Get your weekend on.

    Thought I would do a short blog about our most recent excursion, that consisted of two awesome shows in Montreal, and at SCENEfest.

    First off, it was the maiden voyage (for us) in our new van. We we're trying to think of names for it, Mike wanted to name it Maestro (because it's supposedly keeping us on time) I wanted to name if after a variety of different dutch people from our high school that have the word "van" in there last name. But what's in a name? Who cares about that? Regardless it felt really good to have a real sort of "band van". Before we were always touring around in a minivan, and we got to the point where we have way way more gear and stuff than will fit in the minivan.  Maybe only in my own head, but I felt we reached some sort of milestone.  I've always thought well REAL bands have big vans. And in some sense I'm always going through that, I vividly remember thinking before, real bands have merch, real bands have albums out, real bands have managers and labels etc. Now that we have all that, I'm currently thinking REAL bands have booking agents and U.S. Labels.  Until then folks, we're stuck in some kind of band purgatory.  Never the less, for us there was a sense of serenity in hanging out in the old girl. Picture of our new heat for you above!

      Anyways, the shows....were really solid! Not that we've ever had a bad in time Montreal, but this time was really cool as well. The line up consisted all of bands that always seem to be on my newsfeed, so it was good to see all these bands in real life. Chasing Amee was the first band in Montreal and I definitely liked it. They had a couple kind of bluesier rock songs and then some pop punk, someone told me the bluesier stuff was newer.  I hope so because I enjoyed it more, and the guys were really really cool. Definitely hoping to play with them again. 
   We were on next and it was the first time performing most of the set in Montreal and I think it went over really well. We did end up pulling out an older song, Golden, but I suppose when I go to shows there's only so much new stuff I'm hoping to here before they get into the more recognizable stuff. But dear God are we all just so stoked for the day we no longer have to play Golden.
    After us it was The Artist Life and MuchMusic's new favourite band These Kids Wear Crowns. The Artist Life kind of walks a weird line, they just finished doing a tour with Stung Out and Face to Face, but somehow also seem to do really well on bills with much poppier bands like These Kids, and in the past The Stereos. Regardless that's awesome for them. They were really tight and the songs of there new album were good, and they were really nice dudes too. 
   After that was These Kids Wear Crowns who were really poppy and had the crowd bouncing beach balls and the like. Talked to them briefly and they seemed pretty cool and down to earth, which is cool, cuz they seem to be getting pretty famous and successful. Hope to play with them again for sure.
 Anyways, the show was awesome. What wasn't awesome was the driving in Montreal. First off the venue we always play in MTL (the underworld) is on the the third floor of a building and carrying merch bins and bass rigs up the stairs kinda bites. Whatever though, it works off the calories gained at Foufs after the show, gotta have a postive spin. But yea back to the driving, it took me ONE HOUR to go about 100 yards. Parked right by the venue but had to go down a couple one ways to get back and Jazzfest was in town so the streets were closed down. It sucked so badly. I've been kind of worried about what its going to be like driving in places like Brooklyn and Chicago later this summer but nothing will be worse than that, absolutely nothing. 


   After that we didn't get to get as fucked up as we generally would in Montreal because we had to be at scenefest the next day ( as did all the other bands). We ended up having to sleep for an hour or two in a parking lot in Cornwall and motor on back to Scene.

   I had been telling our new bass player for the past month how awesome Scenefest is and this year definitely didn't disappoint. The market square is always really happening and its always good to catch up with other bands that you don't get to see as much as you'd like to.  Also the weather this year was awesome, in past years it's rained like a mother fucker but this year it was dandy. Which was twice as dandy because we were on an outdoor stage. Anyways we were all really happy with how our set went. The stage we played at was packed and the new stuff went over really well, as well as our new motown covers, which kind of compliments the newer material which is kinda motowny itself. We had people climbing over fences to get in and it was fucking awesome! Huge thanks to everyone who came out, Scene is always one of the best days of the year. 


     Anyways that's that. You know you had a good weekend when your inbox is filled with new people following you on twitter, right? Right? Probably back in the day it was more like "Man, we had a good weekend, we sold like x amount of albums", but now, its twitter. Whatevs.


Hoping I didn't bore you, though I'm sure this was actually pretty boring. Just wait till our tour of the states. 


Jesse