Reviewed onSaturday March 5 (photo by Ashley Mar)
The decision to schedule Spectrum Now’s Divine Times concert on the same night as Mardi Gras may have seemed to some like an odd kind of organisational suicide. But rather than one event overshadowing the other, the two joined together in strange symbiosis. After all, both proved to be celebrations of love, and if there was one thing that united the diverse talents on display at Divine Times, it was a sometimes strange but no less striking sense of devotion. This was music played by people who love music, lapped up by a crowd that adored it in turn.
Jonathan Boulet began proceedings on a high note. Blasting his way through a dark yet danceable series of songs – the kind of music Madness might play if they found themselves in the grip of a bad acid trip – he was charismatic and chatty, introducing the audience to his sheepish parents, who stood in the corner watching.
U.S. Girls’ Meghan Remy played a difficult, stark set, stalking around the stage like a predator, and Seekae were all prickly, pogoing choruses. Headline act The Jesus and Mary Chain powered through an assemblage of B-sides before making light work of the seminal Psychocandy, combining blistering feedback with blissed-out choruses. It was barbed wire baked into cake; apple sauce laced with arsenic.
Nonetheless, of them all, Nova Scotian five-piece Alvvays were the most transcendent. Their set began with a very long, very public soundcheck, and early tunes were plagued with minor technical issues. But by the time they were done, the band had ended up in a different realm entirely – somewhere alien yet familiar, stumbling through a landscape both beautiful and hostile. It was a stunning testimony to music’s transformative power, as the five 20-somethings onstage slowly grew in stature, becoming solid, significant figures playing solid, significant music. And when it was done, the fans stumbled out into the night, the sound of Mardi Gras all around them, as the city in which they nestled buzzed and breathed as one.
