Virgin Festival B.C. ’09, Day 2
At Deer Lake Park on Sunday, July 26

You'd be hard-pressed to deny that Sunday was the better day of B.C.'s edition of the Virgin Festival. That's a stone-cold fact that, oddly, didn't have anything to do with the lineup.

Saturday night's unexpected lightning storm may have been a more memorable way to cap the evening, but having headliner the Roots cancel their performance over safety concerns sort of took away from Mother Nature's captivatingly nightmarish light show. Sunday's skin-scorching heat got to be a bit much by midday, but at least all 12 of the afternoon's acts got to strut their stuff on Deer Lake Park's two stages.

Opening act Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros were decked out in all sorts of summer gear. Looking like he either dressed to beat the heat or had just rolled out of bed, vocalist Alex Ebert (aka Edward Sharpe) giddily pranced around barefoot and bare-chested with his long locks scrunched into a topknot, while the rest of his massive 11-piece band cluttered the stage with bells, organs, bongos, and other instruments. Sounding like Arcade Fire sipping on electric Kool-Aid, the troupe pumped out some epic indie jams in a compact 20 minutes.

The Manvils' hard-rocking performance on the main stage breezed by even quicker, forcing Carly Rae Jepsen to start ahead of schedule. Though the former Canadian Idol contestant started off a little shaky, pivoting awkwardly from side to side, it didn't take long for the petite performer to loosen up. Jepsen explained that the dub-inflected folk tune “Sweet Talker” was about a boy from her hometown of Mission who was much different from the guys in the festival crowd. “You city boys are all too pretty for me,” she said with a laugh before launching into the tune.

Concertgoers were sparse for the first few acts, but people really started to pile into the grounds by the time legendary hip-hop crew De La Soul hit the stage. Bounding across the floorboards to classic numbers like “Potholes in My Lawn” and “Me, Myself & I”, the trio had the crowd bumping to its eclectic blend of electro-funk and jazz loops. The group got its biggest cheers, however, when it invited the four girls in the crowd dressed up as shrubs on-stage to bust a move.

Jarvis Cocker's dancing wasn't as smooth as the bush people's. Wiggling his wiry frame and pumping his hips to the raucous beat of “Further Complications.”, the former Pulp singer looked absolutely ridiculous in the best possible way. “This is about when somebody digs something up and then falls in love with it,” he said of the self-deprecating number “Leftovers”, in which he describes himself as a dinosaur. Fittingly, the vocalist gave a shout-out to Mick Jagger, who was celebrating his 65th God knows where, and even managed to get Deer Lake to sing “Happy Birthday” in honour of the elderly rocker.

Whatever Future of the Left was singing about, it definitely wasn't as cheerful. Andy Falkous nearly burst the bulging veins in his neck while shrieking out bizarre lyrics about couples eating sausages or how he worries about how dry his ball sac is. Even better was when Falkous sarcastically sneered “Colin is a pussy, a very pretty pussy,” over a punishingly terse, staccato bass line, in “Manchasm”.

Sonic Youth started out as manic as Future of the Left, launching into the full-throttle punk rager “Sacred Trixter”, but eventually eased into a set that saw them screwing around most of the time. Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore prolonged spaces between songs with washes of feedback and assorted six-string noises, but it got old pretty quick. The aging alt-rockers dropped a couple of classics, like the gloriously dissonant “Silver Rocket”, but couldn't maintain the momentum.

Thankfully, the Thermals kicked things into high gear with their curt power-pop tunes. The Portland trio didn't have much to say, nor did it get much time, but getting the audience to clap along to its feel-good fuzz-pop spoke volumes.

Metric singer Emily Haines spent a good chunk of time prefacing the synth ballad “Gimme Sympathy” by telling people to follow their dreams, just like she had. “Being in a band is about being best friends,” she said, before adding: “And living the life you want.” Haines then danced around the stage like a two-stepping hunchback while her cohorts sported mile-wide grins. It was both heart-warming and dorky as hell.

Ben Harper and Relentless7 took the stage with a simple message. “We've come to play the blues,” Harper said to rapturous applause. Seated for most of the night, the musician wailed on his slide guitar as his new backing band pounded out a solid groove. “Never trust a woman that loves the blues,” he cried on the rollicking “Lay There & Hate Me”. A surprise rendition of Led Zeppelin's “Good Times Bad Times” found the combo digging deeper than 12-bar blues, while the tender ballad “Another Lonely Day” found the musician dipping into his own massive back catalogue.

Jamming well past sundown, Harper accomplished what the Roots couldn't do the night before: he closed out the day. There wasn't anything particularly flashy about his performance, especially compared with Saturday's bolts of lightning, but at least he had concertgoers focused on what was most important about the weekend: the music.