Supercrawl Festival

How many of us old timers remember, and maybe still use, the expression "strolling downtown"? Well, that's the very concept behind the Supercrawl Festival in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, born five years ago as a challenge launched by Sonic Unyon Records, the city's local indie label: to bring tens of thousands of people out to stroll along James Street North, right in the heart of downtown.

A daunting challenge, given Hamilton's reputation as a working-class industrial city with little to offer, overshadowed by nearby Toronto. The idea was to reclaim abandoned or decaying buildings, renovate them, and turn them into underground venues, art galleries, pubs, quaint vintage shops and clubs of every kind, where people of all ages — especially those into music and visual art — could find a place to call their own.

The idea of closing off the whole of James Street for roughly two kilometers, setting up two stages at either end and another in the middle, seemed, to say the least, overly ambitious. And after the first edition in 2008, which drew barely three thousand brave souls, the organizers looked like fools. But that's the thing about the heart of independent rock: it keeps beating regardless of the market.

And so, against all odds, the festival has grown year after year, up to the more than one hundred thousand attendees over the three days we witnessed, with the peak reached on the closing night, headlined by the synth-pop of Passion Pit, the cream of the Toronto punk crop Fucked Up and Metz, plus hidden local gems still little known beyond the border, Lee Harvey Osmond, Joel Plaskett and Dinner Belles, not to mention the main draw, one of the most revered American underground bands of the last thirty years, Yo La Tengo.

But Supercrawl isn't limited to the three stages: there's art galore on every corner, hordes of street artists, fortune tellers, painters and caricaturists, acrobats from the Orange Circus (a sort of English-language Cirque du Soleil), and hundreds of impromptu performances and works of art in progress, like a fence where every passerby gets the chance to add their own graffiti to thousands of others.

All for the enjoyment of young university students and old alt-rock die-hards alike, working-class locals from the area's many industries and well-off kids visiting from the wealthy metropolitan suburbs.

The third night was the most musically explosive: as evening fell, after dozens of "lesser" bands, at least in terms of following and fame, Metz took the stage with their now-proverbial ruthless assault of raw, heavy electric guitars, all thunderous, hammering noise. An hour of relentless performance, as if the trio wanted to leave every last drop of energy on stage.

Alex Edkins, the band's guitarist and singer, ended up exhausted and drenched in sweat, despite the cool temperature, as if he'd just played a basement show rather than an outdoor stage. A devastating rhythm section and a set that flew by like a freight train, built around the songs from their debut album. The intensity of Metz's sound dragged the thousands in attendance into an imaginary basement, shoulder to shoulder, jump after jump: this is the true garage spirit.

Even before Metz finished battering their instruments, the sound check for the mighty Yo La Tengo was already starting on the opposite stage. Many in the crowd rushed over to secure the best spots in front of Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew, the Hoboken band that for nearly thirty years now has stood as one of the most beloved by American music critics and by the underground crowd of the tri-state area.

The trio proves right away to be right at home in the post-industrial, post-decadent urban setting surrounding them, opening with a four-song run that ranks among their best: the new tracks "Stupid Thing" and "Paddle Forward", plus "Stockholm Syndrome" and the towering "Big Day Coming", all delivered in abnormally distorted versions, pushed past every limit, in a noise-rock frenzy worthy of their great friends from south of the border, Sonic Youth. A few youngsters drift away from the front of the stage almost immediately, not particularly drawn in by Kaplan's imposing pedalboard, the quality of the songs or the trio's musicianship, but at least twenty thousand people let themselves be carried away by a sound that, in the second part of the set, grows calmer, moving into a sequence of semi-acoustic songs that show off Georgia's voice at its very best, matched by her dynamism behind the drums.

After more than an hour of great music comes the closing run, opened by "Ohm", the track that opens and defines their recent album "Fade", and closed by the apocalyptic fifteen minutes of "Pass The Hatchett, I Think I'm Goodkind", with its obsessive bassline, its rhythmic crescendo and Ira's violent guitar passages, as he pulls out his legendary trick of swinging the guitar over his head for his solo. The ovation is the kind rarely heard north of the American border.

In the end there's even time for a quick greeting and a few words between the three musicians and a small group of hardcore fans, further proof, if any were needed, of just how much Ira and Georgia are two of a kind: never full of themselves, always approachable, as likeable as almost anyone else in the alt-rock universe.

But it's not over yet: after a few minutes' break, it's back to watching Fucked Up, who close out the performances on the north stage. Introduced by Vish Kanna (a well-known Canadian FM radio host) as "the best punk-rock band in Canada, if not the world", Fucked Up kick off with "Queen Of Hearts", explosive and relentless, with Damian Abraham in top form, still dressed (for now), before diving into the crowd as early as the second song. Damian makes his way through the whole area in front of the stage, trading smiles, touches and kisses with his fans. It's partly for this reason that Toronto adores him like almost no other artist. The peak of the show comes with "The Other Shoe", with the crowd singing along in unison to the "dying on the inside" of the backing vocal. Energy and enthusiasm through the roof.

Closing out the night on the main stage are Passion Pit, but frankly their synth-pop, even coming off a huge year in the States, with a single that climbed all the way to number 3 on Rolling Stone's 2012 charts, can't hold up against the giants who came before them. Before the set ends we head off, to beat the traffic out of the city, but not before taking one last look at the extraordinary spectacle of James Street and Supercrawl. Until next year…

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