Osheage 2008
click for photos

They say it generally takes a festival about five years to find its bearings. The first Osheaga festival, though generally underattended did seem to set it apart from the hundreds of festivals each year with headliners like Ben Harper, Sonic Youth and the Flaming Lips. Year two was somewhat of a disappointment but only because the best bands were relegated to back-woods stages while main stage acts were registered painfully low on the excitement meter.

This year’s festival took the freshman excitement of the first year, learned from the billing mistakes of year two, and made year three an ass-shaking success. Granted I skipped Jack Johnson entirely, felt like an inmate when told I could not return to the festival grounds if I left, and will definitely spend the rest of summer trying to figure out why on Iggy Pop’s green earth the festival were scheduled for a Sunday and Monday. Regardless, sound and artist-wise, come Tuesday I was a happy man.

Here are some picks and surprises…

Cat Power
My finest Cat Power moments have generally come while weeping alone in empty bathtubs in the dark months, I’ve generally I’ve heard bad things about the live show. That said, Cat Power’s Osheaga performance was a pleasant surprise. Chan Marshall’s trademark signature vocals were accompanied by a band which, in uncanny Cat Power style, dug into the rocks for some moments of fist pumping, soulful glory.

Metric
The sun essentially came out on Saturday when Emily Haines took to the stage in an electric blue one piece dress to play metric anthems and personal favourite – “Empty” closing with a tempered and playfully slowed-down version of “Live It Out.”

CSS
Something’s going on in Brazil that I just haven’t quite put my finger on. Either the country has finally reached that stage where it can produce affluent kids with parents’ money to burn and time to kill making music, or the combination of heat, sand, sex, and a long history up tempo music has collided with that frenzied and filthy new world electro in just right way. Just about anyone you talk to who went to Osheaga festival will tell you in unanimous chorus that Iggy Pop and the Stooges was the best performance. Except me. I will take all the mud you can sling and the fists you can swing. The show reminded me of the MIA show on the same stage the previous year, when the Sri Lankan rapper taught Montreal a thing or two about how to throw a party. Granted I loved the MIA show last year, two MC’s and a laptop is no comparison to the full band live show that CSS delivered. CSS has only one very clear agenda – to have a good time.

Iggy Pop
Iggy Pop and the Stooges essentially tore Montreal a new asshole and taught it who its real punk rock father is. Not one second of this show disappointed and it was high octane from the moment Iggy Pop stormed on stage looking better than most college football players to the moment the band left the stage never to see their equipment again. The Stooges pummeled the fairgrounds with tracks older than most punks with the energy of an Iraqi oil field set aflame. Sadly their equipment was stolen, but one day when their stolen gear has stolen gear grandchildren and they’re all sitting around a stolen campfire, you can be shit-sure they’ll have one amazing story to tell them about their last show before becoming fugitives from the law.

Plants and Animals
If there’s a band to hear in the rain, it’s probably this one. The Polaris nominated Plants and Animals and easily one of the best bands to come out of Montreal recently. It’s always easy to see which band has their jazz chops: they’re the ones that are best suited to translate those chops into innovative rock n’ roll. Epic, jazz-infused rock with a tinge of country influence basically means you can make sweet love to this music or get into a serious fist-fight with your cousin next to the pick-up truck.

Broken Social Scene
I have a lot of respect for a band that announces themselves as “The most overrated band in Canada.” There’s little room for disappointment when the pretension has been done away with. The final result was just a goddamn good show. There was the old stuff – you know the ones – new stuff, side project stuff. Probably one of the most rewarding shows of the festival and marked by the most immense rainbow arching over all. BSS was joined by members of the Stills, Apostle of Hustle and Amy Millan of Stars.

Spiritualized
The Spiritualized show can probably be summed up by their last song. It was at this point that I died, was born again, raised by adoptive parents of the coast of Norway and then learned to fish. I traveled the high seas until my fishing vessel capsized off the coast of Bermuda, killing my entire family. Luckily I was rescued by a band of pirates and then lived the next 20 years traveling between the Carribean sea and the west coast of Africa when one day we overtook a ship full of slaves to be used on the cocoa plantations of central and West Africa. Upon freeing the slaves I fell in love with one of the captives whom I promised a life of riches and glory with the booty I had amassed over 20 years of pirating; we purchased some camels in Tangiers and made our way across the Sahara using only the stars to guide us. Later, when the camels were sick we cut them open and slept in their carcasses and told no one about it. Many years later, when recounting this tale to our grandchildren, my freed-slave-bride had a stroke and died right there in our living room in Leningrad. Heartbroken, I took again to see and crossed the Atlantic for the last time arriving in the port city of Montreal where in the distance I heard the final bars of Spiritualized’s encore. In other words, quite possibly the longest song in the history of encores.