Led by vocalist and guitarist Ian Thornley, veteran Canadian rockers Big Wreck performed on Day #1 at Crewfest 2024 on Friday, July 19, 2024.
Here are SWOMP’s photos from their performance:
Big Wreck has become an iconic North American rock band that calls Canada home.
With a consecutive streak of hits singles and albums, including ‘That Song’, ‘Ladylike’ and ‘Albatross’, Big Wreck released Pages last spring.
Although it is technically classified as an EP, Big Wreck has never done anything on a small scale.
The first chapter of a mini-album series culled from a pool of 18 songs recorded in 2023, Pages is a hefty six-track dispatch that handily reasserts the Toronto band’s reputation as both the most muscular and musically adventurous of the ’90s CanRock contingent.
Those hoping for more of Big Wreck’s patented post-grunge anthems will immediately be taken aback by “In Fair Light,” which greets fans with a hypnotic flurry of xylophone-like chord patterns that feel closer in spirit to Steve Reich than Soundgarden, before taking us on an extended ’80s-prog odyssey for nearly eight minutes.
Following that fearless opening salvo, Big Wreck is free to show off every trick in its toolkit, be it pummelling nu metal (“Bail Out”) or majestic, multi-sectional Zeppelin-esque folk tales bookended by perky synth-rock passages (“Bird of Paradise”).
But for all its genre-bounding eclecticism, Pages still scores a direct hit to the heart with “Weightless,” the sort of arm-swaying acoustic sing-along that will surely make nostalgic fans wistfully declare: I really love that tune.
The mid-’90s was a golden age for Canadian alternative rock (a.k.a. CanRock), and although Big Wreck technically formed at Boston’s Berklee College of Music in 1994, singer/guitarist lan Thornley’s Toronto roots put them at the forefront of this new Canuck wave.
The group’s 1997 debut, In Loving Memory Of…, introduced a band that were tough enough to hold their own against the post-grunge fray, but possessed a deep- seated reverence for bluesy classic-rock fundamentals.
(To wit, the album’s soaring centrepiece, “That Song,” was an instant radio anthem about listening to your favourite radio anthem.)
Big Wreck’s CanRock reign lasted for just one more album (2001’s The Pleasure and the Greed) before Thornley set out for a solo career.
However, with 2012’s reunion effort Albatross, Big Wreck embarked on a prolific second act and, despite the untimely 2019 passing of founding guitarist Brian Doherty, the band are still going strong, dropping the Lenny Kravitz-meets-Soundgarden groover “Middle of Nowhere” in 2021 with guest vocals from Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger.
Follow them on their official website https://bigwreckmusic.com/.