The Left Coast: Japandroids
// August 12th, 2009 // Music, The Left Coast
Introducing our newest contributor, Andrew deWaard, with The Left Coast:
Photo credit: Gerald Deo
A weekend overshadowed with the Hughes Blues, it is perhaps not so strange to think of the Japandroids show here in Vancouver Friday night as a similarly nostalgic ‘homecoming’. This is a band that spent 2 years and 2 EPs wandering the wilderness of the largely venue-less (RIP Dick’s on Dicks) Vancouver indie/’weird punk’/lo-fi scene, only to spend the summer of 2009 blowing the hell up, fast. Propelled by a gushing Pitchfork Best New Track and Best New Music, East Vancouver’s (retrospective) pride and joy rapidly rose from the cover of our fair city’s weekly, to woxy darling, to Rolling Stone, and straight to the top: the New York Times has now printed — and ABC News’ Charles Gibson stoicly muttered — the (let’s admit, pretty stupid) word Japandroids. At a Constantines show here in Van a few months back, the Japs’ Young Hearts Spark Fire (mp3) came over the PA and a sizable chunk of the crowd started singing along: this was the new Vancouver Anthem. (Thanks to yours truly, the song briefly made a run for New York Magazine’s Song of the Summer). Oh, and dude had emergency surgery on a perforated ulcer (scar pic!) while they were on tour, a potentially-fatal abrupt stop to a long-awaited and recently resumed North American tour. So it’s been a bit of a summer for the lads, and it was good to have our ‘Rockers East Vancouver‘ back for a night.
Which is not to say the Japandroids haven’t been home in awhile — hell, they’ve played 4 shows here this year. A mid-afternoon hipster flea market in February (crowd size: 13) featured just as much rawkus noise-pop fuckery as their opening spot for White Denim in April (I told the guitarist’s mom, who was sitting beside me, that her son’s band was far better than the headliners. She said I was sweet.) Surely there was sweat dripping from the roof of the Biltmore (and the hearts of many of the grrrls in the crowd) when they played the expertly curated Music Waste festival in June. But Friday’s show was something else. Local lo-fi heroes the Twin Crystals and Victoria’s garage-bin-drum-featuring Listening Party were on the bill. The tickets were ten (10) dollars. And it was the first major show in a shiny new venue, the first licensed space from Malice Liveit, he of The Emergency Room fame. Shiny might not be the most apt word; the Rickshaw Theatre is at Main and Hastings, aka the epicentre of Canada’s notorious worst postal code (and subject of the Japs’ melancholic “Darkness on the Edge of Gastown“). V-necks outnumbered junkies on the street for a spell, before everyone piled in to the barren, concrete-brick lined and theatre-curtain backed Rickshaw. John Hughes would have approved of such highschool gymansium like surroundings, as he would the teen-angst desire to “French kiss some French girls” (‘Wet Hair‘) and self-professed emo pledge to “Stay sick together / Be crazy forever” (‘Crazy/Forever‘).
So it was, a homecoming to a homeless scene.
