David Bash keeps his ear to the wind. As curator and emcee of the International Pop Overthrow – an annual showcase of pop and power pop bands that began in Los Angeles in 1997 – he has to pay serious attention to what’s happening in the world of music.
“We consider hundreds of bands each year,” he tells Westender. Bash focuses on unsigned acts from each of the 15-17 cities where the festival takes place, including locations across the USA, Vancouver, Toronto, Stockholm, and Liverpool. “I do mostly everything myself” – personally attending each chapter of the IPO – “although my girlfriend, Rina Bardfield, who is an aerospace engineer by day, somehow finds the time and energy to help me keep our website up to date and find bands online for me to audition.”
Bash and Bardfield rely on sites like Sonicbids, Bandcamp, ReverbNation, and SoundCloud to decide which bands are worthy. Still, as industrious as he is, when seeing Bash had booked The Top Boost to play this year’s Vancouver IPO, one could easily assume it was because the band had contacted him. A gloriously jangly, guitar-centric psych pop trio from New West, The Top Boost’s debut EP, Turn Around, came out just a few months ago, making it less than likely a Los Angeles-based music geek like Bash had heard them. So surely they were the ones who applied to the fest?
Nope! Bash contacted them out of the blue, says bassist/ vocalist Hunter Gogo. “I’m not sure how he heard us. We did get played on this one radio station - I think it’s Australian, a power pop radio station. But we got a message from him a few months ago. It sounded really interesting!”
The Top Boost – the new addition to the show that Bash is most keen to see live – is named for a channel on amplifiers that makes the “treble frequencies more prominent, and gives the music more of a bright sound,” Gogo explains. It’s a rather inspired gear geek reference, befitting their retro image and love for Rickenbacker 12-strings.
Another festival performer is North Vancouver’s elle-ectric – AKA Stephanie Walker – who makes ethereal, texturally rich music which she admits needing “a lot of words” to describe. “My favourite is 'indy pop magic,' or 'cinematic bedroom pop,' I guess! That’s a fun one.”
As elle-electric,Walker has played the IPO before and this year she’ll be performing at Girl’s Night Out, a showcase of female-fronted bands, Aug. 31 at the Fairview Pub.
There’s quite the range of styles on that one night alone, which features performances from emotive singer-songwriter Eden Fine Day, bouncy surf-pop artist Laurie Biagini, charismatic Duvallstar leader Siobhan DuVall, and punk-poppers Pill Squad, fronted by Tracy Brooks Carroll, formerly of The Hip Type.
Duvall’s streetwise, Chrissie-Hynde-meets-Stiv-Bators snarls and Brooks’ wry punk deadpan are about as far from elle-ectric’s gorgeous, feminine vocals as could be imagined, but the word “pop” does take in a pretty wide range of music, after all. The key is that, whatever style a band plays, their music has to be “melodic,” Bash explains, “whether it be more rock ’n’ roll based or more in line with singer/ songwriters.”
Other IPO regulars include power-pop powerhouse China Syndrome (whose leader Tim Chan also slings axe for Pill Squad), as well as Danny Echo, Gold Stars are for Suckers, Preston & Fletcher, and Edmonton Block Heater, among others.
But for people whose musical tastes are truly eclectic, taking in pop-punk as well as old school ‘70s R&B, the final act on the final night, Cass King & the Next Right Thing, may be the must-see.
Some may remember King leading a huge ensemble on David Bowie’s “Fame,” with Orchard Pinkish, during the Rickshaw Theatre’s David Bowie tribute a few months ago. King is also the force behind the theatrical SHINE: A Burlesque Musical, and fronts the sexual comedy duo the Wet Spots with her husband, John Woods (also guitarist for the Next Right Thing).
But she’s also a killer singer, as anyone who has seen her rip through Joe Jackson’s “I’m the Man” knows. It’s unclear whether King and her band will include that particular cover in their IPO set – Bash asks bands to focus on originals – but they’ll be debuting a new song, “Naked on the Dance Floor,” which King and Woods – finishing each other’s sentences – describe as “’70s up-tempo Joe Jackson, maybe with a little bit of the Knack. It’s about an actual party we attended, where the cops showed up.”
Another new song, “Window Shopping,” was inspired by the legacy of Prince, and comes closer to King’s Wet Spots material, about a chance encounter in a grocery store that finds two strangers “looking at each other like we’re already fucking.”
After all, any good festival needs at least a smidgen of sex.
The International Pop Overthrow comes to the Fairview Pub Aug. 31 – Sept. 3. For more information and a full listing of bands, see InternationalPopOverthrow.com
