I love a bill stacked with local bands, and if Montreal has an abundance of anything, it’s local bands. Knitting’s album release show for their new record, Souvenir (Mint Records), felt more intimate than your typical Sala show. A makeshift stage sat on the floor, buried under gear, and the crowd — which swelled after opener Fireball Kid — kept inching closer between sets. Amazing turnout for a Thursday with a stellar lineup.
Fireball Kid, fresh off their own terrific release, Deer Path To A Shortcut, opened with infectious energy. Singer and synth player Colin Ratchford told the crowd the band was down a member — his other half, Seth O’Neill, on backing vocals — so he’d be pulling friends from the audience instead. One of them was none other than local KT Laine, who came up to harmonize on “At Your Leisure.” I’ve seen Fireball Kid three times now, and this new shoegazey dance-rock incarnation is easily my favourite version of the band. The crowd agreed, hollering the lyrics to “Guilt Drive” and the tearjerker “King Of The Lake” straight back at Ratchford and company.
Fireball Kid
Next up was frown line, the mainstay bedroom-indie-rock project of Annika Devlin, who fronts one of the best-mixed live bands in Montreal. Devlin’s vocals slice through like a scalpel through wallpaper, while behind her, walls of ’90s alt-rock guitar pile up and threaten to swallow the room whole. The newest iteration of the band now has Jacob Barton on lead guitar, adding a more sporadic streak of guitar wizardry to the mix. New music has been scarce from frown line the last few years, but they debuted a newer track, easily the danciest thing we’ve heard from the group yet. They closed, of course, with the grungey barn-burner “Days Without.” Always good.
Frown line
Finally, knitting took the stage, dragging Souvenir‘s guitar-forward glow behind them like a comet tail. This is the record where the band fully molts into their own strange skin—angsty grungegaze that sounds and feels like a bruise. Knitting’s been circling this city for years now, sharpening its teeth on smaller rooms, and somewhere in that slow grind the riffs got weirder— fronts of noise rolling in low and strange, then clearing just enough for Mischa Dempsey’s voice to wander through like someone talking to themselves in a hallway of mirrors. It’s half-poem, half-static catharsis.
The set tilted heavier as it went, gravity pulling the whole room down into it, and “Sequel” arrived like a door left open in a dream you can’t quite place. That song just gets me. “I Want to Remember Everything” followed, all jagged tenderness. Both songs landed with the same physics as the album versions, but heavier and thicker, songs that have been played live many times, left out in the rain and swelled. And just like frown line before them, knitting’s live mix threaded that needle between piercing and pleasant — a sound that presses against your sternum and stays with you.
Knitting
