Over The Top Festival [Toronto, ON]

Toronto's Over the Top Festival bills itself as an annual all-ages showcase of less-than-accessible theater, film, and music. In this light, there was no artist more perfectly suited to headline the festival than Merzbow. Unfortunately, the Japanese government went over-protective-parent after last month's global outbreak of Swine Flu and forced the grandmaster of noise to cancel his North American tour, including his Toronto date.

Despite this setback -- and the cancellation of a party on a city bus -- the festival didn't fall apart. In fact, with the Tokyoite elephant out of the room, space opened for potentially ignored bands to play to larger audiences than anticipated.

----

- Pre-Festival

I began the festival at an advanced preview of Michael Rubenfeld's The Book of Judith. Taking place in a makeshift gospel tent on the grounds of Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the play tells the writer/director/actor's story of being asked to find a lover for a quadriplegic woman named Judith Snow. In the role of a singing preacher, Rubenfeld gives a sermon reflecting on his prejudices towards the disabled and the love and hate he discovers in himself though his relationship with Judith.

Throughout the play, a choir of disabled vocalists and musicians -- led by sight-impaired band-leader Alex Blumer on the ukulele -- performed an original score by the Sunparlour Players. They played hauntingly beautiful spirituals comprised of harmonium, xylophone, and 12 unique and unconventional voices. Their use as the chorus to transition the jagged plotline between acts was the highlight of the play's direction.

Rubenfeld's motive was to challenge the view that disabled people either fall into the category of “weird shit” or “holy shit,” that they are seen as freaks or objects of inspiration. His goal was to show that disabled people are just people who happen to be disabled. It would have come across as after-school special if not for all the full frontal male nudity, swearing, and showtunes.

----

- Thursday

Bayonets!!! opened the first night of music at the Whippersnapper Gallery. Manic and ferocious, they played 10 minutes of balls-out 45-second math rock gems. The Edmontonians banged out skewed melodies full of aggression, razor sharp guitars, and bludgeoning bass. Back and forth male-female vocals drove the chaos to new heights and reigned it in respectively, creating as much contrast as possible within their self-imposed time restraints. As the brief set suddenly ended in a flurry, the crowd reacted with confusion as their eyes shifted to one another as if to say “Is that is?”

Detroit's Friendly Foes were next and played a great set of power-pop splashed with jumpy guitar lines and driving percussion. Their songs were crafted with an incredibly thoughtful sense of structure and timing -- pop anthems with working-class lyrics and an early-'90s indie rock feel. Seemingly disappointed by the less-than-energetic audience, they played hard, but it was clear that they had more in the can than they gave to the arms-crossed crowd. Front man Ryan Allen produced a guitar sound large enough to fill an arena, jumped off his amp, played in the audience, and egged the crowd on in classic rock fashion, but to no avail. It was a good set, but no one was joining the street team. Friendly Foes play killer guitar pop, and they want legions of fans singing along to every lyric, pumping their fists in jubilation with every beat, but it wasn't going to happen on this night.

Moving from the gallery I went to Sneaky Dee's. As I walked into the upstairs venue, The Darcy's were in the middle of an indulgent set of dandy-inspired anthemic rock songs. The band suffered from the mistake of playing the same chord progressions on too many instruments simultaneously in every song. Any fullness they were attempting was lost in the lack of complexity. Their best moment was a cover of Final Fantasy's “The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead,” and when your best song is someone else's, it isn't a good night.

The Ghost is Dancing were up next and were unfortunately all shtick. All the elements were there: the zany keyboardist who danced more than he played, the girl who stripped instead of concentrating on playing better violin, and the quirky lanky lead singer with his off-kilter vocals. Mediocre dance-rock at its finest... Next.

After having put up with two amateurish and boring acts, I was excited to see headliners, Clues. Building on his reputation with the notoriously difficult Unicorns, Alden Penner dealt with the eagerly anticipating crowd with the overt indifference for which he has become known. Not outwardly confrontational – which would have been welcomed – he was passive-aggressive, losing more than three quarters of his crowd in the process. But fuck! He and the rest of Clues played some changeling songs that blew the minds of those who put up with his bullshit long enough to hear them. After taking 40 minutes to set up -- the festival runs showcase-style with one-hour slots -- two non-band members took to the stage. One played a minjayrah flute, while the other chanted in Arabic. Let's be straight: they were great. Maybe not as confrontational an idea as it may have been had they pulled this out in Alabama in late 2001, but it was rattling enough to eliminate the faux-party atmosphere their openers left behind.

Twenty more minutes passed by the time Clues took the stage. The crowd was agitated, bored, overheated, and anxiously staggering back and forth in the sweltering club. But when the colossus drums of “Haarp” kicked in and the band finally began to play, all eyes were immediately drawn to the stage. Clues played a tension-building set with rapid time changes, chimey guitars, and hysterical drumming. Members seamlessly switched instruments to flawless effect. Their songs were build on intricate structures that fed into and off of one another with ease, creating a dreamy atmosphere of otherworldly harmony and conflict, chaos and control. Equal parts spazz and folk, Clues demanded to be experienced. By the time the band reached the end of their set, the audience had thinned, but with two songs left in their pocket, they erupted, as did the crowd. The floor of the venue creaked and throbbed under frantically raging bodies expelling all the anger and frustration that Penner had intentionally build up inside them.

----

- Friday

As Woods set up, a rickety base was strung across the drum kit and stacks of tapes were pilled on top of two cassette decks connected by a crossfader. So much for Woods' open rural sound. The Brooklyn band took the stage at the Whippersnapper Gallery to the largest and oldest crowd I had seen during the festival. They pulled their setlist almost exclusively from their most recent album, Songs of Shame, but they brought their sound to new heights with added instrumentation. Mixing cassettes of noise and shouting backing vocals through a distorted headset could have been gimmicky, yet the disorienting lo-fi soundscapes they created filled out the spacious feeling of their recorded material. It poured concrete over the forest and drowned Jeremy Earl's sweet and echoed vocals with grumbling percussion and warping tone. Woods' folk-rock influences are immediately evident, and there is a tendency to reduce them to their provenance; however, what they bring to the sound and take from it is in itself worthy of attention. Hey, Hey, My, My.

The crowd began to clear as Woods finished their set, with only a small group of approximately 30 people remaining at the Whippersnapper to see the celestial folk of MV+EE. Playing as a five-piece, the band began their set with the meandering “I Got Caves in There.” It became apparent that both the sound in the concrete gallery and the unfamiliar local bandmates holding down the rhythm section were fucking with Matt Valentine and Erika Elder's charkas. Communication failures led to songs being pulled in opposing directions and jams faded quickly before being sloppily pulled back together. These unfortunate slips drove more of the all-ready sparse crowd away. However, those who stayed were treated to moments of sublime psychedelic improvisation. The band hit their stride with the stompping “Hammer,” as the floor-lounging audience became wrapped in the soundtrack of MV+EE's Appalachian utopia. But for all of the highs, there were too many lows. EE played some touching melodies on her electric mandolin, but overused a piercing wah, while MV crunched out ragged guitar grooves that trailed away without a destination. The venue was nearly empty as the lackluster set navigated through its peaks and troughs. Despite brief glimmers of brilliance, they lost me along the way too, and I don't like sitting on the floor with hippies, so I left.

----

- Saturday

On Saturday I attending a screening of short films, some of which could be classified as music-related, others were curated for the festival based on their own merits. Having recently been introduced to Don Hertzfeldt's work, I was eager to see his new installment, I am So Proud of You. Using archival 8mm footage in addition to his well-known use of stick-figure animation, Hertzfeldt creates a vivid picture of the desperate life of protagonist Bill and his ancestors though morbid and heartbreaking storytelling. His ability to evoke hilarity and sorrow though the animation of a couple of simple pencil strokes is nothing short of genius.

Written and produced by former Hole and Smashing Pumpkins bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur, the Canadian premiere of OOOM: Out of Our Minds was next on the bill. The seemingly high budget – for a short – film portrayed man's [sic] historically tumultuous relationship with nature through three loosely-interlocking vignettes: a contemporary car crash, vikings encountering a mystical pagan-like female (played by Auf Der Maur), and a team of lumberjacks cutting down trees pouring with blood. The film was a little heavy-handed, but maybe that's needed in a world where global warming-deniers still exist.

Next was the World premiere of two animated shorts by Chad VanGaalen: Ebay and Bald Static. Sharing a common aesthetic, the two films showcased what you come to expect from the multi-media performer, if what you have come to expect is a transcendental hybrid of underground 70s comic aesthetics with stop-motion, cut-and-paste animation. In both films, Vangaalan tosses the audience into a world where penises and houseplants morph into grotesque monsters, where every image is constantly consumed and regenerated in seamless motion, and behind every tooth-filled smile lies a perverse-cannibalistic beast waiting to be born.

***

Despite early setbacks, the 2009 incarnation of Toronto's Over the Top Festival held its own in a city consistently flooded with music, film, and theater festivals. Perhaps not as avant as advertised, but changeling enough to repel many a scene-hopper, the festival was a success. And let's not forget, it was all-ages too -- at least someone is looking out for the children.

Most Read



Etc.