By: Pat O'Brien
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We Are Wolves - Publicity photo from their website
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Many times, when you go to a concert, you more or less know what’s coming – nothing seems inherently menacing or hazardous – but Friday night found me vaguely uneasy, and it made the night all the more exciting. The potential for disaster, though present throughout the evening, never came to fruition and it made the night absolutely stellar.
Near the halfway point in Buildings’ set I knew the night was going to be unforgettable. They had thrashed their way through about four songs and had convinced me that they weren’t just another throwaway opening band. Lead singer Grant Kjos had a clipped, rough howl that sounded like David Yow chewing on broken glass, while guitarist Brian Lake pulled and shook noises out of his guitar that I thought only existed in people’s imaginations. The songs bobbed and weaved, took sharp turns into dirge-like dreaminess and seemed like they might dissipate into the ether, but then just as quickly jerked into filthy hardcore squalor, like Mogwai playing ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead covers. At first it was so overwhelming I thought I was going to have to step outside to collect my thoughts, but by the end of their set I found myself wishing they had a couple of songs left to play. They have been flying a little below the radar so far in the Twin Cities but I doubt they will for much longer.
Shotgun Monday were on next, and they sounded like how it must feel to take a punch from Oscar De La Hoya--brutal and tooth-loosening. The anger simmering just below the surface was more than apparent and felt like it might boil over at any moment. They sounded like a perfect mix of Quicksand and At The Drive-In with focused, intense rage as the icing on the cake; I haven’t seen anger like that drifting from the stage in quite awhile. At first I thought it was some sort of construct, a falsehood to give an aura of danger to the band, but as they moved along I realized it was all too real and that their set could very possibly devolve into an instrument-pulverizing free for all. It didn’t and everyone seemed a bit relieved, but a few people--myself included--had slowly backed further from the stage during the set just in case. The audience even seemed a little drained at the end, but it was probably nothing compared to how the band must have felt.
Montreal has become the new hot music scene in the past couple of years and We Are Wolves are part of the second wave to start garnering attention. They are much more experimental than their peers (The Arcade Fire, Stars, etc.) but no less deserving of the accolades being tossed around the city. If you were to look up “electro-punk” in a dictionary, surely there would be a picture of lead singer Alex Ortiz shouting into a microphone. The songs were dense and churning, most of them unfolding sans guitar, just bass. We got a quick French lesson from Ortiz before “Little Birds” (“En francais es ‘Les Ouiseaux Petites’” he said with a laugh, figuring most of the crowd didn’t understand him) and also a lesson in how to create more with less. “Feisty” is the best word I can think of to describe them. Drummer Antonin Marquis stood upright behind a stripped-down kit (no bass drum) banging out simple, catchy rhythms and complimenting Vincent Levesque’s analog keys under the pummeling bass lines; and through it all the music managed to sound strangely, unsettlingly organic, recalling Clinic in that respect. During their set I kept waiting for something else – something more – and then realized anything more would have muddied the already busy waters. It was as close to perfect as it could get; adding even an extra cymbal to the drum kit would have been an egregious error.
Location Info:
7th Street Entry
Artist Info: Buildings, Shotgun Monday, We Are Wolves
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