights of this year’s three-day event, held in clubs and coffeehouses across downtown Toronto from June 9-11, included the guitar-slinging Sadies at the Horseshoe and the blues-munching Brown Hornets at the Silver Dollar on Saturday night, plus a touch of seasoned grandeur at the Rheostatics and 54-40 show at Lee’s Palace.
Despite the presence of such musical legends, the conference and festival—modeled on Austin, Texas’ long-running South-by-Southwest event—does its best service as a showcase for up-and coming indie rock and pop artists. For those who despair of finding new artists worth discovering amid the musical waste land of Avril Lavigne soundalikes and Canadian Idol wannabes, NXNE offers hope of a better future—one that, ironically, as in the cases of Novillero and the Brown Hornets, often evokes the past.
It’s a tonic for the troops!
