by Matt Watton (@brotinus)
Sled Island was back this year, taking place June 22nd through the 26th! The annual urban festival takes place in downtown Calgary, Alberta over five days at a bunch of different venues throughout the city, featuring over 200 artists in rock, hip-hop, and experimental music. I was lucky enough to be able to go and see around thirty different acts perform (I averaged about 7.5 hours of live music per day). It was an excellently curated festival, showing off the best that Canadian music has to offer. Scheduling conflicts and festival fatigue meant I couldn’t see everything I wanted to, but I’m here to report on some of the best acts I did get to see, some old faves but many new to my ears, that I think readers of Post-Trash will also enjoy.
All photos courtesy of Matt Watton.
Brain Bent
Calgary’s own Devo-core punks. Their coordinated blue-collar shirts with an enigmatic yellow (!?) patch helped make clear the band’s mission statement: tongue-in-cheek anti-modernity disaffection communicated through ferocious, stabbing punk riffs and synthy, motorik jams. They’re western Canada’s answer to the Minneapolis Uranium Club (of whom they’re clearly big fans).
Buddie
Lead songwriter Dan Forrest recently relocated from Philly to Vancouver, so Sled was kind of Buddie’s coming out party to the Canadian scene. Poppy, tender, chord driven indie with tasty lead guitar lines (reminiscent at times of Built to Spill, who they opened for!) and sentimental harmonies. The band exuded a casual sense of fun and enjoyment that was immediately infectious.
Built to Spill
Built To Spill featured as one of the elder statesmen of Sled and brought everyone together – queer Zoomers making out, hipsters wearing bespoke ball caps, Gen-X dads wearing the same New Balance sneakers as Doug Martsch. BTS is currently sporting a 3-piece line-up (Melanie Radford on bass and Teresa Esguerra on drums), and it really works: this sparser rhythm section lets Martsch luxuriate in his solos and really shine as the 90s alternative guitar hero he’s always been. They pleased the hometown crowd by playing Rush’s ‘Tom Sawyer’ as the intro to their new track ‘Gonna Lose’.
Doohickey Cubicle
This Vancouver duo features hypnotic, jazzy tunes carried afloat by ethereal vocals and lush, catchy basslines. They completed their live sound with a killer sax man (alternative music needs more saxophone in my opinion!) and got the entire crowd dancing like nobody was watching. FFO: Men I Trust/Really From/US Girls.
Heaven for Real
One of the best performances of the festival was Halifax/Toronto/Montreal band Heaven for Real. Fronted by the brothers Grundy, they exude a kind of slacker-twee energy that is nearly impossible to characterize. Their songs are an unpredictable mix of danceable, shambolic earworms that remind me of 60s garage nuggets or New Zealand rockers the Clean or even Rivers Cuomo if he ate a ton of mushrooms. I’m really looking forward their forthcoming record.
Hélène Barbier
This Montreal-based artist writes creative and catchy post-punk tunes (sung in both English and French). Jittery, staccato guitar and her enticing, enigmatic voice combine to produce beautiful, quizzical melodies and unconventional hooks. Barbier’s understated playing belies her deep musical talent and ear for idiosyncratic songwriting. It was a real treat to hear her play songs from her newest release, Regulus (out on one of Montreal’s coolest labels, Celluloid Lunch).
Love Language
This Montreal band formed at the start of the pandemic, and Sled Island marked one of their first live performances. They play a jangly brand of indie punk with some sharp edges – I was really captured by how the tracks ebbed and flowed between a delicate dreaminess and a raw ferocity.
Motherhood
These proud New Brunswickers create bizzarro garage rock, or avant-punk, or folky-cerebral post-punk – labels can’t really capture their unique blend of the playful and quirky with the dark and demented. Their music is full of shifting tempos, off-kilter rhythms, fuzzed out prog jams, and thrashing two-minute ragers. The night they played was an almost-release show for their excellent new record (Winded) – the album had already dropped in their home time zone when they took the stage in MST.
Necking
It’s encouraging to see punk – not post-punk, not art-punk, but straight punk – alive and well. Necking, an all-female 4-piece from Vancouver, tap into a powerful punk rock energy to create agitated, exasperated, uncontained outbursts. You wouldn’t be wrong to cite Riot Grrrl or X-Ray Spex as comparisons, but if you look past their gender we might also mention snotty BC punks Dayglo Abortions, and I even got some Dead Kennedy vibes from the guitar work.
No Frills
Millennial dad rock at its finest. Former Calgarian, now Torontonian Daniel Busheikin writes some excellent, catchy bedroom-pop songs about love and longing, medication and mundanity, and the whole band – composed of vets of the Toronto indie scene – fleshes them out with groovy riffs, spicy guitar lines, and toe-tapping awesomeness.
Stuttr
Vancouver’s Stuttr put on one hell of a show (writhing on the floor, licking guitar strings, moshing with the crowd, that sort of thing). They are A+ noise makers whose unique brand of post-punk I can only describe as trashy skate punk meets shoegaze.
Sweeping Promises
I felt blessed to be able to see what is perhaps the most exciting new band of the last couple years – in a Legion Hall no less! Their debut record was almost other worldly, such a solid sonic concept seemed to emerge fully formed without forewarning. Their live performance captured the immediacy and urgency of the record (singer/bassist Lira Mondal is a commanding presence) while also demystifying and humanizing these post-punk heavy-hitters (it was endearing when guitarist Caufield Schnug blushed at the audience’s demand for him turn up his volume).
Uranium Club
What can I say about the Minneapolis Uranium Club Band? Their live act is like a conjuring that awakens in us audience members an impetus, an abandon, a veneration we didn’t know we had. They played some new tracks that have me excited for their next release – just as tenacious, intense, and esoteric as ever, but now with more, dare I say, melodicism and open space.
This is just a small sample of what Sled had to offer. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it to Toronto’s psychedelic shoegazers Mother Tongues, the heavy post-punk weirdness of Doreen from Edmonton, or the frisky dark wave from Calgary’s Parisian Orgy – but I’ve been listening to their records in heavy rotation, and I think you should too. See you all at next year’s Sled Island!