No-Cases Day 4

Sunday was the last day for the ECUA No-Cases, and it was the one where I knew the least about the bands that were scheduled to play. On the bill were On Vinyl from New Brunswick, Shelter with Thieves from Halifax and Shotgun and Jaybird also from NB.

Music trivia was going on at Hunter's before it started, but I apparently decided to skip out on trivia on one of the nights my usual team actually won. I'm good like that. But it put everyone in a pretty upbeat mood even though I expected people to be winding down and suffering from the weekend adventures.

OnVinyl are a three piece rock act with a pretty traditional heavy rock sound. It's not as apparent in their recorded stuff but when they play live the music is very bass-driven, with the bass playing a strongly distinct melody that gets in front of the guitarist's chords. There's a lot more guitar soloing in the recorded stuff so it doesn't seem like that's a direction the band is pushing, but it did give them a little more unique sound angle.

I really appreciated that the singer was very talkative between songs. Instead of just mumbling and going from song to song he made jokes and interacted with the crowd. More bands should realize that this is a big step to winning real fans.



After them were Shelter With Thieves (I still think the often mistaken name "Sheltered With Thieves" is better, but oh well.) They were the musical hilight of the night for me, with a style that is sort of halfway between power rock and genuine punk, and I absolutely do not mean that they are a watered down version of either in the vein of pop-punk. The guitar was very jumpy and energetic, with lots of fun little hooks, and the singer had the strained almost-hardcore quality that can infuse a ton of energy into a song when done right. They were one of the forgotten-hour bands that I got to see at the 72 Hour Jam the night before but this performance was five times better. The band seemed to appreciate a crowd of enthusiastic fans more than being made to wait an hour and a half past their scheduled start time, and deal with inept and / or drunk management, only to finally get to play for a few enthusiastic fans in a room with wandering cokehead zombies and broken glass. I was glad that they were the one band I saw perform more than once (me == itinerary master.).

The last song they played was a cover of Wish by Nine Inch Nails that pretty much made me insane. Even without the keyboard part they did the song total justice.



The other bands after that didn't really strike me as being very interesting. But overall the night was better than Thursday, but not quite as good as Friday for the No-Cases and even though the crowd wasn't as thick (it hit capacity the other nights I was there) the people who did show up were all into the show and having a great time.

Afterwards me and one of the dudes who organized the no-cases used the two tickets I scored from a friend for free to the PEIMA party at the Delta and see what kind of trouble we could cause. Sadly our short attention spans won out before we could really do anything worth getting kicked out for, but it was still pretty funny for the time we were there.

All things considered this was an amazing weekend, and I really appreciate the efforts of Brad, Gabrielle, Kelly who put in so much work getting everything together and running after all the equipment and billeting and money matters that needed to be taken care of.

The three of them made PEI's ECMA weekend something bigger than just whatever the East Coast Music Association decides it should be.
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On+Vinyl, Shelter+With+Thieves