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Music

I Want My MTL: Solar Year Won POP Montreal

Festivals aren't supposed to be competitions, but we're still giving out top honors to this Montreal duo.

“The only reason why I know this church is because I catch the 80 bus kinda close to it and you can see the red roof,” I told a friend as we sat on the floor of said church two weekends ago. The city has both a severe lack of venues and an almost total absence of church-going Christians, which means that a lot of shows happen among pews, candles, and crucifixes during POP Montreal. The lineup was Solar Year, Julia Holter, and Tim Hecker. Tim Hecker used to teach at McGill and does shows in town all the time—to the point where if someone does a Tim Hecker impersonation by humming in a machine-like manner, people might get it.

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I knew of Solar Year as “that one band that did their album launch at a pool over the summer where they had underwater speakers.” For some reason, knowing that still didn't prepare me for what I saw.

The church has these red lights that made the wooden Jesus in the background look particularly creepy, and then there were these two dudes standing where the preacher might normally stand with a table of samplers, keyboards, pads, et cetera. Sitting on the aisle floor, I felt like I was watching the future, if the future was some sort of Star Wars meets Gucci-goth electro. One person yelled at the microphone as the sound rang everywhere, and then a guy with a black hoodie next to him pressed all the buttons without ever even looking up from his board. It felt like a ceremony to bring Aaliyah back from the dead. But once Julia Holter came on, I was like, “This sounds like a 6th grade piano recital” and left before it was even over. Festivals aren't supposed to be competitions, but fuck it—Solar Year won POP.

@ggguillermo