POP Montreal Sweet 16 recap (Oh Sees, Besnard Lakes, Ty Segall, Hurry for the Riff Raff and more)

From September 13 – 17, POP Montreal celebrated its 16th anniversary with a typically eclectic lineup, featuring performances from RZA, Hurry for the Riff Raff, Oh Sees, The Mighty Diamonds, Besnard Lakes, a reunion from Think About Life, and dozens more acts. Below is our recap of the most memorable sets we witnessed throughout the festival.

Thursday, September 14

Oh Sees @ La Tulipe

They may have dropped the “Thee” from their moniker, but other than that not much has changed for San Francisco’s reigning kings of weirdo garage rock.

Taking the stage at a sold-out La Tulipe, band leader John Dwyer and co. launched into a frenetic set that had the crowd pogoing madly and endlessly crowd-surfing throughout their 90-minute set.

With their current two-drummer set-up, even some of the band’s simpler garage punk tracks took on a mesmerizing quality, with doubled up drum parts that occasionally varied just enough to keep your eyes glued on the duo — easy to do, with their prominent placement right near the lisp of the stage.

When Oh Sees are full-on there is no other band like them — they exude a contagious primal energy that seems to channel itself directly into the frontal lobe of the crowd, pushing them on to greater heights of abandon. One fan was so taken with the band (or so high) that he simply decided to sit on the side of the stage mid-set, alternately zoning in on the band with his wide-open stare and closing his eyes and rolling his head back in appreciation.

While they may have spent a bit too much time jamming, that ebb and flow between free-form improv and all-out attack is what makes seeing Oh Sees such a visceral and exciting experience.

Ty Segall @ Theatre Fairmount

Ty Segall has never been a stranger to melody, and while his pop song-writing often gets buried under layers of guitar fuzz and noise, his knack for crafting a hook really shines in his acoustic set-up.

Segall was in a loose and care-free mode at this show, joking about getting “experimental” before kicking into an earnest cover of Hot Chocolate’s “Every 1’s a Winner.” He also took the fairly intimate setting to showcase some new songs, one of which had a pronounced mid-period Bowie feel.

While Segall performed his stripped-down material admirably, he had to contend with a boisterous crowd that often overwhelmed his sound entirely. Whether it was casual POP pass-holders more interested in schmoozing than taking in the show, or a crowd pent-up from the insanity of catching Oh Sees earlier in the night, it was frustrating to watch Segall drowned out by the mostly indifferent crowd. The waves of crowd “shushers” did their best, but it was unfortunately a losing battle on this night.

Saturday, September 16

Besnard Lakes at Ukrainian Federation

Celebrating the 10-year anniversary of their acclaimed sophomore LP, The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse, the Montreal psych-rock band performed the album in full for their POP show.

At times swelling to 11 members (maybe ever more —  members were spilling out of sight side-stage at points), including a violinist and trombonist, the band did a great job of re-creating the wall of sound of the acclaimed LP.

The soaring and ethereal vocals of the husband and wife team of Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas were complimented by a triple guitar attack, with each guitarist building upon the other to create a sensory overload like something out of the Philip Spector handbook.

Despite their hair-raising performance, the acoustics of the venue did the band no favours, often muddying the sound, especially on numbers that brought out the extended lineup. Spotty acoustics aside, it was a set that only cemented the ambition and massive sound of one of Montreal’s most exciting live acts.

Royal Trux at Theatre Fairmount

Resurrected 90’s indie vets Royal Trux made their first Montreal appearance in eons for this POP set, and delivered a set as loose and borderline out-of-control as could be expected given the likely herculean amount of substances coursing trough their bodies. It wasn’t a total train wreck or a transcendental experience (we had considered both options beforehand), as much as distilled experience of what the band so infamous in the first place.

The band, led by former-couple Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema, were never exactly shy about their drug and alcohol use back in the 90’s, and it was a bit disconcerting to hear Herrema’s marble-mouthed slurring between songs, which was virtually incomprehensible. As for the band’s actual music, it was fairly evenly split between distorted garage rock (good) and jammy, bar band blues rock (not so good).

Apart from some diehards up front, the crowd seemed to lose interest pretty quickly, leading to chatter levels at the bar that rivalled even those at Ty Segall a couple of nights earlier.

Sunday, September 17

Jay Som at Petit Campus

Jay Som’s music straddles the worlds of indie rock and full-on pop, with Melina Duterte’s confessional lyrics given a slick-sounding production sheen on record. In a live setting, the band definitely hewed closer to their unassuming indie aesthetic, offering up faithful renditions of tracks from the recently released Everybody Works LP, with seemingly little concession to the crowd. In fact, watching the band almost felt like peaking into their rehearsal space, as their in-jokes and playful band interactions made it seem like they were performing more for themselves than the crowd. It may have just been the laid-back nature of the band’s music, but the set never reached the joyous heights of much of Jay Som’s recorded material.

Hurray for the Riff Raff

The New Orleans-based Hurray for the Riff Raff released one of the year’s most vial albums with The Navigator, an autobiographical concept album that traces singer Alynda Segarra’s back-story, from her childhood in the Bronx, to living on the streets of NYC and crisscrossing the country before settling in New Orleans. The album also serves as an exploration of Segara’s Puerto Rican heritage, which infuses the album with a wider soundscape than past releases. That may sound like a heavy-listen, but Segarra and the band bring such an energy and vitality to their loose folk-rock sound that makes the messages of isolation and gentrification that much easier to digest.

For their closing-night set at POP, the band unleashed an energy that one wouldn’t necessarily have expected from their records — it was almost the difference between listening to the Ramones on their early releases versus the jackknife energy of their live shows. Segarra was in total control of the crowd from the opening notes, leading off a set primarily focused on material from The Navigator, which seemed to suit the appreciative crowd just fine. Describing their sound as “resistance music” to fight back against the state of the world today, even tracks like the modestly-paced single “Living in the City” were given a shot of adrenaline, imbuing them with a punk-like energy.

Revealing to the crowd that the last time she was in Montreal was 12 years ago, when she was “playing on the street and living in the park,” it was clear that Segarra was thrilled to be back, albeit in a very different situation from her last visit. With their empowering and thrilling set, this was without a doubt the highlight of this year’s POP Montreal.