Sled Island is Alberta’s community compass

Mysterious doors are labeled with archaic phrases such as “ladies auxiliary room,” under which someone has helpfully scrawled on a piece of paper, “not a bathroom.” Thick red carpets lead you past dart boards, cases of dusty trophies, and pool tables bathed yellow by vintage Budweiser-brand canopies. The stage in the main room is backdropped with the Legion’s maple leaf crest and a Union Jack flag for good measure. The place is moody, liminal, and strangely cosy – like somewhere you once visited in a dream.

By the time you’re reading this, the cribbage tournament will have resumed. The punks will have retreated to their usual grassroots watering holes. Sled Island Music and Arts Festival – Calgary’s more intimate, rough-and-ready answer to The Great Escape or South By Southwest – is a temporary guest in this two-floor community space, one of its 19 venues this year, which was founded to assist with social reintegration after the First World War. Returning soldiers launched the Legion with the aim of bolstering community and connection – a safe space, essentially.

Calgary’s musical outsiders need safe-space hubs to congregate in too. And there’s something quite beautiful about eggpunk misfits, drag queens, and metalheads being welcomed into this setting that was intended for such a different population sect. There are many juxtapositions under the Legion’s roof: the tacked-up shuffleboard score sheets beside set times for bands named bugswallow and illuminati hotties. The stoic old women shifting cans of Dandy lager (a local brewery and Sled Island partner), totally indifferent to the radical change of clientele: namely, throngs of kids in CJSW shirts, repping the city’s beloved and enduring campus radio station.

It’s slightly absurd – but also makes total sense – to see this site repurposed for a Snõõper snow. Headlining Sled’s final full day of music, the Nashville act easily resemble the best punk band on earth, and you’d have a hard time convincing anyone in the room otherwise. Their goofy, galloping punk beats and the space-hopper stage energy of lead vocalist Blair Tramel are met with a constant undertow of stage divers and moshers. Full jugs of ice water sail over a tangle of writhing limbs. It’s pure carnage, the most giddily electric end to a festival you could ask for.

This isn’t a unique pairing, though – punk rock and veteran spaces. There are around 1,350 Royal Legion branches across the country, and south of the border you’ve got VFW halls, the US’s comparable community venues for veterans of foreign wars. I remember The Wonder Years explaining that VFWs were the only places that would let them host all-ages shows back when they were starting out.

It’s not just punk bands, of course; Sled spoils us with an incomparable lineup at the Legion across four days. The first act I see is fanclubwallet, out of Ottawa, whose songwriting was once diffident bedroom pop oriented around on dimestore children’s keyboards. Now it’s any-room pop, endlessly hooky, and any right-minded music fan should be spending time with it. When Michael Watson’s motorik drums jog in during opener “Cotton Mouth”, vocalist Hannah Judge surveys the scene with a half smile that validates the feel-good magic in the room and kicks off a set that is so consistent, tight, and melodic that, in that moment, there’s no other band I’d rather be watching.

fanclubwallet warm the stage for feeble little horse, the first night headliner, and surely the oddest, most compelling band to float to the top of that whole Sonic Youth guitar attacks but keep it around 2 mins x glitchy video game-core stew. It’s their first time in Canada, they explain, and the first show they’ve played since the release of their new record, bitknot, which pops off just as much as older-school favourites like “Freak” with its overwhelming slime-wall of fuzz.

Friday night, conversely, is hip hop night, where local up-and-comers and international heroes are just a staircase apart. Calgary MC Bijaan tells us that no genre is better for storytelling than hip-hop. And, after getting the crowd to be his sound technician during a protracted on-stage line check (turns out he doesn’t do sound checks as a rule), billy woods proceeds to demonstrate.

New York’s abstract, elusive rapper of the moment is one of the acts hand-picked by this year’s guest curator, the LA-based experimental hip-hop trio clipping., along with local legends Cartel Madras, and a dozen others. Every edition of Sled has a guest curator that chooses maybe 10% of the lineup, and glancing down the list over the last 19 years gives a good impression of how the festival has evolved – from Pavement’s Scott Kannberg and Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna in earlier years to the increasingly experimental picks we’re seeing today. It was Flying Lotus in 2017, I’m told, that really helped the festival slide out from under its indie rock reputation and expand its MO.

But throughout its evolution, Sled hasn’t moved even an inch away from supporting homegrown acts and prioritising DIY culture. From the local artists designing the limited-run prints on sale at the ‘Sled Village’ HQ, to its partnerships with organisations around the city – the Eighty Eight and Dandy breweries, record stores such as Sloth, music mags such as REVERIE, various community spaces, and the CJSW station, which hosts in-studio sessions across the week, to name a few. (And as far as corporate sponsors go, Servus Credit Union, to their credit, come to the Legion on Friday night armed with boxes and boxes of green doughnuts that they’re giving away for free on account of their logo being a green circle.)

But I’m more so talking about the many undercard adventures Sled allows you to embark on. Black Country, New Road are over from the UK to headline the city’s elegant Palace Theatre, opened in 1921 and designated a national historic site in the 90s. BCNR are the only British act on the entire bill, and there’s a serious buzz about it. They’ve never been here before, and bands of that level from abroad seldom pass through Cowtown. But I can see them any time, and have many times, so I head over to Loophole Coffee Bar in what feels like a no-man’s-land part of the city.

This unassuming little one-storey coffee shop with primitive collage art on the walls, a festoon-lit deck, and a dingy back room is dwarfed by skyscraping condo blocks that serve the city’s oil-and-gas industry population. (More Calgary juxtapositions.) Etched on the door in chalk are the names of the bands playing tonight – G.U.S.H.; Fionavair; Pinball, 1973; Often Wrong – and then below that, by way of clarification, “ROCK MUSIC.” A dish cloth pinned to the wall has a $340 price tag, which, given the exchange rate right now, isn’t half bad.

As events and bills increasingly pride themselves on being genreless, it’s actually refreshing that Sled organises its stages by vibe – just loose enough but still logical, meaning you can post up in one place for hip hop, another for electronic, another for the Mint Records showcase – the legendary Vancouver label that brings flagship indie rock oddballs like Heaven for Real and Knitting into town for its annual must-attend afternoon. Or, if you want the genre spread, the best option: you have to get out there and zigzag across the city.

Tonight at Loophole, though, it’s “ROCK MUSIC,” which is actually code for punk + noise. Pinball, 1973 are somewhere near the frontline of the loosely organised ‘prairie emo’ genre, mixing instrumental math exercises with heart-on-sleeve yelling. G.U.S.H. before them sound massive: in a landscape of bubblegrunge in-crowders, they’re more like chewing-tobacco-grunge, doing their own thing earnestly and viscerally.

But the show is stolen by the out of town ticket: Fionavair. Seyjii Schultz’s exciting, urgent songs don’t sound like any one thing. You might call it jazz-punk, but not the Maruja or Squid variety. There are eerie spoken word sections with chord clusters that live up to her Slint shirt. There are frustrated saxophone scribbles. In a way, it’s the streamlined, fucked-up, down-home alternative to Black Country, New Road’s Palace Theatre baroque-ing a mile across town. Fast, arty, cool – and very Montreal.

If Fionavair are the quintessential Montréal band, what components define the Calgary band?

Jed Arbour moved here after attending/falling in love with Sled Island, plays stormy, visionary art-rock that lands like Truck Violence x Modest Mouse x Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and recently got kicked in the head by a horse. That’s pretty Calgary.

“The concussion lady said I’m trying to find myself in dream space,” they share in between experimental, choppy pieces led by two bass guitars whose chest rumbling intensity moves from jarring and invasive to comforting and addictive. “Isn’t Sled Island just so fucking magical for no explainable reason?” Arbour asks, inadvertently giving us a partial answer.

Another Calgary favourite is Dial Up. You could call them a supergroup, but you’d have to do that for every Calgary band given the many personnel overlaps. Dial Up might be the platonic ideal of eggpunk: gimmicks and bits in liberal supply (“it’s bug city over here, over here, over here,” they point around the room like The Blues Brothers with their “you and you and you”). But there are also deceptively smart melodies and cool, wiggly guitar parts and fax-machine synths you can latch onto. Actually, “eggpunk” overly pigeonholes (or chickenholes) what they do. Sometimes it’s echoic of experimental indie Mount Rushmorers like Beat Happening, Moldy Peaches, or Pavement when they were really goofing off, but on x2 speed. It’s fun and stupid and brilliant. Did I mention they dress as bugs?

Cross-pollination is a throughline – really a necessity – for Calgary bands. As it is for Sled in general. The singer of one band will be playing drums for another the next day. Your bartender will crop up as bassist later that night. The technician doing sound at one venue will be headbanging in the front row of a different one the next day. It reminds me of my native Brighton scene and the overlapping worlds of our beloved venue triangle: The Hope & Ruin, The Albert, and Green Door Store. Good people doing cool things without ego or rigid roles.

I catch up with a gang of punks who came together from several other bands, went undercover as country musicians for the kicks, and then accidentally became a legit country band moving hundreds of tickets across Alberta. They’re called The Rifle County Players and have a song called “Albert Pride”, where they sing “Alberta bound is where I wanna be” over that non-stop, one-two, gum-stuck-to-your-shoe rhythm. “But proudly in Canada and not a fucking state,” lead vocalist Kyle Lanigan confirms after the song wraps.

Indeed – the Players could be mistaken for big-sky patriots who love pick-up trucks and light beer and hate things you shouldn’t hate. But what they’re actually doing is radical: reclaiming regional pride when it’s been weaponised and deeply conflated with the wrong things; taking a traditional musical form but stripping out certain parts in order to renovate its insides – using their powers for good.

It’s tricky to shout about Alberta pride without getting lumped in with the province’s separatist movement, a hot-button topic at the moment. In 2022, Danielle Smith’s newly installed provincial government passed the Alberta Sovereignty Act, which insulates Alberta from policies made in Ottawa that she deems detrimental to the province.

It has been called anti-democratic and unconstitutional, and in practice means a large expansion of power over areas such as education and law enforcement. Smith has been doing everything she can to strip Albertans of healthcare, introducing an American-style system we all know works great down there! She’s been trying to demolish trans rights; ban LGBTQ+ books in schools and libraries; and effectively shift the province closer to their southern neighbour – a real Nigel Farage in bellbottoms. She’s also been pushing for a now confirmed referendum that will go ahead later this year: Albertans will vote on whether to have a binding vote on their province separating from Canada.

“I don’t want people to think we’re a shitty country and we’re ignorant hicks that wanna separate,” Kyle says of the visitors in town for Sled. “We’re not that kinda country. And we’re all about community. Community is certainly not separation, or killing your healthcare, or killing your educators, or dismissing the First Nations.”

He explains that none of the First Nations groups have been consulted on the separation, despite this being their land. He also notes that while the band isn’t overtly political lyrically, the way they go about things is underpinned by their morals. “They don’t have messages in there – they’re just country songs,” he says, “and that’s the beauty of the genre. But at the same time we can have this conversation to solidify what we are as a group and a project. The cool thing about Calgary is you can be whatever the hell you want, but you always wanna be on the right side of it, the good side of it.” Co-vocalist Haley Gunn adds, “I think it’s fun to confidently represent where you’re from, and who you are, who your friends are, who your community is.”

“You gotta be punk in the small town and then in the big city the small town is kinda cool to have as a juxtaposition,” Kyle explains of bringing the boonies to the city through their music. “We found this nice balance where you have this cool genre, you get the good bits of it, but implement everything you have, and Sled’s nice cos we get all these acts from out of town. We’re just blessed. Of all the festivals they could have sent you to in some podunk part of the world…”

Because this is Calgary, on the same stage, at the same time, but on a different day, three of Rifle County’s members – the third being drummer Nick Oxford – become Window Lamp Corp. This is Haley’s project. Grittier live than the jangly chill of her Episode album, she sings like Patti Smith, writes chord progressions like late-era Velvet Underground, as clattering barre chords move in boxes, but there’s a wonky skip in their step. And if you left it out alongside records by Canadian heroes like The Courtneys and Peach Kelli Pop, it certainly wouldn’t go bad.

Rifle County and Window Lamp have played many Sleds before, are veritable Sled veterans. “It’s an embodiment of the city itself,” Haley says of the event. “Every single scene, everything here is so intertwined. It’s the small-town city of Canada.”

I’m told elsewhere that Calgary is the Austin to Alberta’s Texas. The white collar town to Edmonton’s blue. The Wild West. Cowtown. Blue Sky City. It’s a city of beige, brown, blocky skyscrapers and quirky, flat-roofed indie venues and pinball bars. The counterculture is hidden under the megalithic offices and malls. You have to peel back layers to find it. An all-things-punk record store, Neon Taste, can be found in a tiny, unassuming mall in Chinatown, for example. There are several independent art galleries that the locals shout about: The New Gallery, Contemporary Calgary, Esker Foundation.

There’s the National Music Centre, including the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and its recent exhibit on Ajax legends Sum 41. You’ve got Calgary Tower playing compass as you dart between the buzzy strip of 17th Ave and the intersection of Centre street and 7th Ave – the Palomino Smokehouse (“beers, bands, barbecue”) behind you; the Tower to your right; the Legion up ahead. On your travels you’ll also see many supersized murals commissioned as part of the Beltline Urban Mural Project, or BUMP, which Matthew Springer of Dial Up and Cartel Madras' Bhagya "Eboshi" Ramesh and Priya "Contra" Ramesh are involved in.

At this point I should acknowledge – as many bands do onstage and Haley does in our interview – the Indigenous land Calgary (or Mohkínstsis) occupies. Per the fest’s website, “Sled Island acknowledges Calgary as the traditional territory of the Blackfoot and the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta, which includes the Siksika, the Piikani, the Kainai, the Tsuut’ina and the Ĩyãħé Nakoda First Nations, including the Chiniki, Bearspaw and Goodstoney First Nations. Calgary is also home to the Métis Nation of Alberta (Districts 5 and 6).”

National Indigenous People’s Day is Sunday, the day of Sled’s wrap-up party. In the morning I take a walk along the Bow River – the Indigenous trio Iron Tusk recommended it – and find myself in the midst of thousands of runners taking part in Calgary’s sixth annual Run For Palestine. Families, groups of friends, solo runners holding flags – it sets the tone for an emotional day ahead.

“I wish I was actually Indigenous,” quips Seth Cardinal Dodginghors of sadbirthdays during his band’s set of heaving shoegaze. He clarifies the joke when it’s met by only a scatter of nervous laughs. He is Indigenous – a Tsuut’ina/Amskapi Piikani/Cree artist who recorded his forthcoming album in the residential schools that his grandfather was forced to attend.

Residential schools, of course, were synonymous with the Canadian genocide of Indigenous peoples. These were brutal, abusive, Church-run internment camps, essentially, that separated First Nations children from their families and systematically attempted to erase their culture and opportunities, belatedly leading to National Day for Truth and Reconciliation under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government in 2013.

sadbirthdays’ set features extended instrumentals that allow or encourage you to reflect on your thoughts. There’s some wicked depth-perspective play at work, too: Ana Paula Villanueva will furiously strum her pink bass into a thundering fracas as Seth and fellow guitarist Dan Auger (from Treaty 8) manipulate whammy bars like video game joysticks and sound out sunray arpeggios. And the Calgary juxtapositions continue as their loud, enveloping music leans into the sad birthday aesthetic, with many-coloured helium balloons tied to Seth’s mic stand. It’s the perfect band name and concept for something so consequential. Just like a special day gone wrong, its poignancy is elevated because of your expectations of what should’ve been.

Though it’s billed as the wrap-up party, Sunday at Sled still offers seven hours of music following the annual hog roast – all of it taking place at The Palomino smokehouse, a Calgary institution and roomy, bustling centre of Sled debriefs. Flitting between the basement and main floor, you can loosen up to Wheelchair Sports Camp’s smart, acerbic rap fired from a wheelchair, or Tear Dungeon’s horrorcore chaos with blood mixture spat through gimp masks. I’m most at home with His His, the lofi indie rock project of Aidan Belo that I discovered when he was over in the UK for FOCUS Wales last month.

The project’s name isn’t a pronouns riff – it was a typo with enough intrigue and throwawayness to have legs, to get defined by the music. Belo is a don’t-overthink-it songwriter in the best way, writing about real life and its low-stakes joys and novelties: the old man whose backyard he used to sneak through because it was a shortcut to the library where he wanted to play RuneScape on the communal computer. There’s one about a friend’s mum’s giant bong. And another parent-themed one where he relays his “very Portuguese” dad’s take on His His: “it’s kinda country.”

It’s kinda country in the early Wilco before the synths way. In the “Range Life” but keep it under 2 minutes way. In the MJ Lenderman in a breezy mood with an acoustic and a Tascam way. There’s a last-minute setlist alteration on account of me telling Belo how much I dig the peppy, two-chord, two-minute “Get-Go” from his Good Gold Cassette EP. “We weren’t going to play this song, but someone told me it is their most Scrobbled song as of late,” he says.

The words to “Get-Go” nicely track with my feelings towards Sled: “I’ve gotta new home, I gotta get on / I’ve gotta new show, I gotta get on.” Thriving with juxtapositions, joy, and meaningful connections, Sled Island is a community compass for Calgary and beyond that steals your heart and feels like home right from the get go.