To be clear, the It’s Gonna Get Loud Tent, down on the city plaza, was a very nice tent. I’ve seen a lot of tents, some real bunk ones among them. I can’t even extend my legs fully in the $20 tent I own at the moment. The It’s Gonna Get Loud Tent was warm and music didn’t sound terrible in there, which is better than I can say for music tents in the past.
That said, 8 p.m. on a Friday in a tent is a rough gig. Slow Down, Molasses played well but simply didn’t get all the way there, and a crowd that included a group next to the stage trying to see how high they could stack beer cans on the table didn’t help.
I’ve always hoped for good things from Slow Down, which features Planet S and Prairie Dog contributor Chris Morin. With each release — and each Regina gig, including shows at BreakOut West and Regina Folk Festival — they figure out their spot in the shoegaze niche a little better. That niche doesn’t coexist entirely with a space still filling up with people and that featured a video board as wide as the stage.
From there, I walked down to catch a bit of Emilie Mover at Artesian on 13th. She’s an artist I missed talking about when her record, Mighty Time, came out. Didn’t mean I wasn’t listening — Mighty Time held me for a few listens, a singer-songwriter record that sounded like a focused band album.
She was in town as a Juno nominee for Children’s Album of the Year, a fact I had missed before the night. Some of the songs from Mighty Time came from the same period when she was writing her kids album, she said at the concert.
“We’d think they were joke songs,” she said from the stage, “and then three of them ended up my record. That last one started as a joke song. It was a day-drunk song.”
Live, Mover was performing mostly solo, with a piano player joining her a little later in the set. Her songs adapted well, though they lost a little without the spot-on full-band pop treatment. Mover’s voice was great, working the edge between soulful and cool disaffection.
