07.24.2009 Hillside Festival Day 1 (Guelph)

Since this is kind of a Vancouver blog, I'll start with a short description of this little festival. Hillside is what Under the Volcano Festival in Vancouver would be if it grew to be about 3 times what it is now. A medium to large festival with a sense of community, or as I've been told by some people one of the biggest "hippie festivals" in Canada. They have a food court area, which has all local food vendors. Some of the dishes I ate their included Thai curry and African Peanut stew. If I wasn't worried about public "daily weight loss", I probably would have had a lot more than I did. Also another cool thing they had was re-useable dishes, which were washed by a dish washing staff. Water was also freely available by a company in guelph.



The first "act" I saw was billed as "Let's Get this Party Started". This featured Ambre McLean, Kristin Sweetland, members of Rock City Plaza, Josh Gabriel, Zack Leighton and others. From what I remember, they put on a pretty tight jam.

I caught a bit of Birthday boys afterwards. It might just be the singer, but I left with the impression that they sounded like Nickelback. I strolled over to the the Lake stage mid set to check out Kae Sun who I believe is from Africa or Ghana, but grew up in Ontario. I remember he had a very captivating voice.



There were only two bands I really wanted to see on day one. One was Coeur de Pirate and the other being The Grates. Unfortunately they conflicted time wise. Seeing as how Coeur de Pirate doesn't really play much outside of Quebec and Ontario, the choice wasn't that hard. Days leading up to the festival I was a little worried because I heard she had cancelled her appearance at the Dawson Music Festival a weekend earlier due to exhaustion. I guess a week is long enough to recover. Today Coeur de Pirate was a 3 piece. Beatrice Martin doing vocals and keyboard, a guitar player and another keyboard-er. She doesn't disappoint, as she was quite entertaining. She spoke in both French and English between sets, because afterall, we are in Canada as she pointed out, in French. Her set was at about half capacity not bad for a predominately French singing chanteuse. She introduced "Commde des Enfants" as the song that got her known. Aside from her album material she also played a new song, which she described as a sad song. At the end of her set she also snuck in 2 covers, one by fellow French singing language barrier breaking Montreal band Malajube (Étienne d'Août) and Rhianna's "Umbrella's."



Rock City Plaza pulled in a pretty packed crowd. They also have quite the following. Lots of really drunk people watching their set. One girl did a possibly tongue in cheek proposal to the drummer, which was kind of amusing. Same girl and her friends later danced on stage during the set. RCP reminds me of Neutral Milk Hotel, most notably during Joyful, which sounds a little like "King of Carrot Flowers."



Someone told me that the last set at the Island tent was the one where all the volunteers went to unwind. Makes sense, because it was ridiculously packed for USS. There was actually a huge lineup to get into the area. As you would expect the audience was full of modern radio rock aficionados and college kids. USS is probably best known for their radio hit "Hollowpoint Sniper Hyperbole." I was a little surprised to find out that the band is basically just a DJ/hype-man loading beats and scratching plus a guitarist singer. The guitarist might actually be a gifted song writer, but I just found that any sort of refined musical substance that he might have was pretty much hidden under the dance beats that ran throughout their set. I mean yeah sure it was totally entertaining and the hype man did his job very well, but at the end of the day I just wonder what the band could be if they didn't use dance beats, a hype man and had a full band. Well I guess they'd have to fire one of the members. Oh they had a blender on stage with some fruit. During the last song they mixed in Orange Juice, some blueberries, and a banana and blended it. Then drank it when they were done their set. I'm sure there's a deeper meaning in there somewhere, or maybe not.

$20/$0