Photo via Murmur Those fancy double-disc deluxe edition reissue sets have become fairly commonplace recently as the labels try to take advantage of the type of people willing to buy the same album over and over again while they're still alive, but that doesn't mean they're not - at least sometimes - getting it right. Case in point, the announcement that R.E.M.'s debut album Murmur will be g...
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Hearts Of Palm UK / For Life (Hypnote ) For the record, the "UK" part of the name is all affectation - there's was territorial trademark tussle and the trio hails from California. There's not even much overtly Anglophilic in their sound, which is a twinkling example of electro-chamber pop more comparable to the likes of The Postal Service or Au Revoir Simone, though not as peppy as the for...
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Photo by Libi PedderSo - I'm currently in a weird sort of position where after a fairly hectic few weeks of wholly bloggable stuff, I've finally gotten a chance to take a breath and have realized that I have nothing to blog about. Which is not to say that there's nothing worthwhile happening in music, just that I've not had the chance to listen to anything in the last while sufficiently that ...
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Photo by Elizabeth WeinbergSo most everyone I know is referring to next Tuesday night's show at Lee's Palace as "the Frightened Rabbit" gig, and quite reasonably so - they released one of the year's best records in The Midnight Organ Fight back in April and have toured North America a few times since then, but have yet to visit Toronto and also, we do love those thick Scottish accents. But as...
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Photo by Frank YangSome people spend Thanksgiving with their families. I spend mine with rock'n'roll bands. Two years ago at Pop Montreal, last year at The Phoneix with The National and this year again at the Phoneix with Okkervil River and Crooked Fingers. It's okay - my parents have a habit of being out of the country on Thanksgiving so it's not like I'm a total no-account son. Just most...
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Shannon McArdle / Summer Of The Whore (Bar/None) Considering that Shannon McArdle's solo debut came relatively hot on the heels of the dissolution of both her band - The Mendoza Line - and her marriage to said band's principal songwriter Tim Bracey, it'd have been reasonable to expect it to be damaged in tenor at the very least. And it is, absolutely, running the emotional gamut from anger to...
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Photo via Tell All Your FriendsA while back - a long while - I got an email from a reader asking if I could perhaps help him identify a video he'd seen somewhere by an English band and which featured a single take of the singer riding a bicycle around London's streets (or street - most of it's a single circle). Not the most original idea for a vid, but apparently memorable enough to warrant ...
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Photo via Facebook"There's a new album from The New Year" is all the review that longtime fans need. Those less familiar with the works of the brothers Kadane may need a little more to go on. They began as Bedhead, a mid-90s Texan band known for their slow, languid songs built on a nest of intricately intertwined and unfailingly melodic guitar lines, and when that outfit dissolved in 1999 th...
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I imagine you'd have to flip a coin. How else to decide who headlines a double-bill the likes of which are teaming up for the "Rock And Roll Means Well" tour cutting across the continent this November? The Drive-By Truckers or The Hold Steady ? Both their latest albums - Brighter Than Creation's Dark and Stay Positive , respectively - are solid though not career-defining moments. By virtu...
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Photo by Patrick MaroldEric Bachmann has worn many hats over the years. He started out as the hard-barking frontman of angular '90s college rock heroes Archers Of Loaf. He then reinvented himself as the lonely troubadour on the first couple Crooked Fingers records, terrain he revisited on 2006's gorgeous solo effort To The Races. And with the last couple Crooked Fingers records, in particul...
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Photo via MySpaceWith Comets On Fire, Ethan Miller has proven a certain facility with recreating the sounds and textures of a bygone era, namely the sprawling space-rock jams and fuzz-laden psychedelia of the '70s. With his other band, Howlin' Rain, he's demonstrated his stylistic versatility by recreating different sounds and textures of that same bygone era, namely the sprawing blues-rock b...
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Photo by Frank YangI am willing to bet that most everyone who was packed into the tiny back room of The Rivoli on Saturday night was there to see Ms Laura Marling, she of the fine Mercury Prize-nominated debut Alas, I Cannot Swim if not of the top billing on this night. But, assuming they arrived early and stayed late and took in the entire show, I am also willing to bet that they weren't jus...
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Photo by Frank YangThere is an upside to having never been especially fashionable, and that's you never go out of fashion. Case in point, The Wedding Present, whom over the course of their twenty-plus year career (including the Cinerama years), have never really enjoyed the heights of critical or popular acclaim but have never suffered the sting of backlash, either. Instead, they've simply p...
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Photo by Steve GullickSo next Sunday night, when most are sitting down to carve up a turkey or tofurkey or turducken and giving thanks for the last long weekend for more than two months, others - presumably those without families who love them - will be gathering at the Phoenix to welcome Austin's Okkervil River to town. And they'll be giving thanks that the Okkervil M.O. of releasing an albu...
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Photo by Frank YangElectro-funk duo Chromeo were far and away the best act at this year's Rogers Picnic, pulling off the not insignificant feat of getting the crowd dancing even though every move sunk them deeper and deeper into the mud pit that was Fort York. Things should be a little bit drier when they headline the Red Bull Big Bang dance party at Muzik next week on October 9. They're per...
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Photo by Frank YangDear every other touring band in the world: we appreciate your interest, but your services are no longer required. We have Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. My ticket to their show at the Kool Haus had been sitting on my corkboard for something like six months, and with every listen to Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, to say nothing of my ongoing explorations of his back catalog, I couldn't...
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Photo by Liam MaloneySay you're a band who's been around a while and whose last album got a good amount of critical and popular acclaim and a nomination for a major music prize in your home country. How do you follow that up? Well, if you're Murray Lightburn of The Dears, you dissolve the whole band with the exception of your wife (that would probably have been too awkward) and make the foll...
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Photo by Frank YangSo technically, I was correct a few weeks ago about there being a surprise appearance involving My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields and Gemma Hayes while the two were in town last week. Except instead of Shields sitting in on Hayes' show at Supermarket on Friday, it was Hayes making an unannounced appearance as support at the My Bloody Valentine show at the Kool Haus the n...
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Photo by Frank YangI'm immensely relieved that Caribou won this year's Polaris Music Prize for last year's Andorra, because if he didn't then I'd have had to find a new post title. Because so confident I was that this is how things would turn out, I'd already committed to... typing it. And I didn't want to have to hit that backspace key soooo many times. So there's your winner. And though...
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Photo by Frank YangIt had never occurred to me, in the decade plus that I've been listening to Loveless, that I'd ever experience it live. For starters, My Bloody Valentine were completely defunct for almost all of that time, Kevin Shields' reclusiveness and eccentricities having become a topic of musical urban legend. No, like much of the music I'd discovered in the '90s, I was at least a f...
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