What is normally a hyped-up festival began with chaotic guesswork; it was difficult to know which of the multitude of bands to catch without hours of listening beforehand. This year, the four-day music festival in Victoria, BC, took on an outer space theme, and the tagline “A weekend of discovery,” a statement which has never been more true.

Thankfully, on the flipside, what the festival does best is unify the city and its residents over four nights of spontaneity, all in the name of the unexpected. What makes Rifflandia, or Riff, so unique in the first place is its multi-venue approach, in addition to two main stages located at Royal Athletic Park, better known as the “Park”, Riff 2014 managed to book over 150 artists at 15 venues located around Victoria – no small feat for the size of the city.

Highlights included a flashy lights show to Tiger and Woods and a retro performance by Cool that can only be described as “rad.” (They sold tapes instead of records or CDs – I’d call that pretty Cool.)

But the real cherry on top was Pickwick’s performance at the gorgeous Alix Goolden Hall church on Friday night. After crowds had listened to hours of mediocre electronica, they offered up incredible energy, spirit, and unexpected beauty. The six-piece indie rock band from Seattle invoked a sense of realness, not to mention flawless acoustics that amounted to the perfect Rifflandia moment.

Half Moon Run also delivered tight performances on both Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, in what were, perhaps, the most current and highly anticipated shows the festival had to offer this year.

Alternatively, Born Ruffians delivered a lukewarm performance at the Park on Friday, followed by the adorable Dragonette, who, despite being somewhat of a has-been, literally appeared out of dry ice, getting the audience’s hands high in the air with old favourites.

Over the course of the weekend, the Park boasted the usual array of food trucks, mini shops and merch, including Rifflandia t-shirts with “September Forever” in caps across the front. In typical festival fashion, hipsters with floral crowns spent long afternoons soaking up the last of the summer sun. Rifflandia is a festival that captures the spirit of summer and holds it in its palm for one last time.

To conclude a weekend full of surprises, an actual meteor streamed across the sky during Death Cab for Cutie, eerily matching this year’s galactic theme. It’s moments like this that make Riff just so damn magical. It’s quite simply hard not to love Rifflandia.

While the initial release of the lineup suffered from a little bit of backlash, as always, fans of the much-loved festival (or rather, everyone in Victoria) came crawling back and it was no less out of this world than it has been in the past. Cheers, Rifflandia. And here’s to next year.

See more photos from the festival here.

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In an immediate break with the preceding paragraph, I’m going to compare the guitar sound on Wavves’ latest album Afraid of Heights to The Pixies and Nevermind. Whether Nathan Williams and his buds are toying around with early ‘90s vibes or fudging with distortion-heavy bedroom recordings, Wavves carve out a distinct album sound – one that proves difficult to recapture onstage. The damp fuzz that usually hangs over his albums evaporated in the afternoon sun, and the 20-foot stacks poured out track after track of nondescript guitar tone.

Listening to music is fun. However, the experience improves exponentially with each added serving of distilled alcohol. When a tall can of Bud – North America’s most ubiquitous beer – goes for $11, exponential growth tends to lag, and fun plateaus around “a pretty good time.” So when Earl Sweatshirt grumbled, “It’s okay to have fun guys,” two songs into his set, our answer was, “Thanks Fun Police, but my grandma only gave me a $50 bill in my birthday card this year, and I’m trying to stretch it all the way to 11pm. It’s 6:30 and I only have $18 left.

Beer gripes aside, Earl pounded out a minimal, grimy mix of RZA-inspired beats and Eminem-flavored darkness to an appropriately mellow audience. Playing between Palma Violets and The Gaslight Anthem wasn’t quite the right musical fit either. When his set was over, I thought to myself: “Earl needs a crew and a light show. A tiny little guy in a white t-shirt just yelled at 10,000 of us for 45 minutes on a sunny day.” Long story short, when it’s beautiful out, people have trouble listening to anything that isn’t “In The Summer Time,” so kudos to Earl for getting half of the crowd bobbing. The elements of summer were against him.

I mentioned the late ‘70s, early ‘80s puffing a cloud of smoke over the festival’s proceedings, and sartorial choices aside, the era hadn’t really made an impression until Girl Talk took the stage. The common gripe with Girl Talk is that “he’s just playing other people’s songs.” The trick to getting everyone to relax and enjoy 45 minutes of unbridled, idiotic fun is to warm them up with records like Paul’s Boutique and Odelay – reminders that we’ve been listening to collages of “other people’s songs” veiled as albums for almost 25 years. Personally, I find Girl Talk to be the opposite of Wavves: impossible to listen to on record, but unstoppable in a live setting. People generally want to hear the hits when they’re at a concert, and Girl Talk plays everyone’s hits. Channeling the spirit of my 53-year-old mother, his set began with AC/DC and was peppered with menopausal classics such as “Love Shack,” “Sweet Emotion,” and “Jessie’s Girl.” I’ll always vouch for his ability to evaporate music snobbery and force everyone to enjoy Alan Thicke’s son and The Breeders back-to-back.

Capping off the evening was Phoenix, our era’s version of Supertramp. Always catchy, always easy on the ears – they served as the perfect nightcap. Their huge catalogue tends to bleed from song to song as a result of a collective tempo, and at times it felt like I was listening to a 15-part Rush track without the complex time changes. However, their light show and accessible arena rock had girls hoisted atop many a shoulder and served as the perfect metaphorical bookend to a festival whose most successful vibes felt like they were curated by my mother.

See more images from Grove on our Facebook page.

The post Debut of Toronto’s Grove Music Festival with Wavves, The Pixies, and much more appeared first on Quip Magazine.

Yes it happens to overlap with Veld. Yes, it is a little bit tragic but a decision will have to be made and this line is definitely out for a win.

Taking place at Fort York Garrison Commons, GROVE will be home to such acts as Hot Chip, Girl Talk, Phoenix, Young Empires, Nightbox, and Icona Pop among a few others. This is a day dance, and Girl Talk will bring it home after dawn.

We are giving away a pair of general admission tickets to a lucky QUIP fan, to enter for a chance to be that lucky fan visit our Facebook, a click over to the GROVE contest tab.

If you just can’t wait the tickets are available at Ticketmaster, Rotate This and Soundscape for a mere $59.50.

*The contest opened on July 8 at 10AM and will closes July 22 at 10PM ET. Must be of legal drinking age to participate. Open to all residents of Canada excluding Quebec.

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By 9:45 or so, the line into The Congress has slithered around the block, a simmering pastiche of adolescent hijinks, appropriately representative of the wide distribution in age. The show is 17+, so while the expected 20 and 30-somethings, barely hiding just-shot-gunned PBR cans loaf around and smoke cigarettes, there’s also a substantial constituency of giggling titillated teens. Someone’s father is reading a book a few feet from the line, displaying exactly zero effort in the nonchalance department, to the stark dismay of one teenage girl.

To suggest that a Girl Talk show is less about performance than experience isn’t necessarily wrong; it’s just too reductionist, and kind of wet-blanketish. As the priest exists between God and congregation, so too does Gillis, inhabiting some elusive space between the music and the crowd. In a platonic reality, he might be the nexus point at which our profane sphere comes into contact with a Bacchanalian soundscape of lust and narcotic revelry. In reality, you’ve just never in your life seen a room more jam packed with sweaty bodies intent on dry-humping the shit out of each other. Did we mention there are balloons and confetti cannons?

Gillis’ set begins like a camera’s lens coming slowly into focus; a digitally rendered chant modulates from a two-syllable glob of sound into something steadily louder and more recognizable. No sooner does he take the stage, when a mass of clamoring fans start to shuffle in, stage right. It’s well known that Gillis allows fans to come onstage and dance, and people have been jockeying into position at both sides of the stage since before the hip hop openers, Zion 1.

The samples Gillis draws from are all lifted from his most recent album, 2010’s All Day. Having listened to the album for a week prior to the show, the live renderings are un-surprising, but somehow retain all of their entertainment value.

The appeal underlying his mash-ups rests in the warm and nostalgic familiarity of songs we know and love, 70’s soul classics comingling pleasantly with gangster rap and punk rock, bubble gum pop nuzzling fondly against dub step. And that appeal translates into real performance power when you start to follow Gillis’ transitions.

As he’s expressed in some of his interviews and writing about his work, these are the points, in a live show, of the highest importance, and which leave the most room for improvisation. So whether he’s laying TI over The Strokes or Missy Elliot and the Beastie Boys on top of Blitzkrieg Bop, a transition is, at all times, beginning, occurring, or leveling out.

Macgyver-esque toilet paper cannons whip through the air, coagulating to a backdrop of LED panels reminiscent of a half finished game of Tetris, all while more fans seem to be piling onto the stage by the minute. Someone jumps the barricade and doesn’t quite make it past security, as another girl topples backward off stage, only to leap back up unscathed.

As the mass of dancing fans cluster around Gillis, it’s easy to lose him in the crowd, but for his efforts to amp them up, climbing bare-chested onto the DJ table, invoking a near-pandemonious reaction.

The show’s sensory engagement is multi-tiered, but chiefly visceral. So while it’s easy to dismiss Girl Talk’s performance as a well-curated dance party, it’s equally possible to lose one’s self in the fray. And there’s something about that trance-like draw that’s untouchable, and certainly worth the experience.

Check out more photos from this show on our Facebook page

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