5 Must-See Bands at Rock The Shores 2016

By: Staff –

This July 22-24, Rock The Shores will once again be the biggest rock event of the summer on Vancouver Island.

Returning to a three-day format, Rock The Shores will kick things off on Friday, July 22 with The Seven Mile Social – a day of programming dedicated to showcasing Vancouver Island’s biggest and finest homegrown talent. Tickets for Friday’s Seven Mile Social start at $25.00, providing guests with an affordable, high-production music festival experience. Artists include Current Swell, Jesse Roper, Jon and Roy, Towers and Trees and more.

Saturday and Sunday at Rock The Shores will continue with a focus on world-class talent with gates at noon each day. Adjacent to douglas fir forests and set on sprawling green grass, Rock The Shores provides guests with a high-caliber rock festival experience wrapped in a natural and welcoming west coast setting.

Tickets are now on-sale here.

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City And Colour 
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“There’s a line that I’m trying to find, between the water and the open sky,” sings City And Colour’s Dallas Green on “Friends,” the penultimate track off of his fifth album, If I Should Go Before You.

For someone like Green, it’s hard to imagine that there’s much left to search for – he’s traversed the globe on tour, released numerous albums (one most recently as You+Me with Alecia Moore, aka P!nk) and collected scores of accolades.

Though Green is a musician, he doesn’t make a show of things: that’s the songs’ job. Thus he’s done this all quietly, intentionally, still looking for the next answer or dog-eared chapter each record holds. And this time, on If I Should Go Before You, he once again uncovered something new: a certain kind of family in his bandmates.

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Metric 
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Life is beautiful. The world is cruel. Music still matters. Metric have wrestled with these truths for 15 years, but their new album, Pagans in Vegas, takes them on in an entirely new way.

Six albums into an inspiring career that’s seen them collaborate with legends like Lou Reed, perform with the Rolling Stones, entertain the Queen of England, become the first band in history to score their first Top 20 commercial radio hit in the U.S. without the backing of an outside label, win a plethora of awards including Junos for Album of the Year and Artist of the Year, pen the theme song for Twilight: Eclipse with Howard Shore (for which the music garnered nominations for both an Oscar and a Grammy), release an interactive app directly to fans, and set up an esoteric toll-free number for their dedicated listeners to navigate the past and future of their music, Metric have their creative process on lock.

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Arkells
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Beloved Canadian indie rock quintet Arkells’ highly anticipated new album, Morning Report, will be released on August 5th. The record showcases the intuitive interaction between frontman Max Kerman and Mike DeAngelis’ intertwining guitars, Nick Dika’s urgent basslines, Anthony Carone’s dulcet keys, and Tim Oxford’s lockstep drumming.

Morning Report is comprised of click-tracked rhythms, subliminal samples, and electronic pulses – threaded together with horns and strings into a richly-textured mix which more readily recalls montage and collage approaches of Hip-Hop beatmakers than the direct plug-in-and-play attack of a live rock band.

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The Cat Empire
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For over a decade, The Cat Empire have been known far and wide as one of the world’s greatest party bands. Their colourful, genre-bending music, shipped across the world in traveler’s backpacks seems at home almost anywhere, and yet the band has always been a kind of illusive stranger.

Difficult to describe and impossible to categorise, The Cat Empire’s reputation is built upon a chaotic and fiercely uplifting live show that, last year over half a million people bought tickets to see. Much like their other annual expeditions the band’s 2015 tour covered 15 different countries including Hurricane & Southside Festival in Germany, Secret Garden Party in the UK, Rock Wertcher in Belgium, and a career highlight headline show at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall in London which sold out months in advance.

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July Talk
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July Talk isn’t easy to pigeonhole. Imagine Tom Waits and Amy Millan shouting whiskey-soaked lullabies while backed by Crazy Horse and youʼd have a start. Striking a balance between Americana and indie-rock, July Talkʻs Beauty and the Beast aesthetic burns a little going down, but will leave you wanting more.