Wintersleep, Perchance to Dream...That This Set Will Soon End

Wintersleep @ Barrymores (Ottawa), with Brian Borcherdt, Dog Day

Do you know a band called Wintersleep? Don't worry, you probably won't. They've been lauded by indie music magazines, which is usually the death knell for commercial success on this continent.

Music reviewers, you see, tend to come from two basic camps. The first camp is of the 'promote anything' variety, desperate to make contacts and friends in the hip and cool music scene taking place around them. Can't be in a band? Then be their ink groupie, publishing their press releases as music reviews - FoxNews to their Republican Administration, if you will.

The 'promote anything' variety has ths warped notion that positive reviews get noticed. These reviewers want to be the first to have trumped a band, to have contributed to their success, to have lived a life beyond their laptop and bag of cheesies next to the mouse. They want to show how they can compare Yo La Tengo to anything - a piece of fruit, a forlorn look in an empty cafe, or the new Weezer album.

For some reason, as we cross the Atlantic and land in the Kingdom we call United, things begin to change. It's as if all that salty water between us has been rubbed in our wounds and now we're ready to take it out on any artist so long as it improves our career. Unless their American. Brits love American music, and love America. It's weird - all popular American bands get a pass over there. Brits? Not so much. This is why NME can rip that Oasis album 'What's the Story (Morning Glory)', and then when the album becomes huge (you might know some of the songs - Wonderwall, Don't Look Back in Anger, Champagne Supernova, Some Might Say, Cast No Shadow, She's Electric) NME recants the original review, and REreviews the album. Fantastic. Ahhh, to be a reviewer. To contribute nothing to society.

So it is with a heavy heart that I offer a partial and impartial review of this Wintersleep concert, of which I didn't stay to the very end, but stayed long enough.

There were two artists who preceded Wintersleep, and they were Brian Borcherdt and Dog Day. Apparently all these guys are from Nova Scotia, a province that has produced TONS of indie music, none of it good. Thrush Hermit, Sloan, Joel Plaskett, Superfriendz, Eric' Trip. A veritable who's who of exhaustingly uncreative and mediocre indie music. It's not even mediocre, it's just...it exists.

The Brian Borcherdt set was him and an acoustic guitar, and was really quiet. You couldn't really hear much of the guitar, and he wasn't singing very forcefully. A fairly wimpy set. A set probably more conducive to Second Cup than to Barrymores. I simply don't understand emo, and I don't understand why it maintains a semblance of popularity. How do we as a culture laugh at people like Celine Dion, yet give emo a pass? Have we simply stopped progressing?! Derivative music is the worst music in the world, and derivative music often takes the shape of a band or musician who is desperately trying not to be derivative. Sook-Yin Lee for example, is one of the most predictably off-the-wall derivatively uncreative artists in Canada. I can only assume Rolling Stone loves her.

Yeah, so I'm finding it hard to focus on writing about this concert, and admittedly I found it hard to focus during the concert as well. Brian Borcherdt. Where angels fear to tread.

The second band was called Dog Day, which immediately reminded me of Dog Day Afternoon. I haven't seen that movie, so I was then actually reminded of what dogs do in the afternoon - sleep their asses off. So this is what I did during this set. Well, I listened for a bit but I didn't recall hearing one verse or one chorus. Or any change in dynamics. Or any pulse. Or any creativity. Or any originality. I would rather they just put up a screen and we could watch the third period of the hockey game. Dog Day was actually reversing the enjoyment or 'utility' as economists would say.

Let me explain this 'utility' concept one step further. So you want some ice cream. You have a bowl, and it's awesome!! So you have a second bowl. It's great, but not as good as that first bowl. Then you have a third bowl. It's alright, but you're getting pretty stuffed. A fourth bowl. Boy, that's a lot of ice cream. Not feeling too good. Fifth bowl. Okay, seriously, I've had enough. This is called the law of diminishing returns, where each bowl adds value but to a lesser degree than the previous one. Bands like Dog Day however have confounded economists who must now come up with a way of explaining a new law - the law of immediately reversed magnified returns. So it's like this - you want to hear music, and Dog Day comes up. You immediately hate music and want to leave.

Wintersleep finally took the stage sometime after 10pm I believe, and people had already been angling their way near the stage where they could be unimpressed but with a much better view. Optimists!!

What to say about Wintersleep. Well, they actually weren't bad. It all essentially sounds the same except for one of the songs which was called 'Orca'. Amazingly it's the only song that people in the audience really knew and cheered for. There must be a correlation there somewhere. It's a good song. And during the set, one of the people I was with gave me the 'yay or nay' symbol to see where I stood on the Ebert/Roeper rating system. I actually said 'yay', and not due to peer pressure! The concert was okay. Unenthusiastically okay, though I may have been reeling from the anger effect brought on by the first two bands. It's like the logic of being in a group chased by a bear; you only have to be faster than the slowest guy! Hence go on tour with shitty bands. All of a sudden Wintersleep looks like Paul McCartney!

Any goodwill I had towards Wintersleep however was dashed when they broke out into a Phish-like four-chord jam for 15 minutes. How's that for alliteration!! I remember looking at my buddy Jeff, and asking 'Why?' There are many things about the cosmos that I don't understand - relativity, ESP, girls...but there was no greater mystery to me in that moment than how a band could possibly think jamming like that on stage was interesting to anyone but themselves. And that is exactly why go-nowhere indie bands are heralded by indie mags and ignored in the mainstream. In the indie arena, confidence is the currency. In the mainstream, it is strong songwriting, and serving the servants. Wintersleep. Winter and Sleep. Guess which word I was thinking of during that jam? Listening to this infamous jam session reminded me of Thanksgiving , where you ingest tons of turkey and then immediately want to find somewhere to doze off, in the arms of Morpheus. Which is what I did. Grabbed my jacket, ventured out onto the cold Bank Street sidewalk, with the words running through my mind...

"Snow and sleet, and sleet and snow.
Will the Winter never go?" (Katherine Mansfield)


Afterword - Starting a Band

It was inevitable when hearing music and a performance that you know you could better with a bit of hard work. Jeff, Jean and I have started talking about one day talking more about possibly starting a band. We're stuck on the name right now. Jeff is one of those guys that can get a conversation going about anything, and no-one knows where it is going to end up. Usually in tears and blood and anger. So if anyone wants to contribute to our band-name discussion, please feel free to follow our train of thought as we painfully decide on a name, but please remember that you will be emotionally exhausted by the end.

The name discussion started out with the understanding that there's three of us in the band already, and great, we all play guitar and sing. Awesome, we're the fucking Byrds. But The Byrds is already taken, so how about The Birds? Well, that's a Hitchcock movie. So Jeff ingeniously comes up with Da Birds. But it's too much of a cross between Pharrell Williams and that SNL sketch. Jean settled it with Das Birds. A German acoustic troubadour trio, something out of the film A Mighty Wind. That's where we are right now - how so far we have come!


Afterword 2 - A Girl Who Doesn't Know Me Now Hates Me

So one of Jean's friends, Regan, was out last night to see the bands. She's a Wintersleep fan, so after reading this review she now has a third reason to hate me.

It all started when we were near the stage and the girl in front of Regan was literally touching herself to every song. From the top of her head down to her knees, she was doing her best Divinyls impersonation. So I lean over to Jeff and say "Man, that girl in front of Regan is orgasming to every song!" Somehow Regan heard me say her name and 'orgasm'. Great. It was too loud and awkward to resolve the misunderstanding, though I did kind of give her the 'sorry about that' look.

Then later on we're talking about our new musical creation Das Birds, and I turn to Jeff just as a Wintersleep song ends, and jokingly yell too loudly "...and we'll dress up like Nazis when we play!" This time Regan and a whole bunch of people heard me!! So now Regan thinks I talk to Jeff about her and Nazi orgasms. Nein!!!