There are also festivals aimed at
particular subgenres of the notoriously
fractious metal scene: Quebec Deathfest,
for instance, is exactly what it sounds like,
while Messe des Morts caters to black
metal fans.
That’s a lot of angst and aggression
for one province – and doesn’t even
begin to address the local shows put on
throughout the year in dingy bars in big
cities and small towns alike.
So how did we get here?
Quebec has historically had a strong rela-
tionship with music that’s just outside the
mainstream. During the ‘70s, the province
was home to one of the most rabid fan-
bases for progressive rock. (It’s no won-
der Pink Floyd were playing a massive
stadium, not just an arena, when Waters
hocked his famous loogie).
While the indie explosion of the
early 2000s got international attention,
Montreal has long been a hub for more
aggressive sounds. In a recent interview
about Montreal’s music scene, Murray
Lightburn, singer for the decidedly
non-metal indie band The Dears, told
Canadian Musician that if you go into
any of the city’s numerous jam spaces,
you’re more likely to hear blast beats and
chugging, high-gain riffs than dreamy,
reverb-drenched guitars and keys.
Nick Farkas, who in his job as VP
of concerts and festivals for promotion
behemoth Evenko ultimately decides the
lineups for ‘77 and Heavy, says that for
several years, the Montreal stop for the
Warped Tour (informally dubbed “punk
rock summer camp”) was usually among
the top two or three in terms of ticket
Evenko’s Nick Farkas
Voivod
sales. That festival’s vagabond days came
to an end in 2018 when it was announced
that, after 24 years of bringing snotty
angst to teens across North America,
Warped would skateboard no more. (This
year, Warped will be held as dual two-day
long events in Atlantic City, NJ and Moun-
tain View, CA).
With four major festivals at least
partially dedicated to heavy music where
some major North American cities have
now been left with none, the love in
Quebec is palpable. What’s less obvious is
the why of it all, and whether the scene,
steeped in history as it is, can sustain this
kind of crowding.
“We were the lumberjacks in the sense
we paved the way; we cut the trail down,”
says Michel “Away” Langevin. “We’ve al-
ways been hugely respected.”
If anyone is qualified to talk about
the roots of Quebec metal, it’s Langevin.
The drummer for long-running thrash
act Voivod, Langevin is the only member
who has been a constant since the band’s
formation in 1982. Over that time, he has
witnessed (and been actively involved in)
the conception, birth, and maturity of the
province’s metal scene.
According to him, the bands playing
with Voivod in the early ‘80s were super
into the new wave of British heavy metal
bands who sprouted up in Black Sabbath’s
wake – bands that, while super heavy,
still had a major pop sensibility like Judas
Priest and Iron Maiden. But the sounds of
the next generation of ultra-aggressive
acts like Venom would soon begin to filter
in through word of mouth.
“When we started coming out and
playing Montreal, we realized there were
no bands like us here,” he says. “Before
1985, it was hard to find real heavy metal
bands in Quebec.”
That was soon to change. By the
early ‘90s, technical metal was on the rise
in Montreal. Today, the local scene is root-
ed in death metal bands like Kataclysm
and Anonymous or the mathcore of Ion
Dissonance.
“The thing is, it’s really respected
internationally as being metal that’s su-
per technical,” says Langevin. “I can’t really
say where it’s from but I know in our case,
prog rock was huge in Quebec in the ‘70s
and had a huge impact on everybody in
Voivod.”
While becoming respected in Que-
bec metal circles requires a nerd-like
devotion to instrumental supremacy,
punk has never been that way, so it
makes sense that there’s little crossover
between the two scenes. For a few years,
Heavy Montreal tried to curate lineups
that mixed the two genres, but eventual-
ly gave up, splitting the punks off to their
own day. But the development of the two
scenes has not been purely parallel, with
some occasional cross-pollination. Over
at Rockfest, it wasn’t unusual for Anthrax
to play on the same stage and to the
same crowd as Sum 41.
So the question is, why have genres
C A N A D I A N M U S I C I A N 39