“You still got it!” shouted one wildly apperceive fan after The Pursuit of Happiness blasted Westfest with a whole lotta’ Love Junk last night outside of Tom Brown Arena.

Opening with cuts “Hard to Laugh”, “Ten Fingers”, “Man’s Best Friend”, “Beautiful White” and “Walking in the Woods” off their Canadian indie-rock classic, right here…right now, two things are as clear as Crystal Pepsi:

  1. 30 years on and tunes from that album still tear up the place like a pack of crazed chocolate-fed toddlers in a sandbox
  2. TPOH sound like they’ve been performing daily since 1988 instead of only a handful of shows since the mid-90s

 

Yuppers, they were that damn good.

It’s been awhile since Moe Berg and bandmates Dave Gilby, Kris Abbott, Brad Barker and Renee Suchy have played Ottawa, the last time being a set over at Barrymore’s for the music hall’s 1-year anniversary back in 1996.

“As you could guess, we don’t get out much anymore,” quipped Berg to one of Westfest’s largest crowds in their 15 years of free summer shows.

This was just one of the anniversary’s being celebrated that evening.

Love Junk rolled into its 30s this year, though judging from the vocal audience the tunes are just as important to them these days as they were when they were helping shape their youth back in ’88.

Berg may have been taken aback by the amount of fans that came out to rock the west-end of O-town last night, mentioning a few times how grateful the band was for such a turnout. After all, outside of two cuts on a 2005 hits compilation, the group hasn’t released any new material or toured frequently in over two decades.

Fans hungry for something, anything, brought their appetites and were rewarded not just with a rock buffet kinda’ night. Berg dropped that a reissue of Love Junk was on the way shortly with goodies like live cuts and never-released demos.

While that album made up much of the night, the band did bust out some deeper cuts like “Shave Your Legs”, “I Like You” and “Pressing Lips”. Abbott and Berg traded guitar licks, with the former showing she still can pump out those power chords despite her recent turn as a folk-musician alongside Dee McNeil (The Strap-Ons) as Kris+Dee. Having played a honey-sweet acoustic set earlier in the day, Abbott was now clad in rocker-leather and you weren’t getting a warning shot.

She was ready…she didn’t have to aim and, damn right, she was on fire!

Hell, the entire band was nuclear hot. Gilby pounded the skins for that drum-blast beat on “Waling in the Woods”, Suchy shook that tambourine like a whole stack of Polaroid pictures and Barker’s bass wrapped it up and slapped a 100% Pure Awesome Sauce label on it. If you were one of the few that brought some lawn chairs out to this show I hope you also brought a couple of extra feet of elevation to rest it on. Many had waited years for this and if TPOH was only back for a one-night stand then we were going to one-night stand all night!

None-Love Junk tracks like “Gretzky Rocks”, “The Downward Road” and “Two Girls In One” showed the band that this wasn’t just a one-album crowd. “Cigarette Dangles” had Festival Producer Elaina Martin wrecking a patch of park, elatedly dancing it up on the sidelines.

Of course, it was “I’m An Adult Now” that brought the biggest wave of nostalgic rush over the audience, many who couldn’t stake that claim when they first heard it but some of us sure feel it now.

“We’re going to play a whole set of new songs,” joked Berg earlier in the evening. That playful banter between tunes would give everybody a chance to catch their breath.

You know, if you ask this journalist and many of those gathered for another special night at Westfest, new cuts would have been jusssssst fine. How about a new album, TPOH?

“We hope it doesn’t take so long to get back here again,” Berg said.

Again, no argument from us!

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