NOBRO blows up the headlining spot at the M For Montreal Showcase on Wednesday, 6 March 2024.

La Sécurité, Hippie Hourrah, Winona Forever, Housewife, and Sasha Cay declare war on New York bagels.

The New Colossus Festival played out from March 6-10, highlighting new sounds in underground music from here, there, and all points foreign and abroad.

New York City is a destination that international acts are going to set their sights on regardless. But the stakes were raised as the fest has fit itself snugly into the week before SXSW, attracting bands from all over who wanted to hopscotch through town on their way to more storied Texas festival.

The New Colossus Fest wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and you wouldn’t either, trading between showcases at dives and clubs dotting an electric neighborhood in one of the most exciting cities in the world.

Sights, sounds, food, drink, and lodging if you can afford it.

Let’s go see some music!

Baker Falls, a relative newcomer on the Lower East Side club scene, played host to a bunch of Canadians feuding over bagels. We don’t know either. It was a dark and stormy night, but all was right with the world when the dulcet tones of indie rock signed, sealed, and delivered from North of the Border kicked in. Shout out to M For Montreal for showcasing. Extra points for tackling a Wednesday night like a goddamn champ.

You didn’t have to be a Montreal local to get selected for a feature spot, but it didn’t fucking hurt your chances, you know?

A four-piece jangly dream pop outfit with plaintive country notes took the stage as the rain outside began to fall in earnest. Sasha Cay in front of a room full of wet dogs. The fronter reeled off stage banter that elaborated on intra-Montreal bagel feud discourse. Not the sort of thing that local yokels were going to immediately grasp, but it was an evening for cultural learnings of Montreal for make benefit glorious nation of Canada. The band recently dropped a live-ish album, called Live at You First. The album was recorded at a studio called You First, which would normally qualify it as a studio album, not a live album. But there are no rules north of the border.

The three-piece Housewife self-identified as angst rockers rocking angstly. Fair enough. But there were plenty of candy-coated, pop-forward moments to go with the social and political commentary animating the lyrics. Out of Toronto, not Montreal, which is 100% allowed at M For Montreal because the showcase is just about having a rocking good time (though points deducted for a crowd of musicians not being able to muster up a spare capo when the Housewife guitarist was in need). This band just met their drummer on the day of the show? Must be a new drummer. No indication that the old drummer was murdered and hastily buried in a shallow grave somewhere in the forgotten glades of Rouge National Urban Park. But no evidence to the contrary either.

Medium tempo bouncy lounge rock was the order of the day from Vancouver’s Winona Forever. The four-piece used every centimeter of the three mics set up in front of the two guitarists and one bassist. By the process of elimination, does the drummer have a terrible voice? Evidence of absence is absence of evidence. Please refer to the logical principle at work above in the case of the murdered Housewife drummer. Extra points for the patented forehead-to-forehead stage choreography, which demands no further description – you’ll have to see it live. The band has a new album on the way called Sound Argument. Check it out.

A psychedelic shangri-la in five parts: a double stack of keys, an electric 12-string, an acoustic guitar, medieval lute-looking bass,  and drums for kilometers. It’s Hippie Hourrah. Is that a Canadian spelling of ‘hurrah’? Extra points straight out of the gate to this band for the French lyrics. Shades of Evolfo, The Paperhead, The 13th Floor Elevators. This was a band of jammers jamming jam music. Not the stratosphere soloing type à la Phish or Garcia Peoples. It was more of a subterranean excavation, building the jam from the bottom up, with krautrock accents that strung the energy out to infinity and beyond. The crowd was digging it, and the band wanted to play one more in their final minute (the great unbudgeable fest schedule), but didn’t have a 60-second song in their oeuvre. So they called it a night.

Dance punk, through and through. It’s La Sécurité, a five-piece out of Montreal – if you forget the acute accents, you’re a total tourist. Pop-forward rhythms, quickie guitar noodling, and a ballsy fronter mixing in with the pit is all you need to get the room moving.

Holy shit, NOBRO rocks. We’re not reinventing the wheel here – the four-piece of non-bros kicked out punk jams with fast licks and hummable refrains. The fronter asked the crowd to join in a “I don’t give a fuck” ing-along, and the crowd mostly obliged. Shades of The Monkees meet The Bangles meet a broken bongo. Or at least the bassist/bongo player said the bongo rig was broken. She kept smacking those skins anyway and, if it sounded off, nobody gave a fuck. Their latest album Set Your Pussy Free (with runaway single “Let’s Do Drugs”) dropped late 2023.

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