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Welcome to London, Ontario, a short drive down the 401 from that other city where most of the action goes down. London has its occasional moments in the sun though, and one of them takes place this weekend: for the third year, the city’s LOLA Festival (London Ontario Live Arts) showcases (mostly) Canadian musicians and artists for (mostly) free!

2006 featured Tokyo Police Club, Cuff The Duke, Born Ruffians, and others doing their thing on Dundas St. for a handful of dedicated fans who braved the cold and the rain. 2007 included artists such as Final Fantasy, The Constantines, Grizzly Bear, and Akron/Family, with the stage having moved to downtown’s Victoria Park and the date moved a little closer to the summer months, in hopes of warmer weather.

The 2008 festival is now upon us, kicking off last night and running through the weekend. It promises plenty of performances from up-and-coming Canadian bands and LOLA first-timers, including We Are Wolves, Holy Fuck, Plants and Animals, and the weekend’s lone non-Canadian representative, The Drift. We’ll be bringing you coverage and photos all weekend, which is allllmost as good as actually being there, right? Close? Maybe?

Before diving into the free shows at Victoria Park on Friday afternoon, LOLA combined forces with Dirty Disko to throw a launch party that brought electro duos Thunderheist and Jokers of the Scene to the Up on Carling stage.

After plenty of build-up, Thunderheist finally took the stage well after midnight. I’d seen their set at V-Fest two weeks earlier, and would’ve written a review that raved (pun intended?) even more than Kat’s did. Their brand of electro hip-hop sounds great enough on record, but when transformed into a live show setting, it’s exponentially more electric. Even more exciting was this set taking place late at night in a packed club rather than at 5:00 pm in a sparsely populated outdoor tent; if nothing else, it would certainly make it easier to get into lyrics like “it’s okay to get drunk, get wild” and “where the afterparty at??” And London, somewhat surprisingly, has a penchant for getting wilder than girls on spring break at this sort of show, as past appearances by Crystal Castles and Shout Out Out Out Out have proved. Needless to say, I had pretty high hopes for the set, and Isis and Grahmzilla didn’t disappoint.

Performing without her backup dancers (a trio of girls dubbed, correct me if I’m wrong, the Swagger Crew?), Isis attempted to make up for all that missing energy herself, strutting across the stage, bringing up audience members to dance with her, and even spending the entirety of show-stopping closer “Jerk It” in the crowd (after which she returned to the stage and accused me of grabbing her ass… it was the guy next to me, I swear!). With no full length album released yet, only a handful of Thunderheist’s tracks - “Bubblegum,” “Suenos Dulces,” and of course “Jerk It” - inspired any sort of recognition from the crowd, but “Little Booty Girl,” “Nothing To Step To,” and a handful of others sounded so good that a Thunderheist full-length, if one is indeed in the works, has become one of my most anticipated releases.

It’s always hard to follow up an “opening act” as energetic and dynamic as Thunderheist, especially since Jokers of the Scene are less of an immediate stage presence: just two dudes from Ottawa spinning extremely tight party music. And over the course of their set, the club did thin out considerably. Those who stuck around, though, kept the party going on the dancefloor to the sounds of Jokers of the Scene’s electro-disco mixes. They even incorporated their opener’s single into their set, dropping their remix of Thunderheist’s “Jerk It,” (available to stream on their myspace) which replaces the in-your-face riff of the original with a chill synth backing line that it’s hard not to bob your head to.

By the time JOTS’s set wound down well after 2:00, everyone was leaving Up on Carling sweaty and satisfied, having witnessed a show that kicked off London’s most exciting weekend of the year for independent music in style. The bar’s been set high. Time to see now if the rest of the weekend’s acts can match it, or, dare I say, raise it?!

Coming up tomorrow: Day 2, including We Are Wolves, Do Make Say Think, The Drift, Bocce, and more.

(Photos by Lulu Wei)

Posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 11:30 am by Luke Adams and is filed under Concerts & Events.

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