Movies of War

1 of 6 2 of 6 Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up for our free newsletter.Several years after author Lizzy Goodman wrote Meet Me in the Bathroom, an oral history about how New York’s 2000s indie rock scene was created, Madeline Fraser found herself in a Kelowna bathroom dreaming up the start of what she hopes can be another musical revolution.It was there that Fraser, a music promoter and manager, met Laura Lee Schultz. “It was a tattoo show/concert, and [Schultz’s band] Down The Lees was playing,” she recalls to the Straight. “We bumped into each other and started talking about discrimination—in Kelowna there were very few places for queer and women bands to play.”The two eventually threw out the idea of a women-led rock festival. Another book, Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front—about the ‘90s Riot Grrrl movement in the U.S. that gave rise to bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Sleater-Kinney—ended up guiding the way. Left to right: Gadfly's Homa Khoshnavaz, Crimson Funeral's Madeline Manson, and WAIT//LESS's Rebecca White dare to look down. Tanya Goehring The first Girls to the Front Festival was launched in Vernon in 2024. On the bill were punk and hardcore outfits like WAIT//LESS, Gadfly, and, of course, Down The Lees.The inaugural edition was a success on all fronts, according to Fraser.“We were still kind of sneaking people in after it had sold out,” she says. “When we saw all these girls together, performing and enjoying something, it really felt like it was ours, our place. Of course there were cis men there, but it felt like our place. It was just a super powerful feeling. Laura and I had tears in our eyes when WAIT//LESS was headlining and they invited all the girls to the front to dance and mosh. It’s just so fucking powerful, man. Such a cool feeling.”The festival announced plans to expand to Vancouver and Kelowna this year. Unfortunately, because of many of the factors that Fraser and Schultz identified in starting the festival, the Kelowna iteration was cancelled in late February. Tanya Goehring The Vancouver edition is set for March 14 at the Pearl, where Fraser has been general manager since December. It features a laundry list of well-known Vancouver punk and hardcore bands, including indie darlings PISS and the aforementioned WAIT//LESS.Joining those two and Down The Lees on the bill are Vancouver acts JISEI, Gadfly, cherry pick, Tall Mary, Crimson Funeral, and Semi.“It’s been surprisingly smooth,” says Fraser of putting together the lineup, noting that the festival is close to sold out. “I think that’s the cool thing about women and female-presenting people: we know how to get shit done. There’s no fucking around.”The Straight went to the Pearl in late February to interview the frontwomen of three of the bands playing the festival. Here are their stories. WAIT//LESS's Rebecca White doesn't need stardom—a movie soundtrack placement will do. Tanya Goehring “I was like, ‘I’ve wanted to do this for the last 15 or 20 years; I need to keep doing it,’ ” White says. So she got together with guitar player Trevor Stoddart, whom she knew from Calgary, and Allie Sheldan and Michael Weiss of alt-pop Vancouver outfit Little Destroyer.The four musicians met for a jam session and, pretty quickly, formed the garage punk outfit WAIT//LESS.“Maybe it should have been a different name; we have to describe the spelling every time,” says White with a laugh. “But the concept of the band is that waiting for things to happen is never going to work. It can take several years to come to realize that you just have to do it.”Out of the gate, WAIT//LESS has had more success than your typical punk rock band. The group has only been playing together for about three years and has already unlocked a few levels of Vancouver music lore by playing the Commodore twice—opening for legendary local rockers D.O.A. as well as Jack White (no relation).“It was such a trip,” says White about opening for the White Stripes frontman, whose team reached out to WAIT//LESS via Bandcamp. “Growing up, you know about the White Stripes, and then meeting him, you’re just like, ‘What is life? This is so weird and great and funny.’ And the experience was… it was fucking awesome; what else can I say?”WAIT//LESS put out its first full-length album, Improve Your Image Listen to WAIT//LESS, last summer during a rousing show at Leo’s Clothing Supply in Downtown Vancouver. The album includes standout “Another Year”, a scathing, electrical ride that utilizes White’s punishing vocals to great effect.The band recorded an EP in January with a grant from Creative BC that allowed them to record in the basement of CBC Vancouver with producers Howard Redekopp and Erik Nielsen, who have collectively worked with Canadian heavyweights like Said The Whale, Mother Mother, the New Pornographers, and Dear Rouge.“It’s the traditional WAIT//LESS bangers, definitely,” White says of the upcoming record. “You have to grow, and I feel like our first record was, ‘We’re going to drop a handful of bouncy balls and see which way they go and who we want to be.’ There’s always a learning curve. Working with those producers, it was just like… these experiences are happening and you kind of take a step back and go, ‘Whoa, we just did this crazy thing.’ ”Still, even as White has accomplished a lot since moving from her hometown to Vancouver, it hasn’t all been easy.“I moved here during COVID; it was challenging,” she recalls. “And growing up in Calgary, the music scene there is so, so close. Everyone knows each other and plays in bands together. There was this bar, Broken City, RIP, but the communities that came from that—everyone was down to just like, go to the show. It’s not that Vancouver doesn’t have that, but sometimes I feel you’re grasping a little bit. I feel like people don’t drink enough here.”Regardless, White isn’t going to stop trying to bring people out to the bar, or the venue, or the vintage store.“I’m gonna keep going, because what else is there to do, except the thing that makes you feel alive?” she says. “Am I hopeful for some sort of, like, stardom? No, I’m hopeful that, you know, we can get touring, and someone likes a song enough to put it in a sick movie. Making a living, sure, but living by making.” Homa Khoshnavaz found a home in Vancouver's music community after fleeing Iran. Tanya Goehring HOMA KHOSHNAVAZ SPEAKS softly and is very matter-of-fact, ending most sentences with a small laugh or a smile, even when the things she’s talking about have an inherent seriousness to them.Khoshnavaz was born in Iran to what she calls an “artsy family”.She started playing in bands in Iran in her mid-teens, something she casually recalls as being “extremely hard and dangerous” to pull off.“I was like 16, and all my band members were 25, but yeah, it was very hard to keep a band going there and to do shows,” she recalls. “It needed to be very underground. You had to make sure the cops were not going to come and arrest everyone.”Khoshnavaz was 19 when she moved to Vancouver as a refugee just before COVID to, in her words, “be free”.Starting a band here was easier. She met her now-husband, guitarist and drummer Nigel Young, who had been in local bands like psychedelic rockers the Intelligence Service and punk group RAG. The two, with bassist Hansen Thingvold, formed Gadfly, a stoner/sludge metal outfit with a Middle Eastern influence, and started playing shows around 2022.The trio became a regular on the Vancouver indie circuit, playing venues like Take Your Time Back and Green Auto often. Khoshnavaz says that the band’s music style has evolved over the years.“When I first started Gadfly, it was more of a stoner vibe. Now it’s more… unhinged and angry, but ‘yay’ at the same time,” she says with a laugh.Khoshnavaz doesn’t feel like she’s putting on a persona or being disingenuous when she moves from her soft-spoken nature to the harsh tones she hits on the stage. Just the opposite, in fact.“I feel like it kind of makes me feel more free, that I can be myself,” she says. “Also alcohol helps.”The band has garnered a reputation around town. Last fall, the group opened the Rickshaw for both California garage rock pioneer Ty Segall and Seattle grunge rockers Mudhoney. It’s still also playing the smaller shows, though.Gadfly took a brief hiatus at the end of the fall to record and write its third album, after 2022’s Apranik and 2024’s Sura. That record should be out by summer. But at the band’s first show back, on February 1 at Take Your Time Back on Kingsway, Khoshnavaz, usually stoked to be on stage, wasn’t anticipating having a good time.“I wasn’t expecting it to be that fun, especially with everything going on in Iran,” she says. “And then everyone at the show was so full of energy. So that was very nice.”Asked whether the political happenings in her home country are hard to process for her, especially given that members of her family are still there, Khoshnavaz just gives a simple “Yes,” followed by a shy laugh.Gadfly’s latest album, according to its lead singer, strikes a slightly different tone than the band’s previous efforts.“The whole band wrote it together. It still has that Persian vibe, but when I was listening to it to see if there was something I should fix or change, I would just shake my head on every song,” she says. “And I usually hate our songs, especially the ones I write. So yeah, this one I think is very good.”Khoshnavaz does her now trademarked laugh and smile before we ask if there’s anything she’d like to add prior to ending the interview. She hesitates for a second and then speaks directly into the recorder: “Free Iran.” Crimson Funeral's Madeline Manson is out for blood. Sometimes literally. Tanya Goehring ON HER 10TH birthday, Madeline Manson’s father got her a guitar, which is still, according to its owner, in good condition.In her early teens, Manson—yes, it’s her stage name—was in vocal lessons and choir.By 13, she had started writing and performing her own songs and doing open mics in her hometown of Nelson. Back then, it was acoustic, singer-songwriter tunes. But she was always headed for something a bit darker.“I always loved punk rock, and my dad, in addition to giving me the guitar, had introduced Nirvana to me, which was a huge catalyst,” Manson recalls. “One of the first riffs I’d ever learned was the opening to ‘Come As You Are’. I was obsessed with wanting to be punk when I was a teenager and also felt like I identified with the values in it. I had kind of an insane upbringing, and it built up a lot of rage in me.”It was on a photoshoot with her friend, Jessica Nicklen Smart—that perhaps fittingly had her sitting in a Vancouver graveyard holding an almost-six-foot long sword—that Manson decided to start a doom metal band.“Jess and I started talking about music, and she was like, ‘Yeah, I’m learning drums, and my friend Emma [Lewis] plays bass. And I thought, ‘It’d be really cool to jam with other girls.’ I had only jammed with guys my whole life. I felt like it was going to be so powerful, and it was.”That first session was in January 2025. Out of it came both a song, “Spill Your Blood”, and a name, Crimson Funeral.“Spill Your Blood” is still the band’s only released song, and it’s a melodic trip into death metal that sees Manson hit soaring registers amidst a thundering bassline.The song has developed something of a reputation, not just with fans of Crimson Funeral, but with some of the venues around town, thanks to a stunt that Manson pulled off during the band’s show at the WISE Hall.“We had a little thing planned at the end, because that show was a psychedelic music festival thing that my friend was putting on,” Manson recalls. “And I was like, ‘I want to put a bunch of blood in my mouth and spit it out.’ Jess was like, ‘Yeah, we should do that for sure.’ ”So she acquired little pockets of fake blood that activate when they are bitten into. “During ‘Spill Your Blood’, our last song of the set, I had a little cup hidden behind the curtain, and I held the second-to-last note, turned away, filled my mouth up with this foul-tasting stuff, and hit the last note, and opened my mouth, and there was so much, just like, dripping all over me, my guitar, the monitors, and the stage. It was epic. And then I ended up spitting it on the crowd, which I wasn’t planning on doing, but it was a reflex because it tasted so bad.”Manson can laugh about the situation now, but the organizers weren’t thrilled and ended up issuing the band a cleaning fee.“The last two shows we played, the organizers have specifically reached out to us, like, ‘Hey yeah, by the way, we saw the video. No blood,’ ” she says, chuckling. “If you were there though, and you saw it, it was pretty sick.”At the moment, Manson and company are in the process of finding time and money to record an album that they have written and have been performing most of around town, including opening for popular Montreal doom sludge band Dopethrone at the Rickshaw in May.“We’re just saving up money right now to record, because it’s very expensive,” she says. “We have an album’s worth of stuff planned out, ready to go. We’re getting to this point where we’re going, ‘Hey, we should just seriously fucking do it as soon as we can.’ We’ve had a couple of recommendations to different studios, and a couple of people have reached out and talked to us.”Hopefully they can find a bit of room in the budget for some more fake blood.Girls to the Front Festival is at the Pearl on March 14. Join the discussion Facebook comments not loading? Please check your browser settings to ensure that it is not blocking Facebook from running on straight.com