Halifax Pop Explosion Day 1

Although I missed two nights of this exuberant young festival on the east coast of Canada I made it in time for the last three nights, and I’m glad I did.

To give you some background, HPX is mainly a music venue festival dispersed in downtown Halifax at various small clubs and bars. It also features other aspects, like a zine fair, some stand up comedy, industry panels, and some film. It spans five days in the heart of Nova Scotia and is surprisingly not as marketing-oriented as most festivals are these days, making it a nice breath of fresh air and the perfect ending to my eventful festival season this year.

Getting from the Halifax airport to downtown Halifax takes just as much time as it does to get from Toronto to Halifax, no joke. So I finally got into town and started planning my first night in the city. I started with some Toronto staples (go figure), playing an all ages show at St. Matthew’s Church. First up, Spiral Beach. They played their little hearts out and stomped around on stage to their haunting ‘80s-esque pop frenzies igniting sing-a-longs from the fans standing in the pews. Their cheery ditties are a taste I have yet to acquire; nonetheless the songs are fun and harmless adventures of youthful energy. Also representing Toronto, The Meligrove Band took to the church stage, however not without saying a few hymns and prayers of their own. Albeit, jokingly concluding as bassist Michael Small admittedly announced “we are assholes”.

Assholes they may be, their emotional sometimes piano/sometimes guitar driven pop was spiritually moving. It’s been a few years since their last release, 'Planets Conspire' (a masterpiece if I have ever heard) so they fed the crowd some of their new material. The band is used to being nabbed as huge CCR fans, but these songs introduce a whole fresh philosophy into their usually dark melodious song writing. This is my first time seeing them sans a horn player and second guitarist Andrew Scott, and it seemed the three of them played extra hard to compensate. In turn they did more than just that. Their songs bounced off the ceiling and around the room, boisterous and bold awakenings of noise stuffed to the brim with the juicy group chants and unique wailing guitar solos that made 'Planets Conspire' such an epic piece of work. Can’t wait to see what the New Year holds for them.

I avoided seeing Two Hours Traffic, who followed The Meligrove Band –as I’d seen them before and was less than impressed. Instead we made our way over to Coconut Grove, which is a nice hot spot nestled overtop Pizza Corner (a intersection with 4 different pizzerias on each corner) with a generous sized rooftop patio. I wanted to catch Boxer the Horse from Charlottetown, PEI. That we did… and it became apparent that Jeremy Gaudet and co. were quite consumed with sounding and performing as if they were Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash.

It became blisteringly obvious when they whipped out songs like 'Jackson Leftfield' and the feel good 'Rock n Roll Band'. I could see the audience start whispering in to each other’s ears. Lucky for them, I happen to love Bob Dylan and I quite enjoyed their remakes. If you’re going to rip off the greats you might as well do it well, and Boxer the Horse surely did as their songs were catchy jingles with lonely undertones.

Another Toronto force, The Rural Alberta Advantage came on after and seemed to lighten the mood with their hand clap friendly indie folk rock. It seemed a little to typical for me, and it also seemed every song required a generic clap-a-long… to the point I didn’t have many claps left in me by the time they finished each playful cut. They’ve got all the aspects to doing well in this day and age (a cute female vocalist, tambourines), yet their songs just lack originality. This being a side project to drummer Paul Banwatt’s electro outfit, Woodhands –I suggest he sticks to the latter, although the RAA glimmer with potential.

It was becoming ridiculously cold outside so we swore our way over to the biggest venue of the festival, The Marquee, with our hands shoved deeply in our pockets arriving just in time to catch local indie rock buzz honing band Windom Earle were wrapping up. Just in case you didn’t want your evening to end without a spastic epileptic seizure, Holy Fuck brought just that to the stage with their post-rock set of instrumental chaos. Building up and down and up and spiralling into psychedelic space, a perfect soundtrack to my seemingly inebriated state. Although I have to admit they didn’t present many surprises, they played like I expected them to play: very well. (Read: I wanted to see something crazy). Great set, nonetheless!