Festival Overview: Messtival
August 10-11, 2012
Anagance, New Brunswick
Messtival, the yearly, rural New
Brunswick, mustache powered music festival returned this year with
it's 2 night debut. Last year was fun, but jam packing that much
entertainment into one day (and night) turned out to be pretty exhausting. This year the fun was spread out over a whole weekend.
Despite our mad dash out of the city Friday afternoon, we couldn't
get there fast enough to catch Morse Code Alphabet.
Fortunately, after setting up our tent
on a shady trail, there were still plenty of acts to catch, like the
Squirts and Kuato. Speakerscam and the Caravan kept the bass whubbing well into the night. A super psychedelic light show, projector onto,
above, and around the stage kept the eyes entertained all through the
night.
Waking up Saturday morning in the shade is an experience that Messtival has nailed over any other this summer. After waking at a decent hour, it's cheeseburgers for breakfast, and straight into the afternoon jams with Snailhouse and Hush Money (returning from last year as Garbageface, now a two piece and as politically charged as ever). There's a metric butt tonne of videos of all these amazing bands so don't forget to check the youtube page. The afternoon creeps on with Jonah Haché, Stephen Lewis & The Big Band of One and John Jerome & The Congregation backing a whole host of talented folks.
The rain during Rain Over St. Ambrose
does little to dampen spirits, and Coyote ushers in the evening with
lush indie pop songs in the vein of Hey Rosetta. Force Fields,
played their umpteen millionth set of the summer, once again crush
skulls with skills (and potentially poke out eyes with free CDs). To
make things even more dramatic, someone starts twirling fire around,
and we mean twirling, really fast, and lots of it.
In between all of this, of course, is lazer tag, live art, duck race winners (they all lost), costume
contest winners (they all won, in their own special way), video games
and beta max movies, and late night swims with a mermaid. Grand Theft
Bus pushes the tunes into the morning hours, riding a fantastic set
of super tight jams that probably exemplified the whole weekend. Wet
Grow Light and Gravity Strike keep the crowd alive long into the wee
hours, and Gordon Gets Lost provide the perfect backdrop of music to
wander back to the tent and get lost in the woods to, with trees that
seem to pulse with music and light out here in the middle of no
where.
Make sure to check out all out videos from just about all the Messtival artists!
You can check them out in the playlist below of check out the YouTube page here:
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