BARRIER

Barrier was a punk/emo/hardcore band in Montreal active from around 2007-2010.

Their last show was Friday July 23rd 2010 at a special event called Dumpy Fest 2006 featuring:

BARRIER (last show ever)
HORSES (toronto/east cost)
ORPHAN CHOIR (windsor)
KALE (local emo-punk)
PALS (rare appearance, pop punk feat 3/4 of barn burner)
PANTY HOS (”the lady danzig”)
TO THE CLIFFS (ex snake master, ensorcelor, ballast. 3 guitar thrash metal insanity)
THE CATLIN ELM (screamo/posi)

@ Friendship Cove 215A Murray St. Montreal QC

Some words:
After a relatively long and fully unproductive run, Barrier is over. We played what will likely be our last show on Friday at the amazing Dumpy Fest 2006 celebration, with a million of our friends. It’s hard to explain how perfectly that show summed up our run: a sweaty room packed with people giving it their all, and us unable to play our own songs. It was the support of all our awesome friends that really gave the band any shred of worth that we had, more than any crappy songs we wrote about how awesome it is to have wicked friends. Personally speaking, as someone who doesn’t even know the name of a single chord and can’t tune a guitar even when given twenty minutes alone with a tuner, it was kind of mind-blowing to see so many people going nuts, crowd-surfing on tombstones, bleeding into Zellers alien shirts, hanging from the ceiling pipes, constantly showering beer, falling over drum kits and singing along to songs that I never figured anyone would listen to more than once.

Some people make music because they want to go on tour and see the world, some people look at music as artistic self-expression or a way to communicate things they can’t in words, other people look at it as a way to make money or gain social status. Seriously, that show on Friday was the only musical aspiration I’ve ever had. A space that we all made our own, a night separated from any monetary goal save giving our touring buds (Orphan Choir, who played our first show, and Horses, whose members are like brothers to us) enough cash to get to the next city on their tour, a diverse bunch of bands genres playing genres of music that long ago were abandoned by the “what’s cool” mob, people not giving a shit about anything other than having a good time and being nice to each other. A bunch of people dancing as hard as they can to music that’s basically impossible to dance to, and for whatever reason, it seemed to mean something to some of them.

Together we all proved that we don’t need fancy big names on hip labels to get psyched off of our asses on punk music, and that was all it was ever supposed to mean in the first place. We really never did much in the five years that we were a band, but after Friday, as far as I’m concerned: mission accomplished.