From Hip-Hop to Folk, Punk to Psychedelia—Ottawa Bluesfest Had It All
Across two weekends and four stages at LeBreton Flats, Bluesfest stitched together everything from Swedish psych-rock to Nunavik throat-singing-inflected pop, hip-hop royalty to Quebec’s strangest new rock export — and I was there with a camera for most of it.
The festival kicked off Thursday, July 9 with a lineup that set the tone for how wide this year’s net would be cast. Over on the RBC Stage, Alabama’s Jessie Murph brought raw, genre-blurring Southern grit with something to prove to the main stage ahead of the night’s country headliner, while across the grounds at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Ottawa Stage, Grammy-winning jazz-rap alchemists, Digable Planets worked through their Blowout Comb 30th-anniversary set. Melbourne’s Lloyd Spiegel, all road-worn, technically dazzling blues craftsmanship, opened the LeBreton Stage tent before Sweden’s masked and mythical GOAT took that same stage as headliner.
Friday, July 10 belonged to the heavier end of the bill. Ottawa’s own F!TH – all early-2000s hard-rock snarl – opened the RBC Stage before hip-hop’s stoned, swaggering originators, Grammy-nominated and Walk of Fame-enshrined Cypress Hill brought three decades of Los Angeles history to the same stage, setting up for the night’s headliner: Limp Bizkit, nu-metal’s chaotic elder statesmen, still gleefully abrasive three decades in. On the Hard Rock Stage, Niagara’s My Son The Hurricane – a 12-piece brass-funk explosion, pure horn-driven chaos and joy – and The Simpson’s actor, Hank Azaria brought his earnest blues-rock side project, The EZ Street Band, keeping things loose before the main event.
Saturday, July 11 was arguably the most stacked day of the festival for genre range in a single afternoon. Montreal’s Kat Pereira brought her luminous, maximalist alt-electro-pop to the Hard Rock Stage, trailed later that night by Montreal’s own Patrick Watson, genre-defying orchestral art-pop as comfortable scoring arthouse film as headlining a main stage, whose set closed that stage. Meanwhile the RBC Stage ran a hip-hop-to-country arc from Dallas’s BigXthaPlug – the city’s booming new heavyweight, unapologetically loud and street-forged – through to Mississippi’s HARDY, country’s snarling outlaw, arena-rock aggression wrapped in Nashville twang, as headliner. Meanwhile, the LeBreton Stage hosted Hawaii-rooted soul purist Ron Artis II and Cobourg’s riff-heavy garage rock icons, cleopatrick; while Halifax’s Mo Kenney’s quietly devastating East Coast indie-folk, and Kingston’s Tiny Horse’s giddy pop-country-folk rounded out the evening’s Barney Danson Theatre bill.
The first weekend closed Sunday, July 12 with a folk-and-hip-hop pairing on the RBC Stage – Ottawa-raised, Montreal-based Leif Vollebekk, hushed and poetic even on a festival stage, ahead of Denver’s stadium-sized folk-rock troubadours, The Lumineers; while Vancouver’s bbno$ – viral rap’s reigning class clown – headlined the Hard Rock Stage.
After the festival’s scheduled dark days, the second week opened Wednesday, July 15 with London’s 2000s pop royalty, Natasha Bedingfield, and Luton’s soulful UK pop-folk rising star, Myles Smith, setting up Conan Gray‘s headline turn on the RBC Stage, with his sharp-tongued, diaristic pop. Over at the Hard Rock Stage, the night belonged to the All-Star Women’s Blues Showcase – an all-women eight-piece powerhouse supergroup firing on all cylinders – celebrating the festival’s blues roots.
Thursday, July 16 leaned towards rock and punk. Sydney’s Royel Otis, sun-bleached and effortlessly cool, and Richmond, Virginia’s Lucy Dacus, literary and aching, built toward the cinematic, dust-blown indie folk of Lord Huron‘s headline set on the RBC Stage. Over on the Hard Rock Stage, the night ran a British-to-Californian arc: Liverpool’s Jamie Webster, working-class and anthemic; Essex’s Billy Bragg, folk-punk’s conscience, forty-plus years of sharp wit and sharper politics; and Orange County’s Social Distortion, punk royalty gravel-voiced and road-worn, closing it out. Over on the LeBreton stage, vintage soul revivalists Thee Sinseers took the headline slot.
And then there was Friday, July 17, when Saguney’s microtonal, dissonant, and thrillingly unpredictable breakout superstars, Angine de Poitrine, landed on the RBC Stage to bring the notably diverse and curious crowd into their orbit.
In the festival’s closing stretch on July 19, Bluesfest took the event for an all Canadian lineup to celebrate Ottawa’s 200th anniversary. Wakefield, QC’s rock and rollers, Rebelle, welcomed the early birds to the RBC Stage, while the loving folk of Kingston’s Savannah Shea took over the Barney Danson Theatre. Ottawa’s own LeFLOFRANCO, brought multicolored urban pop stitched with Kompa, trap, and reggae fusion to the Hard Rock Stage, while the Lebreton Stage welcomed the hauntingly atmospheric vocals of Nunavik’s Elisapie. Finally, closing out the RBC Stage was Saskatoon’s The Sheepdogs, whose revivalist classic-rock perfectly complimented the immortal Prairie rock of The Guess Who.
As Ottawa Bluesfest closes out another year, the city of Ottawa now looks ahead to September and the beginning of CityFolk; with scheduled headliners Alabama Shakes, Third Eye Blind and Alice Cooper.
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