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Day three of Toronto’s citywide NXNE festival.
Sitar success!
The fantastic Elephant Stone provided some sensory satisfaction in the form of Rishi Dhir’s unashamedly pop sensibilities, set to a brilliant backdrop of swirling guitars and pounding percussion.
The Montreal outfit has a Stone Roses/Brian Jonestown Massacre influenced debut album on offer from The Committee To Keep Music Evil. Elephant Stone, and their superb sitar, has added a wee bit of colour to NXNE, which has been heavily dominated by Pitchfork picks (e.g. Ty Segall, PS I love You, etc.) and Indie Rooney’s alt-country bands (too many to mention . . .). Below is a track from Kingston, Ontario’s PS I Love You, one of the top picks of the festival from various media outlets:
Calgary’s Braids followed Elephant Stone with a set of songs in the hugely popular ‘art-pop’ style:
Braids are currently ‘trending’ nicely in the indie websites of this world we live in, and are set to precede festival headliner (and Canadian label mate) Chad vanGaalen on Saturday night. I mention them here to shed light on their Canadian popularity, and to keep up the ladyfest manner of these reviews (see blogs 1 and 2 – NOTE: ladyfest is not to be confused with LadyFest festival, happening now in Bellingham, WA).
NXNE has over 300 bands and 40 films showing over 50 venues. The film festival has been growing since its rather recent inception. Color Me Obsessed: A Film About The Replacements is the festival’s crown jewel this year, but not one which I ventured to see (its 8pm Friday night showing time not suiting my music schedule). The synopsis for Journey of a Dream however, stood out amongst the usual documentaries covering the “making of” tales of albums, reviews of a ’80s punk scenes, or the story of an unsung genius with a mental disorder. Journey of a Dream, shown at the more convenient time for Friday slackers of 4pm, was described as a “Revolutionary political rockumentary recounts the struggle of a Tibetan refugee, who got a chance to live the dream of possibilities in the Western world through an unconventional form of expression – Heavy Metal.”
Filmed in Tibet, India, and Vancouver, director Shenpenn Khymsar captured some stunning scenes of mountains and poverty on his highly personal journey. Khymsar plays lead guitar in Canadian heavy metal band Avatara, yet he hails from the slums of Darjeeling where his Tibetan family had fled after the Chinese invasion of his homeland. As with many first documentaries, Shenpenn Khymsar tries to tackle too many topics for an 80 minute film. Journey of a Dream charts his beginnings as a music lover in Darjeeling, and the history of how Western music came to fit in with the changing face of the immigrant-heavy town in Northern India (arguably the documentary’s strongest piece). The personal path of Khymsar is examined until he leaves India to live in Canada (after being rejected refugee status by America), where his love of heavy metal blossoms further. The occupation of Tibet, and the political movements against it, are targeted in the middle section of the film, followed by a open discussion with Khymsar, his friends, and his parents on how heavy metal is perceived and what it means to them. The film ends with comments on the role of Tibet and her future, and the role of music in political causes.
There is a lot of information in the film which is often steeped in nostalgia, doused in political rhetoric, and caked with heavy sentiment, but will be worth a watch for anyone interested in how geographic position can mold a musician.
Day four and a hopeful journey into new and obscure Canadian tunes awaits!
Hey great series! (I was hoping for more local public transit snark though, a la parts 1 and 2.)
Hey Colin! Thanks! The coarse language that would have been used to tell tales of transit would have been a little overwhelming. Although, Toronto does have forms of public transport, so I can’t complain really.