It was a show that wasn’t even supposed to happen. And it had Billy Fong written all over it. It’s not that the clue to Billy Fong’s whereabouts or that a ticket to South America to the secret location of the Billy Fong Foundation came wrapped in a CD from east coast band Share who sort of opened that humid summer night in August 2009. It’s that L’Embuscade’s show at Barfly that night in Montreal is sort of what great music is all about. It was their last show and it was hair’s length from being canceled. The show was supposed to take place at Green Room but a lockout forced the show down the street to one of the most important venues in Montreal, and clearly one of the shittiest.
What makes Barfly such an important venue isn’t that you can get high on the terrace after work, or that you’ll sweat more than a yogi in the tropics just by setting foot in that place during a show. The thing about Barfly is that if you sound good at Barfly, you’ll sound great anywhere else.
But it’s not even that L’Embuscade sounded great at Barfly. It takes more than finding the sweet spot in a set of shitty monitors to win the Billy Fong Award for best live show of the year. That L’Embuscade is sort of a band that defies categorization with their eclectic brand of melody-wise oddpop softcore rock n’ what (sorry that’s as best as I can do) is only part of the equation. Their music is moody the way people are moody and are one of the few bands with that rare ability to articulate a mood or sentiment that there aren’t even words for yet. And what’s worse, or maybe what was so special about the show is that there’s a good chance we may never hear from this band again, and if there’s a lesson here it’s the cold hard impermanence of life can be as bitter as it is beautiful.
In a way the show offered an extension of last year’s BFA winner with Mark Berube and Kristina Koropecki playing with the band that night. Heavy complex, rhythms, guitars, horns, keys and unexpectedly beautiful male and female vocals (in four languages) make up L’Embuscade and there’s a width and breadth to this band whose overall effect results in high readings on the Galvanic Skin Response Meter used to measure the ‘holy shit!’ factor at a live show. And the louder they get the better they are. If you haven’t heard them, well, that’s because life is sad a lot and you were shit out of luck the night you decided to miss the best show of the year so you could get up early for work the next day.
It’s hard to tell if L’Embuscade bassist/keyboard/vocalist Jesson Moen has it in for Fong but it’s certain they’ve met. And if what Moen says is true, then Billy Fong not only has the sacred musical key to free energy, but he also speaks Spanish.
“He’s a sneaky little rat. When in Argentina (where we wrote about half the album) we were on a self-guided bike ‘n’ wine tour in Mendoza (whoever invented such a thing is fucking retarded). After the 8th winery we were swerving our way to the 9th when we hit a patch of broken glass on the road. It was sitting there drunk on the side of some dusty road in the foothills of the Andes waiting for some sort of assistance, singing melody ideas back and forth to keep occupied when a mysterious man appeared out of the vines, chastised us for our taste in wine and piss-poor Spanish grammar, then gift wrapped the bridge to our new song in perfect argentine Spanish with lyrics to warm the heart of even the coldest porteña: “Te vi cruzar la calle en la tormenta….”
-J. Moen, L’Embuscade-