A trip through Le Pop Montreal

Madeleine Hayles
Contributor

I have been on a train for five hours. I have eaten nothing but popcorn and candy and a plum all day and I feel strange – light-headed, but also giddy and restless – and then the St. Lawrence slides into view and I am looking out the window at the glassy water speeding past.
It’s the same water Cabot and Cartier had sailed up in huge, lethargic carracks. Evening has just set in as the train ambles into Gare Centrale in downtown Montreal and the first thing I think when I get onto the platform is that every train station in the world looks the same: a post-apocalyptic, dingy rat hole.
The time is way past nine, but there are BIXI bikes everywhere in Montreal and I am at the Ukrainian Federation in 15 minutes. Late, though luckily the music hasn’t started yet. The venue is sitting room only and packed, everything is drenched in hazy red light and my friend leads me down the centre aisle to the very front where we sit cross-legged on the floor.
I strain my neck staring up into the face of Taylor Kirk as the three-piece ploddingly begins to play, at first just haunting, erratic noises that seem to untangle into music. It is somehow both simplistic and complex and entirely captivating. Kirk accompanies his eerie, blues- infused tunes with crazy faces; he looks like he is screaming very loudly in between singing, but no sound comes out.
When the set is over we all gather outside, surrounded by hipsters in autumn jackets smoking cigarettes. We start to walk along Parc Avenue – the street for which that Plants and Animals album is named – talking loudly to each other about nothing. Someone cracks open a forty they bought at a déppaneur earlier and we pass it around in a paper bag. We’ve walked into desolate territory; there is nothing around us but low-slung warehouses, empty plots of cracked asphalt and unused construction equipment sitting idly behind wire fences. “Where are we?” I ask, but I don’t get a straight answer from anyone.
Inside the Espace Réunion there is nondescript synth-driven electro-pop playing, and the place is just one huge, sparse white room broken up with pillars, like a pre-fabricated music venue brought to Montreal on the back of a tractor trailer. It is full of moving bodies, and we dance stupidly for a bit, but Les Savy Fav isn’t on until two in the morning and the music is boring and I’m exhausted.
The next day I see the city in daylight for the first time. I walk along Rue Sainte-Catherine, meet up with a couple of people for brunch at a vegan restaurant on Boulevard Saint-Laurent and then walk through Mile End, where everyone on the street looks like an artist/server. Despite the line out the door, within moments we are sitting on the patio at Café Olimpico drinking thick, strong shots of classic Italian-style espresso.
“This is where the Arcade Fire was invented,” my friend says and smiles over his coffee mug. “Ha ha,” I roll my eyes.
I am at Le Divan Orange to see Think About Life. At first I think it strange to see a rock concert in the middle of the afternoon, but I forget about it quickly and bob my head to the disco-funk-inspired pop music.
Lead vocalist Martin Cesar is a sort of chubby black guy in thick- framed glasses. He banters from the stage, asking the crowd what their relationship status on Facebook is. Halfway through the last song he stops abruptly and disappears out the back of the bar. The tall, skinny keyboardist, Graham Van Pelt – he’s the guy from Miracle Fortress – is wearing tiny navy blue shorts that are more like swim trunks, and his legs look skeletal poking out of them. He comes up to the mic and tells us that Martin got hungry so he went home to eat a sandwich. I go back to the hostel to take a nap.
Later, I go back to the outskirts, this time even further, to a recording studio that looks more like a flophouse. When the doors finally open, we are ushered into a room decorated like a psychedelic forest; glaring multi-coloured streamers dangle from the rafters like surrealistic stalactites, Christmas tree lights are draped all around and fake trees cut from construction paper are glued to the walls like scenery from a grade school play.
We find ourselves waiting in the psychedelic forest, watching members of The Luyas drinking from a bottle of what is probably white wine. Maybe this is like a Beckett- ian art project, I muse to my friend; maybe they are putting a bunch of hipsters in a room and telling them to wait for a rock concert that is never going to happen.
Then Pietro Amato wanders onto the stage, the drummer sits down at his kit wearing a fencing mask and Jessie Stein comes out and picks up her guitar, and they play fairy tale-like experimental pop sounds.
Stein’s voice is like a little girl’s and she looks like a doll, but she exudes an adult sharp-wittedness against all odds. Amato is playing a French horn looped through a million sound pedals; there are xylophones and Jesse’s guitar seems magical. They make mind-bending music, music that makes you feel electric all over, and I can’t help grinning uncontrollably. Jesse asks the audience if they have any water and someone passes up a bottle from the back of the crowd. “I dream of drowning,” she sings.