Sharp Pins Break Record for Smallest Pants Worn at La Sot!

As it snowed with ferocity on the streets of Montreal, the three-piece outfit (not dissimilar from what they wore), Sharp Pins, rocked La Sotterenea –  basement venue of La Sala Rossa – in style. Hailing from Chicago, a city at the epicentre of the fast-evolving and emerging indie-rock sound and scene, they brought with them not only a zest, spunk and flair for theatrics, but also a particular analogue flavour hard to come by in our present hyper-digitized hellscape. With songs veering from sweet love ballads to angsty jangle-rock anthems, Sharp Pins packed a punch that could only be described as the frenetic ethos of youth. You could even say they have “a way” (a joke Kai Slater himself later used while introducing their song “You Have a Way”). 

    The band rolled in at 9:30, fresh from pushing their tour bus up a hill in the snow, having been preceded by Montreal’s very own Prism Shores and Austin’s Eli Winter. Beginning with a boom of their latest album opener, “Popafangout,” from drummer Peter Jebson (who was reminiscent of if Animal from the Muppets dressed in a collared shirt under an argyle sweater and khakis), that was so loud its reverberations emanated through the floor and hit me squarely in the lower back. Sharp Pins were off, exploding with the energy I can only assume was harnessed from the brute force their journey to the venue had required. Jesting that “we like it loud,” three Chicago twentysomethings, dressed in their finest 1960s church-boy Sunday best attire, burst into a setlist filled with songs off their three studio albums, Turtle Rock, Radio DDR and Balloon Balloon Balloon, along with an unreleased number to keep the fans excited for what's to come. 

    Sharp Pins confirmed a sneaking suspicion I had, namely that they are truly meant to be experienced and taken in live. Despite the Montreal crowd’s (unusually) timid reception (I blame the persistent onslaught of snow and sub-freezing temperatures, which can break the spirit), their songs eventually encouraged in the crowd an alchemistic desire to shimmy and jive. I’m not sure about everyone else there, but I was certainly heeding Slater’s encouragement to “shake some tail feathers.” Bookending each song with a sweeping guitar jump with greater frequency as the concert progressed, it appeared that as the crowd continued to warm to the band, the resulting energy turned Slater into something of a jumping bean. Considering his skin-tight striped flared pants, I was doubly impressed at his sheer ease and fluidity of movement. 

    After finishing their electric set, the band was summoned back on for a two-song encore, a slow song: “With a Girl Like Mine” and an upbeat, energetic final number: “I Can’t Stop.” And that they couldn’t! With a familiar yet unplaceable essence, Sharp Pins sound like they could be a peer to early Beatles, The Cleaners from Venus and Guided By Voices wrapped all into one – like discovering some B-side of a long forgotten band in the dollar crate at a record store. Suddenly, I seemed to understand Beatlemania and the ferocity with which your grandma probably approached the twist in her heyday. As I lined up to buy a CD, Kai Slater emerged, and I got a chance to compliment his pants as I bought the album. With a head filled with fuzz and muffled ears, still ringing from the show, I stumbled out into the quietly soft, snowy night on St. Lau, a sort-of cloud nine magnified by the marshmallow snow which surrounded me. 

Sophie is the host of Are We There Yet?, a sonic journey through temporal realities, on air Wednesdays from 9-10 am