Pink Mountaintops / Faunts / Jr. Bloomsday

It was the night 50,000-plus suddenly Stanley Cup Final bound Oilers fans took to the streets; outside the relocated Sidetrack, country singer Corb Lund was wearing a motorcycle helmet and shooting fireworks into the clouds. During all this, the fabulous Faunts delivered a sound my babbling drunk dad compared to Alan Parsons Project. Quiet, you. Yet they’re both dreamy, full of smoky Brownian motion. Jr. Bloomsday, meanwhile had sexbot precision and kept the floor packed, but the time machine doors opened suddenly and there were the Pink Mountaintops. The levels of nostalgia Vancouver’s Steve McBean oozed would require not just a mathematician to calculate, but a freakishly connected one. Let’s start with the ’90s and his former band Jerk With a Bomb, to whom he ultimately nodded in song. Hairy McBean looked like everyone did in ’93 (i.e., Jesus Christ), channelling a ’90s-style ’60s and ’70s nostalgia with his giant psychedelic band. Told you this would get trippy. But two drummers! Songs like "Cold Criminals” and "I Fuck Mountains” got all the androgynous front-rowers splashing in their own juices, scarcely realising the social-worker advocacy at work here. The blood we were splashing in comes from real heart. We all fell hard for cherubic Amber Webber, too, whose name sounds like it’s underwater and had such living-room ease on stage. Despite the Mountaintops’ steam-engine rock power, the casualness and equality of things gave me the biggest smile. There was singing along, clapping, wicked guitar riffs and a general sense of belonging. You do like those things, right?