In the fall of 2006 I saw Shot­gun & Jay­bird play in my home­town of Oshawa. It was the only time I ever got to see them play, but it really changed my life. I’ve told the whole story here before, but in fewer words, that was the night I dis­cov­ered the great fes­ti­val that is Sap­pyFest, which I had the plea­sure of attend­ing in 2008, 2009, and again just this month. It’s actu­ally the end of the month now — I’m not sure what’s taken me so long to get down to writ­ing, but if I wait any longer no one will care anymore.

This year for Sap­pyFest I decided to go for an entire week instead of the usual 3–4 days. Part of the rea­son I went for longer was so that I could just relax in a nice envi­ron­ment, but I also wanted to check out more of Ok.Quoi?!, an arts fes­ti­val that hap­pens each year in the week lead­ing up to Sap­pyFest. I went to a round­table dis­cus­sion about pub­lic art instal­la­tions, lis­tened to some live exper­i­men­tal music, saw a ton of amaz­ing short films and ani­ma­tions, and even par­tic­i­pated in the “Con­sen­sus Bus” (a free bus trip open to any­one, but every­one who comes has to agree on the destination).

Of course, Sap­pyFest itself was another fine 3 days of music, with a whole lot of my friends and favourite bands play­ing this year that was a given, but there were also a few new dis­cov­er­ies along the way. I had planned to shoot a lot of video dur­ing the fes­ti­val, but of course, once I’m hav­ing fun I tend to “for­get” my cam­era when I go out… but I did man­age to cap­ture two bands from the first night. Nei­ther band should need any intro­duc­tion for read­ers of this web­site as I’ve shot them both many times before.

Toronto’s best party band Steam­boat played to a packed main­stage tent in what I believe was their first out-of-town gig! The response from the crowd was enthu­si­as­tic, and the band had another chance to get peo­ple danc­ing when they did another set (with plenty of spe­cial guest vocal­ists), clos­ing out the fes­ti­val on Sun­day night at George’s Fab­u­lous Roadhouse.

Finally, here’s Attack in Black play­ing a few songs. Lots of new mate­r­ial in their set, really hope they record them and make another album.

Tags: Attack in Black, Sackville, SappyFest, Steamboat · Leave a comment

One of the first bands I saw this year at Sap­pyFest was The Har­bour­coats, the still-sorta-new-because-they’re-relatively-unknown band led by Bry Webb from the Con­stan­tines. It was a really nice way to kick off the fes­ti­val and def­i­nitely had me hum­ming the songs to myself all week­end. This wasn’t my first time see­ing Bry play­ing away from his reg­u­lar gig — I remem­ber hear­ing at least one of these songs when he did a set at the Three Gut Records 5th anniver­sary party years and years ago at the Tran­zac, and I’ve sub­se­quently seen him play on a few other occa­sions lead­ing up to last Fri­day. Join­ing him this time ’round was Mike Feuer­stack (aka Snail­house) and my old pal Jonas Bon­netta (aka Evening Hymns). The songs were sub­tle and majes­tic, show­cas­ing Bry’s pow­er­ful voice in a whole new way. I’m super excited to hear their forth­com­ing record, too bad no one knows when it’s com­ing out. Maybe I should look into get­ting that Con­stan­tines acoustic EP they put out a few months back to hold me over. Which reminds me: if any­one from Arts & Crafts is read­ing this, can you please press it to 10″ vinyl and send me a copy? What’s with this digital-only foolishness?

Con­tinue reading →

Tags: Attack in Black, Harbourcoats, Jon-Rae Fletcher, One Hundred Dollars, Sackville, SappyFest, Snowblink · 5 Comments

Only a hand­ful of videos from Sap­pyFest this year. Above we’ve got Chad Van­Gaalen backed by Attack in Black doing “Clin­i­cally Dead,” and below we’ve got Attack in Black doing a new song called “Liberties.”

Tags: Attack in Black, Chad VanGaalen, Sackville, SappyFest · 2 Comments