Purple City Day One: Hot Garbage, Andy & The Danny’s, Ancient Greece, Peace Within, and Panic Pixie
Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder) - Ancient Greece at Purple City
On the opening night of Purple City Music Festival, REVERIE Magazine took over Edmonton’s Freemasons’ Hall for a five-band showcase that moved from playful indie rock and psychedelic instrumentals to surf-punk, thrash and brooding post-punk. Beneath the venue’s canopy of vines and suspended lights, each set became progressively louder and more unruly, with two floors of stages to take in as much music as possible.
New-ish Edmonton band Panic Pixie opened the evening with an energetic hometown showing. While “C U Next Tuesday” emerged as a clear highlight, the band saved its most immediately recognizable moment for last, closing with a cover of Wet Leg’s “Wet Dream.” It was an effective choice for an early festival set, giving the gathering crowd something familiar to latch onto while introducing Panic Pixie as a promising new presence within Edmonton’s local scene.
Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder) - Panic Pixie at Purple City
Peace Within followed with a set of instrumental psychedelic post-rock. “Spacey jams before we get to real rock and roll,” the band joked, poking fun at the repetition inherent to their hypnotic arrangements by challenging the audience to “see if you can spot the difference between this song and the last one.” The self-deprecation worked because the band understood exactly what it was doing. Rather than relying on vocals or obvious hooks, Peace Within let each composition stretch out and gradually accumulate weight, encouraging the crowd to settle into the subtler shifts happening underneath.
Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder) - Peace Within at Purple City
For Andy Mulclair, known through the Montreal project knitting, the festival marked a return home to Edmonton with Andy & The Danny’s. Backed by Tim Biziaev of Lovelet, Montreal producer and multi-instrumentalist Sam Woywitka of SAMWOY, and a bassist who had reportedly learned the songs that same day, Mulclair tore through a collection of slacker-minded surf-rock tunes reminiscent of the sun-bleached Wavves and Best Coast era.
Despite the lineup’s last-minute nature, Andy & The Danny’s sounded remarkably locked in, as though its members had been the songs’ original players all along. Mulclair remained an endearing and conversational presence between songs, marvelling at staying in Edmonton’s Chateau Lacombe for the first time and enthusiastically shouting out the rest of the lineup, including “Hot Garbage, who is everything but.”
“Let’s shout out everyone here tonight who supports local music,” Mulclair added. It was a small acknowledgement that captured the spirit of the evening: bands, organizers and listeners coming together to propel a vibrant and active Edmonton music community.
Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder) - Ancient Greece at Purple City
Ancient Greece sent the room spiralling into chaos. Featuring Camille Jodoin-Eng, one of the masked dancers from Toronto industrial punk project Slash Need, the band thrashed with the scrappiness of an old-school metal group tearing through songs in someone’s garage. Their sound pulled from the speed and menace of Slayer while maintaining a scrappy punk-rock edge. Despite hailing from Toronto, there was something distinctly small-town Albertan about their energy: music seemingly designed for shotgunning beers, whipping your hair around and colliding with whoever happened to be standing beside you.
Camille climbed atop a speaker, incited the night’s first real mosh pit and delivered the kind of relentless “hairography” capable of inspiring both awe and jealousy. Ancient Greece didn’t simply play its songs; the band physically threw itself into them, turning the Freemason’s Hall into a makeshift basement show.
Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder) - Hot Garbage at Purple City
Hot Garbage closed the night after playing Calgary’s Palomino Smokehouse the evening before and, according to the Toronto band, there was already a clear winner between Alberta’s two largest cities.
“Edmonton goes harder than Calgary,” they declared.
On this particular night, it was difficult to disagree. Purple City has a way of drawing Alberta’s most passionate music fans into Edmonton, filling rooms with people willing to show up early for the opening acts, stay late for the headliners, and surrender themselves to the discovery. Surrounded by the Freemasons’ Hall’s vines, glowing lights and immersive projections, Hot Garbage plunged into the driving rhythms, dark psychedelia and motorik post-punk of their latest album, SPUN. Their brooding performance offered a fitting culmination to a bill that had become stranger and heavier with each passing set.
The evening also introduced Purple City’s new mascot, Penelope, a purple figure resembling Avril Lavigne crossed with McDonald’s Grimace. And we all know how REVERIE loves a mascot.
By the time Hot Garbage closed out the hall, it was a snapshot of the independent communities connecting Edmonton to Calgary, Montreal and Toronto, and a reminder that supporting local music is best experienced sweaty and loud.
