Oberhofer + Cloud Nothings + Intensive Care – Casa Del Popolo – 18.01.11
First up were Montreal’s Intensive Care. I had never seen them on stage before, so when my ears were greeted by the speakers blaring their explosive cymbals and screeching keyboard, I sort of had to take a step back. Nonetheless, the four-piece put on a good show, with guitarist Nadim almost literally bouncing off the wall with energy. Their set was more of an experiment for them than anything as the boys were trying out a bunch of very fresh songs they had recently been working on. Sounds different guys!
The next band to go up on stage were Cleveland’s Cloud Nothings. The lo-fi, pop-punk quartet’s live sound matched their recordings as if it were a piece of cake, and surprisingly enough, they managed to beat Intensive Care’s loudness by a mile more. Lead singer Dylan Baldi made sure to promote his band properly and informed the crowd, without fail, what the names of every one of the songs performed were. Dylan also mentioned half-way through the set that the band had no place to stay. Luckily, within the first two point five seconds of the lead-singer stating this, one of the two moshers that had been lightly throwing themselves around raised his hand and very willingly offered the guys a place to crash, to which Dylan answered “Okay cool, we’ll talk later!” Cloud Nothing’s self-titled debut release will be dropping this month. Be sure to check it out.
When it was finally time for Oberhofer to take the stage at around 10:45, vocalist Brad Oberhofer had an important announcement to make: “Our guitarist isn’t here,” he said, ”He thought we were going on at 11:30, so he’ll be here in the next 5-10 minutes.” and then he went on this emotional roller coaster of a soliloquy about how he was sad, because he loves his guitarist, and how one of his bandmates is angry at him, and how the world is mistreating him…and then he said he’ll play a bit of glockenspiel in the meantime, and so he did. He played bits and pieces of “Fur Elise”, “Yankee Doodle”, and the Rugrats’ theme song, until finally, guitarist Matt emerged from the crowd, onto the stage, apologized about a dozen times, and caused a group hug to happen within the members of the band.
After the band had finally gotten their set ready, more stage banter ensued, courtesy of Brad: “What do you call a lamb with no legs? A cloud.” as well as, ” What do you call a lamb that’s sleeping? A shleep.” and, “What what do you call a green rocker? Elvis Parsley.” and last but not least, “What do you call a guitarist that’s late? Matt.” Strangely enough, I was expecting to get my ears blown off all over again, but Oberhofer’s set wasn’t as loud as the first two acts and came off really polished and clean sounding. At this point, the number of moshers had accumulated and there was a lot of action going on in the crowd, so although your ears weren’t taking a beating, your body was. That is, if you weren’t paying attention to where the superballs were lunging towards. The band’s been surprisingly well received here in Montreal, considering their quickly rising popularity. A lot of the people were already singing along to most of the songs, or knew most of the cues. Especially when songs like “Haus”, and “Away From You” were played. The guys even played a new song of theirs that’s about Montreal and Canada, which automatic garnered some love from the crowd (if they didn’t already have enough). And although the boys weren’t expecting it, they were obviously asked for an encore, and they had to give in to the persistent crowd, albeit not without the guitarist taking his sweaty shirt off. Safe to say it was a good night for both the bands and the crowd.
–Sarv Wallaby A.
Oberhofer
Cloud Nothings
Intensive Care
Photography by Amelia Robitaille
