Life at the Edge
by Joshua Ostroff, July 4, 1999

Fans rock on despite show’s flaws.

OTTAWA — You can take the girl out of Seattle but you can’t take Seattle out of the girl.

The 16,000 strong crowd at yesterday’s Edgefest were witness to the final proof that despite going glam, taking vocal lessons and wearing, gasp, a long white dress instead of a bloody baby doll, Courtney Love has by no means sold out.

Alternately sexy and surly, punk rock and Fleetwood Mac, self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating — she praised socialized medicine and suggested Canada socialize plastic surgery — Love and her band Hole mesmerized the crowd.

Though the contrast between the earlier, uglier songs like Pretty on the Inside and the newer, prettier numbers like Malibu and Heaven Tonight was harsh, it simply proved that the band has evolved and matured without losing its cynical edge.

PUNK ROCK STARS

Hole may have lost the inherent drama of Love’s public breakdowns, but they’re still punk rock stars.

Kicking off the evening sets was Silverchair, whose poster boy Daniel Johns promised to take our fascism away. But he’ll need better songs than the overly contrived Anthem For The Year 2000, a millennial plea delivered straight-faced despite its seemingly tongue-in-cheek title.

Running through a selection of hits like Freak, the teen band certainly had the mosh pit throbbing. But unlike their grunge forbears, Silverchair longs to be an arena band. They just lack the anthems necessary to do the job.

A similar problem affected Big Wreck, a Boston band boasting Canuck lead singer Ian Thornley, who have conquered rock radio.

So the crowd response was, as expected, quite intense. And the band played their guitars with thick, crunchy, fury.

Unfortunately, while their musicianship and intensity were there, the songs — Blown Wide Open and The Oaf excepted — lack the structure and catchiness to elevate them to that level. The result was a lot of noise, a few Zeppelinish riffs and painful covers of Jimi Hendrix’s Waterfall and The Who’s Baba O’Reilly.

MOIST CHARISMA

But everything those two bands did wrong was made up for by co-headliner Moist, an arena band with the charisma and, more importantly, the songs to carry it off.

The new material like Breathe and Best of Me was delivered in Smashing Pumpkins fashion, thick and powerful without speeding it up to please the pit.

But it was Moist’s “anthems” that really made their set. Silver was delivered with sing-along fury and emotional resonance. And Push topped even that, with “Canada’s answer to Eric Estrada” David Usher going into the crowd to perch on someone’s shoulders while the band ran through a dead-on cover of AC/DC’s Back in Black before returning to Push.

Earlier in the day, the festival got off to a rocky start at the new location, the Rideau Carleton Raceway. The doors opened late, an 11 a.m. car accident (reportedly due to alcohol) closed the road and long lineups snaked around the parking lot.

But it proved a much better venue than the tarp-covered Lansdowne Stadium (though I do miss irritating decibel-shy Glebites).

Unfortunately, very few people were actually inside to hear the opening side-stage acts like Newmarket’s teen rock ‘n’ rappers Serial Joe or B.C.’s Gob.

Not that it really mattered since the urge to fit 14 bands on a single bill, limited the sets to 20 minutes, hardly enough time to establish a rhythm, much less an audience rapport.

TURNTABLE SCRATCHING

The first real impression of the day came courtesy of Vancouver’s premier rap act, The Rascalz.

The heavy bass and turntable scratching emerging from the main-stage speakers was a vast departure from the melodic guitar noodlings of Vertical Horizon and their set focused on minimalist new school atmospherics and tag-team verbal dexterity over catchy “singles.”

Former Ottawa (and current Haligonian) beat-demons Len — a mostly Caucasian hip-hop flavoured pop group currently on the charts with Steal My Sunshine — made up for that with a brief, but solid set filled with a touch of funk, electro, and turntablism.

Perennial visitors Wide Mouth Mason put on a typically solid set of prairie blues rock that continues to amaze me how three boys can make so much noise.

But somehow they got stuck pretty low on the totem pole and were allowed only a brief half hour.

Tepid uneven sets were put in by finger eleven and former I Mother Earth singer Edwin but was made up for somewhat by the catchy guitar rock of treble charger.

Vancouver’s Matthew Good Band offered up a little romance when Good fan Marty Lefebvre proposed to his girlfriend Caroline Butler on stage.

Dubbing himself “the gift that keeps on giving” Good played the happy couple’s favourite song, Apparitions.