The rain didn’t dampen country music fans, who crowded in by the thousands by late afternoon to binge their ears while they waited for LASSO’s second day headliner, Chris Stapleton. The young festival attracted more than 50,000 people over two days at Parc Jean-Drapeau. The conclusion is self-evident: this event is here to stay.
It’s not for nothing that Chris Stapleton performed last, Saturday, at LASSO. It only took one song, White Horse, to kick off his lap, to show the obvious: he towered over everyone by at least a head. It wasn’t about attitude, more about sound and voice. Soul, in fact.
LASSO offers diversity, but it should also be told as it is: some of the programming relies on fairly generic country pop. There’s a world between the Brothers Osborne, whose country rock is rather ordinary, and the musical universe of Chris Stapleton, nourished by Southern rock and blues, then propelled by a sense of groove and a voice full of soul that never t had no difficulty reaching the hearts of the spectators furthest from the stage.
The bearded cowboy wasn’t very talkative, but he warned his audience: “We’re going to play as many songs as we can in the time we have,” he said early in his performance. . After opening White Horse, he immediately delivered one of his big songs, Parachute, which wowed the crowd. Detail that did not spoil anything, the rain had stopped just before Stapleton entered the scene.
He ended this second edition of LASSO in a simple and spectacular way. With what ? Tennessee Whiskey, a country blues anthem that the entire Parc Jean-Drapeau sang with him.
Early in the evening, after a much-loved performance by Warren Zeiders (who was offered her phone number on a large sign by a spectator), Morgan Wade took the stage. In just under an hour, the interpreter of Wilder Days did not impress much. She threaded her songs on near autopilot mode, almost without addressing the receptive crowd. Her beautiful raspy voice wasn’t enough to lift her overly formatted tracks to really stand out.
It was quite the opposite with Elle King. “I’m not mad at the weather. And you ? “, she launched to the crowd before singing a first song. Charismatic and playful, she seduced with her songs fed on vintage rock, tinged with a little R
Before Chris Stapleton finally took the stage, there were also Dean Brody, originally from British Columbia, and the Osborne Brothers. The tandem of John and T.J. Osborne seemed the right group to set the stage for the star of the evening. Both have a penchant for country steeped in rock. However, even if the brothers did not spare their efforts, they paled in comparison to their compatriot with the shaggy beard.
