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Evolve...


peipunk

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Wow, what an amazing time. I'm not one to write a big review (at least not now while I feel utterly brain dead) but I'll briefly mention a couple of things about the weekend.

Steve Kimock Band: I think that this may have been my favourite Evolve set ever. I knew it was going to be good, but OH MY GOD, I was losing my mind.

Surprise Me Mr. Davis: A bit of a stumble to start the show; Nathan Moore breaks a string. Marc helps him change it between songs. Brad's guitar stops working- he is given another guitar. Then, Nathan breaks another string. Somewhat flustered, he is given another guitar. The boys then settle in (although there was a beautiful Poor Boy 2nd song in before the shit happened) and rip out my favourite song of the whole weekend- I Hate Love. I don't know many of their songs, but Rubber Ball was in there, and I was mesmerized as usual by the world class musicaianship. Awesome.

NOW........

I CANNOT UNDERSTAND THIS....

IT ABSOLUTELY INFURIATED ME BOTH NIGHTS....

Friday night Slowcoaster's set overlapped with Steve Kimock. We left Slowcoaster 30 minutes into their set and still missed the beginning of Steve Kimock.

Saturday night, Burt Neilson's set overlapped with SMMD. I left the Burt's 4 songs in (after epic versions of In The Belly and Down With The Sound) ran full speed to the main stage, where, I shit you not, there was about 40 people watching Surprise Me Mr. Davis. I nearly pulled out what little hair I have left. People gradually trickled over, but....

HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE MISSED BIG PARTS OF THE HEADLINERS BECAUSE OF OVERLAPPING SETS BETWEEN REALLY GOOD BANDS....

But the bands only play until midnight??? Is this necessary??

Wassabi was given what was BY FAR the best timeslot of the weekend. That's all I'm saying about that.

The DJ after Kimock was AWESOME....and then DJ Harry drove us back to our campsite by doing a 15 minute remix of Push It to start his set.....????

Weather was great for the weekend, but I guess the rain that came right before Friday really messed the place up....there was a lot of muddy quagmires, big tractor ruts, and a lot of rough terrain. I also overheard people saying that the entire stage had slid in the mud Thursday night and had to be rebuilt on Friday.

Overall, we had an amazing weekend, Saturday was so hot that we went to the beach for the afternoon...it was great but I'm sorry I missed Fat Jebus. All of Green sounded the best I have ever heard them Friday night too. What else.....oh, the Gratefully Deadicated Sound System was a very welcome late night sanctuary for a lot of people...the tent was ROCKING until the wee hours.

For reference, this was a great deal smaller than last years Evolve; THIS IS ONLY MY PERSONAL ESTIMATE, but I thought that there was about 5000 people at last year's Evolve, close to 2000 at Shoreline and I'm guessing about 3000 at this year's Evolve. Any corrections to these guesses would be welcome.

I hope people don't think I'm being a whiny bitch, I had an AWESOME weekend and there was some amazing music, but I just can't understand why these great bands have to compete with each other. Other than that, thank you Evolve for bringing some world class entertainment so close to home for me, and I hope you continue to do so.

AND NEXT TIME LETS SEE SOME MORE ONTARIO FOLKS!!!

cheers

cb

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I did manage to catch some of Themasses...forgot to mention that I thought they were great.... they played Heart of the Sunrise by Yes!!! Prog-rock forever, baby.

Also had a great time hanging out with Chrosie and had a surprise appearance by Pootie Tang and his lady. Uncle Funguy and Northern Wish and I were lapping up what seemed to be the private performance of Poor Boy. I also forgot to mention that Summer of my Fall was a socks-rocker. Jesus!! Guigsy, where were ya buddy??

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Overlapping sets do suck, but with a lineup of that magnitude there will always be something good missed. You're too much of a big fan there punk!

I missed nearly all of the BNB set to catch the SMMD music, but it was worth it.

Great to see you out there Punk, Chris, Rosie- lets get some more upper canada representation next time.

I thought overall that the site wasn't great, but hopefully they keep it for more than one year and can add to all of the work they have done. I agree with your numbers there Chris although someone mentioned to me that this weekend was near 3500, and the count for last year was 7000+ but I don't really know.

I guess the one big selling point, was the gorgeous swimming area with the water flowing down through pools with small waterfalls. It was like a dream.

Kimock and SMMD fortunately for me, and for my crew were enough to make the entire event worth it.

Also very great to have that GDSS in a tent late night, so we were all warm, dry and able to see each other. There were more than a few moments that I might as well have been in my living room with all of the familiar faces.

Sean

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Don't get me wrong buddy; I would have paid the $100 to see just those 2 sets. I just felt a bit frustrated for the people who probably didn't intend to miss the headliners, but were too baked and caught up in the Slowcoaster and Burt Neilson to even realize the other stuff was going on. All in all, I still have a BIG thumbs up.

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Saturday night, Burt Neilson's set overlapped with SMMD. I left the Burt's 4 songs in (after epic versions of In The Belly and Down With The Sound) ran full speed to the main stage, where, I shit you not, there was about 40 people watching Surprise Me Mr. Davis. I nearly pulled out what little hair I have left. People gradually trickled over, but....

HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE MISSED BIG PARTS OF THE HEADLINERS BECAUSE OF OVERLAPPING SETS BETWEEN REALLY GOOD BANDS....

This would have killed me. However, if the LIVE music is being canned at Midnight, it seems that is the cause of cramming the live bands into each other. Doing that in favour of DJ's really sucks.

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This whole DJ/ Band debate has of course gone on for years with Evolve, it really comes down to the two personalities running and presumably investing in the festival Jim and Joe (although Jonas was involved this year and he comes more from the band camp). The completely arbitrary decision to switch over to dj's at midnight has always stunned me. With the additional challenge of overlapping band sets I would have been pissed particularly because Slowcoaster and Burt are two of if not our finest Canadian jambands. But how can you compete with Kimock and Davis. What's wore is that for the most part the bands have travelled much further distances for their sets versus the DJ's who apart from headliners are almost all local. Worse still it's always been my understanding that there is an equal division of the budget between bands and dj's which always made me wonder whether some tweeker yigget who's only played whatever they call raves in Nova Scotia these days gets payed as much as a band with say four guys in it. That said I bet a lot of the dj's play for little or nothing. Further there is the whole issue of people being kept up all hours of the night until 10:30 in the morning so that three tweakers can liquid dance. None of it makes much sense. I just hope Jungle Brothers came out of the DJ budget cause that was a bad call from the getgo. Sounds like they didn't come close to coming proper.

only one of them showed up, they were late, they had no DJ and played only from cd's with lots of long pauses between songs and technical difficulties
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Guigsy, where were ya buddy??

:(

Also very great to have that GDSS in a tent late night, so we were all warm, dry and able to see each other. There were more than a few moments that I might as well have been in my living room with all of the familiar faces.

man, i love that guy.. every year he saves hundreds of hippies from losing their minds. i always wished they'd get him for ctmf, to play through the nite like that.

glad it was a good time.. too bad burt and smmd overlapped, that probably woulda stung me as those would be the 2 bands i'd be most looking forward to... but no doubt smmd turned it out once they got things sorted up there.. too bad about the rough start, though.

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