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The JPEGMAFIA "Round by Round, Blow by Blow" world tour stopped in Montreal this Tuesday. The Brooklyn experimental rap artist is touring in support of his newest EP, OFFLINE! - an extension of his last full-length LP! that dropped in 2021.

Before JPEGMAFIA, nicknamed Peggy, could grace fans with his freak beats, Montreal-based artist BACKXWASH (Ashanti Mutinta) warmed up the crowd. The Zambian-Canadian rapper was an excellent choice for the opening slot, as she veers just as far from mainstream hip hop as Peggy does. Bombastic tracks like “Black Magic” were performed by a BACKXWASH dressed in black robes with a face adorned in black and white face paint - an upside down cross running vertical up her forehead. Bringing a vibe that can only be described as abrasively occult, BACKXWASH proved well worthy of having her name on a show flyer with such a legendary headlining act.

JPEGMAFIA took the stage dressed in a blue and red tracksuit and a head wrapped in a blue bandana. Rather than opening with a song, the rapper humbly introduced himself to the packed venue before his set, thanking them for coming and saying that he hoped they would enjoy the show. In a world where most artists want to look like they’re on top of the world, this lowkey-but-down-to-Earth gesture made it easy to understand the crowd’s unbridled enthusiasm for the rapper, chanting “Peggy” as loud as they could whenever they could. The artist then manned the laptop set up on-stage as he queued his own opening track, further showing his humble attitude.

The setlist was full of JPEGMAFIA cuts to the likes of “BALD!,” “I Cannot Fucking Wait Til Morrissey Dies,” and “Thug Tears.” While Peggy’s spoken intro may have been lowkey, his performance was nothing but the opposite, yelling frantic bars into the microphone and getting up close and personal with the front row. The crowd was completely untethered throughout the entire show, with various mosh pits opening and closing as fans jumped up and down to Peggy’s pounding anthems. Quickly there was no one present, save for people on the very sides of the crowd, who weren’t soaked in what one can only hope was water and sweat.

The highlight song of the show was “Baby I’m Bleeding,” as the crowd broke into a bouncing maelstrom when the track’s looping Death Grips-esque beat cut through the venue’s soundsystem. As Peggy delivered the song’s lyrics, fans only got wilder.

JPEGMAFIA will be working through his world tour right through until September, bringing his explosive experimental rap to the rest of North America, Australia, Europe, the UK, and even Japan. Here are the remaining dates for the "Round by Round, Blow by Blow tour." Find the closest gig to you and be there at all costs.

Hunter co-hosts The Iron Club, your weekly guide to the dark and mysterious realm of underground metal, which airs every Sunday from 9:00 - 11:00 p.m.

On a pleasant weekday evening disconnected 35 km away from the busy Montreal island, in a small suburb called Sainte-Thérèse, there was a loud crowd celebrating local bands. It was not any regular evening but the first of the extravagant Santa Teresa Festival which started on May 19th and lasted until the 22nd. 

With closed streets, three different outdoor stage venues and many indoor performances, the Santa Teresa Festival was unleashed in full force for the first time this year after the restricting effects of the pandemic. It is a music festival dedicated to celebrating and encouraging local and budding artists; as well as international acts headlining. The festival's goal is to give the bands access to huge crowds and to also introduce refreshing music to the audience. 

Right next to the welcome arch of the fest was the usually busy ticket counter on Turgeon Street where the line included people, babies in prams and pets on leashes. Even if some of its venues were only for adults and weren’t pet-friendly, the whole fest still had a groovy vibe no one could escape from.

It was about 8:30 pm on the second day of the fest, when the sun just rested for us to party. People grabbed some drinks at the SAQ bar tents and some tasty crispy fries at one of the food trucks before heading to the closest open stage, the Desjardins stage. This stage is one of the venues that hosted free events for all the days of the fest.

Pink hued lights lit up the audience's faces while the crazy, peppy songs of the band easy tiger lit up their moods. The band comprises of Gabrielle La Rue and Sarah Dion who played their recent release "Ibizia." I realised I was too late to the party when their performance ended just as I wanted to go up closer and break a leg. The song, the beats and the energy were very engaging and deserved all those loud claps and cheers. 

The next performance was at the Loto-Québec stage, one of the paid venues for which the audience needed special passes and wristbands to access. It could host a huge crowd, so there were separate food trucks, bar tents, and drinking water kiosks specifically for this section of the fest. 

Food court scenes smelled like fresh fries, fish-n-chips, nachos and churros. They had multiple seating areas for the crowd to take a break from partying. Meanwhile, the stage was being prepped for Hubert Lenoir’s, 9:15 p.m. show. He is a Québécois musician who rose to fame with his 2018 album, Darlène. 

All the venues were based on first come first serve, and I stood in the last row of the audience as I was late to the party. From what my weak eyes could discern, Lenoir wore a white dress for his performance. He didn’t give the crowd one dispassionate second as he swayed and mesmerised the audience with his soothing June 2021 release, Secret. 

The lights, the bass, the boom, and the crowd went gaga over his peppy song “Dimanche Soir.” According to many publications, he was declared "a pop star in any language" and he proved it that night; rocking the huge crowd in a white dress. 

Simultaneously at the Desjardins stage was another band electrifying the crowd with their music. They were Solipsism, a psychedelic-rock band formed in the winter of 2021. The band members are longtime friends based in Montreal and Québec. François Lemieux (Milanku, ex-Dark Circles) on voice, guitar and keyboards, William Duguay-Drouin (Caravane) on drums, Taylor William Fitzpatrick Johnson (White Nails) on keyboards, Samuel Gadreau on guitar and Maxime Doyer on bass and vocals all mesmerised the crowds with their version of rock. 

The fest hosted many other bands and independent artists for four days. From slow, meaningful songs by artists such as Martha Wainwright and Lonny at the Ste-Therese-d'Avila Church, to rap music by Fly Jordy & Wes Castle in the Cabaret BMO to other venues hosting pop music, rock, and punk, the Santa Teresa Festival proved to be truly a groovy, local music fest for all tastes. 

Metal fans were treated to quite the show this Thursday as Slipknot delivered their unhinged hits to a nearly sold out Bell Centre. The Iowa legends are supported by New Jersey’s Ho99o9 (pronounced “Horror”) and West Coast hip hop legends Cypress Hill on the 2022 Knotfest Roadshow.

The mixing of metal and hip-hop genres on this lineup made for an enjoyable and surprisingly uniting experience. While hip hop and metal fanbases tend not to overlap that much, both genres rattle with an anti-establishment energy, making for a good combo. As a result, audience members got down pretty well with Ho99o9’s punky rap-infused tracks, as well as Cypress Hill’s ‘90s beats, even though 95 per cent of attendees adorned Slipknot or other metal band tees.

Cypress Hill frontman B-Real was quick to make a connection with the audience after pulling out a 6-inch joint. “This is dedicated to all the stoners here,” he said, right before going into a medley of Cypress classics such as “I Wanna Get High,” “Dr. Greenthumb,” and “Hits from the Bong.” B-Real’s juggling of bars and tokes created heavy competition between the audience and Cypress Hill’s on-stage electronic smoke machine, even though the frontman’s own medication was most likely just a prop. The act tapered off their set with hits “How I Could Just Kill a Man,” “Insane in the Brain,” and a cover of House of Pain’s “Jump Around,” the latter two enticing an audience reaction that rivaled the crowd’s peak energy during the headlining act.

Slipknot took the stage after a brief intermission, opening with “Disasterpiece” and “Wait and Bleed,” which offered a sense of the band’s range as musicians, the first track being one of their heaviest and the second being more melodic. This opening one-two punch was emphasized by Slipknot’s impressive stage setup. Frontman Corey Taylor was flanked on both sides with ten-foot high drum risers, each home to percussionists Michael Pfaff and Shawn Crahan. These risers were attached to walkways that looped back around to an elevated rear of the stage, where the band’s sampling master Craig Jones, drummer Jay Weinberg, and turntable mixer Sid Wilson were found side by side for the majority of the set. The three other members (yes, Slipknot has nine members) in the form of bassist Alessandro Venturella and guitarists Jim Root and Mick Thomson riddled center stage as the band blasted through more heavy-hitters.

The Iowa act’s stage presence, often complemented by loud explosions and pyrotechnics, made for a visual spectacle any music fan would feel sore about missing out on. Frontman Corey Taylor also connected with the audience halfway through the set, admitting that he blew his voice out during the show prior in Albany, New York. This moment was met with an astounding applause from the arena, demonstrating a great deal of respect for the singer who was risking the tour’s remaining 14 dates to give Montrealers the show they paid for. Despite Taylor’s announcement, he powered through the band’s repertoire, giving it all during even the most brutal of screams. If he hadn’t mentioned his condition, most wouldn’t have noticed any difference.

Understandably, Slipknot’s set was still cut a little short, as they took brief intermissions between every handful of songs, presumably to give Taylor moments of rest. These intermissions amounted to about ten total minutes of the band’s set, which wasn’t really a big deal. The biggest downfall was which songs were cut, most notably the act’s staple 1999 debut opener “(sic),” which would have been a treat to see live (they played this track during the encore of previous dates on this tour).

If the 2022 Knotfest Roadshow is stopping in your city and you’re on the fence about going, take the plunge. Ho99o9 and Cypress Hill’s hip hop antics, met with Slipknot’s undeniably awe-inducing live offering make ticket prices worthwhile. Also, given that Slipknot doesn’t tour that much, fans are better off taking the opportunity while it lasts.

Hunter co-hosts The Iron Club, your weekly guide to the dark and mysterious realm of underground metal, which airs every Sunday from 9:00 - 11:00 p.m.

In 1882 Friedrich Nietzsche declared “God is dead” and then in 1945 Jean-Paul Sartre posited, “existence precedes essence”. But nearly 50 years later Lloyd Cole sang, “you might call it ultraviolet radiation / it’s only sunlight”.

Born in the post-war world of 1961, musician and songwriter Lloyd Cole grew up in England, later studying English literature and philosophy among the ‘80’s post-punk generation at the University of Glasgow. A time in which he was fated to meet the future members of his band and form Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. In 1984 they made a name for themselves in the British indie scene with the release of their debut album Rattlesnakes, a jangly record with allusive lyrics informed from Cole’s literary background. The band produced two more albums - Easy Pieces (1985) and Mainstream (1987) that to their dismay, didn’t quite meet the Rattlesnakes standard among the critics - the group disbanding shortly afterwards. Despite the break-up, Cole embarked on a solo career, releasing his debut album Bad Vibes in 1993.

“So You’d Like to Save the World'' belongs to this very album. Upon first glance the album cover greets its listeners with a picture of a brooding Lloyd Cole, who sulks in a Schopenhauer-esque disposition. He dons a suit and a cigarette droops in his hand while being cornered; providing the overall illusory image of a world closing in on him as the pessimism of the Bad Vibes album name looms above. 

This portrayal of the cynical antihero ensues on the track where Cole, as the speaker, urges a romantic interest “[who’d] like to save the world / to take one person at a time and start with [him]”, paralleling a poet’s invocation of the muse; a notorious convention of Epic poetry enacted by the poet when in need of guidance. Epic poems typically revolve around a tedious voyage of some sort, in hopes to overcome obstacles from external forces. They also look warily at the future civilizations. In this vein, Cole takes his playful courting, climate change anxieties of the early 1990’s and turns his song into an epic poem of its own. In 1989 the Los Angeles Times published an article, headlining how: “Global Warming Is Expected to Be the Hot Issue of 1990s: Some scientists studying the greenhouse effect say the sky is falling”, an ethos that clearly contextualizes “So You’d Like to Save The World”.  The chorus directly addresses these worldwide concerns, when the speaker asks the song’s heroine if they “really [cried] / when they saw that hole in the sky?”. Solace is then offered when Cole delivers those resounding lyrics: “you might call it ultraviolet radiation / it’s only sunlight”, emphasizing how even in the most harrowing times, the sun’s burning rays don’t have to be a source of detriment.  And the sun’s natural essence (to put it existentially) can just be sunlight—not in a climate change denying way of course, but in a way that is ultimately grounding and reassuring. 

Or maybe, in a way which I've decided to coin as: desperate. Although Cole’s song is devoid of philosophical jargon, it (similar to the works of Nietzsche and Sartre and any other existentialist alike) is imbued with the very pathos of existentialism; the uncertainty, the angst and the disillusionment that popularly reared its ugly head in the ‘40’s and that echoes furthermore in the song’s vulnerability. This desperation evades a rightful name from being such a visceral and therefore ineffable feeling but ultimately provides a catharsis to listeners that is sympathetic in its brutal poignancy. Even the mere lyric of the song title, “so you’d like to save the world”, isn’t posed as a question but as a warm glint of hope; an affirmation of possibility. The song could very well be the older cousin of “Bittersweet Symphony” by The Verve. And maybe that’s why it makes me cry on my morning metro rides to work.

Accompanying the last verse of the song is a flaring guitar melody that happens to be the musical equivalent of  the sun reaching its zenith on those languorous summer days. It scintillates in the air and gives way to perhaps the most heartwarming moment of the song where Cole sings, “so you’d like to save the world / I’d really like to help you” then finally admitting, “I’d really like to be you for a while”; resulting in an overwhelming release. It’s also the moment when Cole as the antihero, takes the Kierkegaardian leap of faith; the subjective action one makes despite their inner-cynicism and angst to believe in something that cannot be objectively proven. For Cole, it’s not solely believing in the “Motorola generation chic” woman he serenades but more so in the notion that opening one’s self up to human connection, especially in times of peril, is what makes life meaningful. 

The song’s environmentalism isn’t the only subtext at hand nor the only catalyst for existential angst. “So You’d Like to Save the World” and the Bad Vibes record collectively evince themes of making the transition from one’s halcyon days and onto those that eventually become disillusioning. In Cole’s case it was the transition from being 23 and in his heydays of making commercially successful music in Glasgow alongside his band, to being uprooted further into adulthood that made him wear the suit of growing up in order to trudge along with the present. I’ll make my final plea: listen to “So You’d Like to Save the World” and as Cole, in his winsome tone of voice suggests, “free [your] inner child”.