The angular jazzbo punk exercises that Quebec City art-punks VICTIME treated the late-night crowd at Townehouse Tavern to fit in perfectly with the neon forest environs decorating the stage, the jagged guitar lines and jazzbo drums fit perfectly with, if not responsible for, the black-lit flora that surrounded them. This is a band that distil artistic impulses into radical gestures that carve the space around them into an arty explosion.
Case in point: when one of guitarist Simon Provencher's guitars stopped working properly and wouldn't hold its patch, he insisted on playing the song anyway, simply incorporating it into his chord play, pushing it back in place on every downstroke after brief but reliable blasts of noise. By the end of the song, the guitar was hurtling through the air to the back of the stage, but it served its purpose in the moment.
He'd display a similar lack of concern for his instrument at the end of the set when he placed his guitar in front of the stage and tended his pedalboard like a mad scientist, while Laurence Gauthier-Brown left her bass and her mini-brute onstage to end the set shouting her lines in the pit, distorted feedback looping into oblivion, monitors be damned.
VICTIME
Up Here, Sudbury ON, August 17
BY Tom BeedhamPublished Aug 18, 2018