CMW 2016: Pale Lips @ The Silver Dollar

WEDNESDAY – If you went looking for the graves of all the dead Ramones, dug them up, extracted their souls, washed those souls and dried them and carefully folded them for shipping to Canada, where they were infused into the living bodies of four women from Montreal, the band those women would then form would almost certainly sound a lot like Pale Lips. They play quick, furiously catchy punk songs — all hooks and distortion and tattoos and denim, with just a hint of the Beach Boys-y seaside vibe that the Ramones brought all the way across the continent from California to the dark and dingy clubs of New York City. And Pale Lips didn't exactly hide their influences during their Wednesday night show at the Silver Dollar, turning the Ramones' "Rock & Roll High School" into "Rock & Roll Dipshit"and referencing old timey jukebox rock & roll with shout outs to songs like "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Great Balls of Fire." There's plenty of the '50s and '60s and '70s in the Pale Lips — but it made for one of the best sets we saw at CMW in 2016.

 

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Read all our coverage of CMW 2016 here.

Words by Adam Bunch, Editor-in-Chief of the Little Red Umbrella and the creator of the Toronto Dreams Project and Toronto Historical Jukebox. You can read his posts here, follow him on Twitter here, or email him at adam@littleredumbrella.com.

Photos by Carmen Cheung, the Arts Editor for The Little Red Umbrella.