We feared for part of Thursday that it would turn into a storm in the evening. The downpour fell in the afternoon. The weather was still stormy on the Place des Festivals in the evening: in front of one of his biggest crowds in his career, Karkwa made it rain or shine.
We knew Karkwa was at the top of his game even before a single note was played. Before even setting foot in the city center, in fact. Last September, a few days before the release of its album In the Second, the group already demonstrated impressive cohesion at Esco. A few months later, at the MTelus, it was both compact and thin, airy and heavy.
That Karkwa was once again impressively confident on Thursday as part of the Francos was therefore self-evident. We had the proof from the first pieces, Ouverture, Perfecte on the screen and Le pyromane. We felt just a little difference, a little more freedom under the fingers of François Lafontaine and in the noisy bursts of Louis-Jean Cormier’s guitar.
On the microphone, the singer proved to be particularly solid. More in his element than Tuesday, during the tribute to Ferland, certainly. We have rarely heard him sing in such a powerful way, rocking his voice as much as during the first half of the show with its impressive energy.
What was left to do? Take advantage of it, indeed. Appreciate that the group, completed by Martin Lamontagne (bass), Julien Sagot (percussion, guitar) and Stéphane Bergeron, feeds our ears with its new songs (Nouvelle vague, Gravité, Dans la second, etc.) and comes out of its past of songs like Le meter (striking and cosmic!), forgete pas and Les chemins de verre. Then dare to play a song like Marie tu cries, which the quintet has rarely performed in concert, said Louis-Jean Cormier.
Karkwa has improved with time like good wine, even without playing for half of its 25 years of existence, its singer joked. It’s not even a pretension, it’s a fact. In the second, released last fall, is the group’s best album. Who has never played in such a united manner, fully mastering both his rock impulses and what we want to call his arty ambitions, for lack of a better term.
The observation was self-evident when we listened to him deploy and make a song like Dormir le jour roar, deliver an old song like Le coup d’état or his more recent pieces, several of which owe a lot to the pianist’s sonic madness. Francois Lafontaine
What more could we want at the end of this concert that Louis-Jean Cormier said ended with a pang in the heart, fearing never to find himself again on the Place des Festivals with these friends? That Karkwa, who invited his gaggle of children to go on stage at the very end to perform True Happiness, reserves another fate for himself, precisely. That this summer which will take the group to almost all the festivals in the province will make them want to warm up their amps for longer than expected.
