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Wintersleep put on what had to be one of my top three performances of the weekend - they were just fantastic! Two things that I didn’t know about Wintersleep before today:

1. They’re from Nova Scotia (see the provincial flag above)
2. They have scads of fans in British Columbia.

Despite an early set time, the fans came out in droves to watch the band’s set. I hadn’t seen a similar turnout on Friday or Saturday at the same time, yet everyone was packed tightly to see Wintersleep perform.

Singer Paul Murphy started out with some unfortunate news - apparently the band had been robbed the night before and all of their gear was stolen. Thanks to the kindness of fellow festival bands (among them Sam Roberts!) they were able to cobble together the appropriate instruments in time for their set. Oh, and they’d been awake since the morning before. Yet they were totally unfazed by either of these facts - they played like CHAMPS. They sounded so epic, so enormous.

They played a new song called Encyclopedia and finished off the set with a raucous performance of Orca. They left the stage and we thought they were done, but after a few minutes of mental “WIN-TER-SLEEP! WIN-TER-SLEEP!” chanting, they came back and announced that they hadn’t noticed they still had time to play one more song - and they chose Nerves Normal. Breath Normal. Terrific set from a terrific bunch of east coast guys!

Posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 5:18 am by Kat and is filed under Concerts & Events.

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