Standing on a pedestal, SZA emerged from the floor of the River stage on Sunday night, rising above the catwalk beneath which her musicians were concealed to first sing the brief PSAThen Love Galoretaken from his first album Ctrlreleased in 2017. His voice, clear and agile as the breeze, resonated all the way to the hills at the other end of the plain where tens of thousands of fans had gathered, who seemed to know the lyrics to each of his songs by heart. The Osheaga festival ended yesterday in a unifying manner, but not so much so that the organizers could rub their hands at having sold all their tickets.
It was a hot day at Osheaga – literally and figuratively! The heatwave continued Saturday into Sunday afternoon, but the storm threatened to derail SZA’s evening, one of the very few R&B headliners in seventeen editions (The Weeknd preceded her in 2017). The singer-songwriter was able to sing under a mild sky and an atmosphere cooled by the light showers that had arrived early in the evening, playing nearly thirty songs in a tight 90 minutes.
The cream of contemporary American R&B, back at Osheaga nine years after their first appearance at the festival, on a much more modest stage. In two excellent albums (SOS was released last year), she has become the new face of the musical genre, her talent being to express with her fine and elegant voice passionate, visceral, excessive lyrics. “I might kill my ex, not the best idea / His new girlfriend’s next, how’d I get here?”, she sings during Kill Billin the middle of the concert, walking around the stage with a machete in his hand.
There is never any mawkishness in SZA’s art, only guts, rage, desperate love. Party too, on the more pop and danceable tracks – like Go Gina And All the Starsher duet with Kendrick Lamar, which she serves in the first third of her song tour – rhythmic nuggets that shake us up after the ballads that made her famous, starting with Garden (Say It Like Dat), pearl taken from Ctrlhere performed in a duel with his furious electric guitarist, a more muscular version which, fortunately, does not stifle the melody.
The scenography, however, left us perplexed; separated into three tableaux that had little in common with each other, the performance sometimes seemed stifled by the sets created by the giant screens, the first setting it in a magic cave, the second in a futuristic city (supported by laser beams), the last in an enchanted forest. The artist, her dancers and her good musicians were enough for us, no need to pretend to be filming a blockbuster summer cinema.
Positive balance sheet
Shortly after 5 p.m., the sound was cut off on all six stages of the venue to broadcast a warning message: the festival’s hired meteorologist had issued a thunderstorm warning. British singer Raye cut her set short; on the other side of the stage, the virulent punks Amyl and the Sniffers tried to outdo the thunder rumbling to the west. Fortunately, the interruption lasted only about fifteen minutes, as the storm skirted St. Helena Island.
“Climate change is happening, and we need to ask ourselves how we can address it in our festival planning,” said Osheaga’s top brass Nick Farkas at the debrief press conference. “How do we make sure that if the temperature goes up to 35 degrees again for three days, we can make the site more accommodating for festival-goers by putting up more tents and shade.”
The organization estimates that it has welcomed 147,000 spectators over the last three days. “We had our record attendance year last year, we did not expect to reach it again this year”, the first night (with Noah Kahan as the closing act) not being sold out, unlike Saturday, inflated by the presence of Green Day as headliner and the pop phenomenon Chappelle Roan.
So, the programmers pulled off a great coup yesterday on the Vertes and Vallée stages by programming rapper and singer Kevin Abstract (founding member of the Brockhampton collective, whose approach today recalls the musical versatility of a Childish Gambino) and, immediately after, the young South African sensation Tyla, whose first career performance was here – she wowed us with her songs in a style she called “popiano”, a fusion of pop and amapiano, a sort of cross between house and r&b from South Africa.
The double act drew a huge crowd to this part of the site, so much so that people were dancing on their feet. The Osheaga audience, mostly English-speaking (60% of the clientele comes from outside Quebec), left when Belgian rapper Hamza got his turn on stage, but only to come back to dance to the tasty disco-funk-pop songs of the English sextet Jungle, who captivated the festival-goers.