Reviews

Summerworks: Diamond Rings, PS I Love You, August 11, Upper Ossington Theatre

Posted on August 12, 2010 by Ricky in Summerworks | 3 Comments

Toronto – A very good Wednesday night at Summerworks was spoiled when we walked to the House of Poutini after the show and realized it was closed. Having played a soccer game, going home, eating a quick and small portion of black bean salad and then going to the show, I didn’t have the chance for a proper dinner. The show was great and I wanted to cap it off with poutine. They were CLOSED. Amazing. I wasn’t aware it was Wednesday. Worse of all, I dragged fellow bloggers Jen Polk and Joe from Mechanical Forest Sound along with me on my quest to fill my stomach with potatoes, cheese curds and gravy. Now they were there standing with me, dejected, empty handed and probably hungry. I felt that perhaps this was my White Castle moment, only I wasn’t high. I wasn’t even drunk, despite sneaking in a small little bottle of cognac into the theatre.

The Diamond Rings set at Summerworks Festival ended with a new song for an encore, called Leftovers. With PS I Love You on stage with him, this song definitely had a strong almost new wave meets grunge rock vibe to it, and it was good. Each line of the song was punctuated by a WOOOOOAH that might have sounded contrived if it didn’t sound so good. I’ve concluded that John O’Regan can write a perfect pop hook in his sleep.

One of the beautiful things about local shows is that you know if their friends are in town or something, they’ll show up for the set and there will be some kind of collaboration. This was such the case for the last two songs of the Diamond Rings set, when PS I Love You was invited back up on stage to do the two biggest hits of each act – Facelove and All Yr Songs. Both songs sounded awesome and I marveled at how good the rock version of All Yr Songs sounds live. That song is probably the perfect pop song, the hook on it is amazing. You get the feeling if someone like Rihanna got a hold of it, it would become the biggest song of the summer. The drummer and guitar added a nice rock feel to it that I enjoy. PS I Love You’s Paul Saulnier is quite a talented guitarist and I enjoyed the nice guitar solo he added to that song. Luckily for us, Joe from Mechanical Forest Sounds recorded it so you too, can enjoy it.

Having seen Diamond Rings a few times, I was quite please to hear some tunes I had never heard before. All of it was good. I like how he occasionally incorporates 90s style mid song raps into his songs. I think that was influenced by New Kids on the Block, where during the middle of a pop song, Donnie Wahlberg would deliver a rap out of nowhere. The more I listen to Diamond Rings, the more I realize it’s a great homage to 90s style pop music, mixed in with the electronic DIY influences of the 2000s. It’s a great blend of nostalgia and freshness. Naturally, the singles Show Me Your Stuff and Wait and See got the best responses from the audience, which was, for once, a nice balance of girls and boys. Did I mention I love summers?

When Diamond Rings took the stage wearing some sort of makeup with a 1992 Blue Jays shirt, I was once again reminded of how much stage presence the dude has. It’s quite hard to be up there on stage all by yourself but John O’Regan pulls it off quite naturally and his appearance instantly commands your attention. The crowd, which was half sitting and half standing during the PS I Love You set, instantly crowded up a little closer when he took the stage.

I was so glad that the intermission between acts wasn’t as long as the intermission for the Hidden Cameras show on Friday. That intermission was so long, I could have went home, marinated some ribs, put it in the fridge for awhile, pulled it out, go to hardware store and buy a smoker, hike into the forest and cut down some hickory or mesquite wood, go home, set up the smoker, cook the ribs and then ate it. This intermission was nice and brief.

Openers PS I Love You impressed me with their set. As you may recall, I wasn’t overly impressed with their set at NXNE. I think that was partially because of who came before them (Japandroids) and the time of the night (1 am). This time around, I got a nice dose of 90s era grunge rock. I didn’t hear the track Facelove, but I guess that was a surprise for later. For a band with just one guitarist and one drummer, they made quite a racket and their songs while immersed in a dense guitar sound did have elements of pop to it, with Paul Saulnier showing us his different vocal ranges with some of his screams and yells.

In case you didn’t know, PS I Love You and Diamond Rings are two acts that are quickly rising through the music scene. Diamond Rings has been a Pitchfork endorsed youtube sensation with his videos All Yr Songs, Wait and See and Show Me Your Stuff and PS I Love You released a critically acclaimed single/EP last year as well. Both acts were playing at the Upper Ossington Theatre as a part of the Summerworks Festival.

I went into the Ossington Theatre on Wednesday expecting a good show and it was delivered as promised.

I re-watched the movie Memento earlier this week. It was good.

Diamond Rings feat PS I Love You – All Yr Songs (live 2010-08-11) by panicmanual

SummerWorks Reviews: All of Him, Hanging of Francoise Laurent, The Kreutzer Sonata

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Brian in Everything, Reviews, Summerworks | 2 Comments

promo shot of Ted Dykstra in The Kreutzer Sonata

We’re in the latter stages of the ten-day SummerWorks festival, and unfortunately I must report that I haven’t seen nearly as much theatre as I’d have liked. The stresses of adjusting to a new job after being unemployed for several months has put a damper in my fest attendance, and at this point I’m not sure if I can even commit to more shows the rest of the week. How does Ricky go to a half dozen shows a week, review them all, and find time for full-time employment anyway? This I will never understand.

Anyway, I have a few shows I did see that I haven’t reviewed yet, so I’ll knock those off one at a time here.

All of Him is less a play and more of a…well, to be honest, I’m not sure what to call it. A seminar, maybe? The subject is Pat Pillay, the playwright/performer Tanya Pillay’s father, and the challenge is this: how do you reconcile what you know about a loving father with accusations that he’s committed a terrible crime?

There’s no real answer in All of Him, but it’s not for lack of trying. Amidst an audience largely made up of her family and friends, Tanya Pillay tells the story of her father, encourages the audience to ask questions and express their opinions, and even tried to greet everyone before the show started (I had to admit, while sitting next to a friend of the family who I’d been chatting with, that I had no idea who she was, I just got a ticket because it sounded like the most interesting sounding in it’s time slot. She was thrilled).

Pillay has a projector and screen set up to show pictures and a handful of props that are passed around the audience. She tells her father’s story without shame, admits it took her years and a great deal of therapy to come to terms with him and the things he was accused of doing, and tries to get the audience to ask anything they can think of, no matter how unpleasant it might be.

On this night the audience seemed a bit reluctant, maybe because it was so full of people who knew the family, although it was interesting when Pillay’s mom and one of her cousins who had no idea his uncle had such a past spoke up. It’s a show that’s pretty raw, and could probably use another 5-10 minutes of stimulating content so that it doesn’t have to rely on a talkative audience to feel complete. Still, Pillay is an engaging performer, and it’s a show with potential.

(after the page break: a hanging, and my favourite show of SummerWorks)

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Concert review: Maps and Atlases [Horseshoe Tavern, August 7, 2010]

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Gary in Concerts, Everything, Reviews | Leave a comment

Maps and atlases, SXSW, March 17

Toronto – “In the sweltering heat 17C heat of Austin TX this March, covered Maps and Atlases, we have. But math rock they make, we did not know.”

Alright. Yoda.

Although I know little about music, math is something that I am inclined to check out. So I went to see them again, with the expressed goal of discovering if there are equations behind their music. That’s when I felt that there’s a little green midget behind the stage fiddling with the cables, making great music that theoretically flows as well as the septic tanks at Ashbridge’s Bay. Believe it or not, I ran their songs through a Matlab program and found that cumulative autocorrelation of their songs isn’t much more interesting than other bands… but then again I’m no expert in math and don’t know if that’s even a measure for anything. So I don’t know about an equation – but there is definitely a madness to their methods.

We walked into the Horseshoe Tavern around 12am, about 10 minutes after the quartet started to play. I have heard several that they played this night, for example, Carrying the wet wood, Pigeon, and Banished be Cavalier before. Eventually I was able to correlate this set almost entirely back to their new album – Perch Patchwork, which just came out a month ago. I might mention that this is their debut full album. I guess on the strength of EPs alone they have built quite a following. Of the 100+ people there, many were fist-pumping to the tunes and on-beat. At first I ran into the same wall that I did at SxSW – I was analyzing it too much, and couldn’t bring myself to enjoy the music. It took me about 5 minutes to settle down and start to really enjoy the twists and turns. I feel that their songs are sequences of musical non-sequiturs. Beats of the singing change mid-bar, melodies turn into slides. The title song Perch Patchwork is a good example. I still couldn’t sing along on the basis of the melody. The first time I heard it, my brain went ballistic and thought that it’s dissonant. But the music grows on you. I have not updated the good vibes when listening to them – a good thing. When I put the new album on shuffle for the first time, I couldn’t even catch the transition between songs. It’s either that smooth, or they have just successfully brainwash me for those musical transitions to sound normal. The Charm might be the most normal song they have on this album – the incessant marching drum forces a large contrast with the lament, giving the feeling of no return. Solid Ground is quite pedestrian – but look over it because it sounds like Magnolia’s soundtrack and nothing can be wrong with that movie. Dave Davidson’s voice is slightly thin and agile enough for what the scores demand. The bass and guitar don’t work the audience overly hard. To add to that, the band is very gentlemanly and genial, without the stereotypical hipster attitude. Mathematical precision, I presume. I think the Canadian crowd really appreciated that fact. After about 45 min of play and 3 more encore songs, Maps and Atlases took their bow.

You can find one of their more “famous” numbers here free: Pigeon has a memorable guitar hook. Was, is a cool instrumental piece. I liked Living decorations and Perch Patchwork. So I guess this is also a solid YES to their new album. Math (or little-green-man) on!

Maps & Atlases – Living Decorations by FatCat Records

SummerWorks Review: Homegrown

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Brian in Everything, Reviews, Summerworks | 10 Comments

It’s tough to separate Homegrown from the controversy it’s stirred up at this year’s SummerWorks festival (I posted links to the Toronto Sun articles that created that controversy in my preview article here), but let’s try.

Homegrown is a bad play. It’s not a bad play because it is sympathetic to terrorists, or because it got arts funding from the city that the Toronto 18 tried to bomb. It’s a bad play because it’s very badly written.

Homegrown is based on the story of playwright Catherine Frid and the interactions she had with Shareef Abdulhaleem, a man alleged to be part of the Toronto 18 bomb plot, while he was in prison. Cate started visiting Abdulhaleem with the goal of writing a play about prison, and ended up becoming obsessed “with separating fact from hype in the face of the uncertainty, delays and secrecy in his case,” according to the program.

Clearly there’s a good story in here somewhere, but Homegrown doesn’t tell it. Instead of separating fact from hype, it can’t separate fact from the playwright’s opinion. Frid’s opinion is pretty clearly that Abdulhaleem hasn’t really done anything wrong, or at least that he’s been treated unfairly by the system. That’s a fine opinion to have, but rather than explaining it or defending it, it’s like Frid just repeats it over and over again, without really backing it up. Sure, Abdulhaleem should’ve gotten to trial faster. Sure, the accusations about how long he was kept in solitary, if they’re true, are a serious matter. Sure, the fact that star witnesses in the government’s case were highly paid informants and probably not the most scrupulous of fellows is troubling. But none of this makes Abdulhaleem innocent, and in fact, if everything happened the way it’s shown in the play, I think he’s probably guilty of his charges.

The parts of the play that don’t feel repetitive feels badly developed. The part of Cate (played by Shannon Perreault) is especially poorly written, ironic since that’s the part the playwright should know best. There’s no real feeling or explanation for why she gets so caught up in Abdulhaleem’s story. The plot point about her long-term relationship falling apart because of her obsession feels like it’s added just so that Cate can rant at her boyfriend in a scene about how “we get the government we deserve,” and name-drop Maher Arar a couple of times, because it doesn’t fit anywhere else. Lwam Ghebrehariat, the actor who plays Abdulhaleem, does a fair job, but has some pretty nonsensical scenes to deal with, including one where he hallucinates about his cats dying without him to take care of them that feels totally out of place. The plot spends quite some time on the stories of two of the informants in the case, Mubin Shaikh (Omar Hady) and Shaher Elsohemy (Razi Shawahdeh), but then reveals that Shaikh had nothing to do with Abdulhaleem being arrested so his scenes are largely irrelevant to the plot. Abdulhaleem says his court-appointed lawyer isn’t competent enough to orchestrate a good defense, but then he’s never mentioned again, leaving me to wonder if Frid even talked to Abdulhaleem’s lawyer in all this. Part of Abdulhaleem’s trial is done on-stage, but it’s compressed in such a way that by the time the judge’s decision plays in a recorded voiceover I was left wondering “is that it?”

The most interesting part of the show is when Ghebrehariat reads the letter that the actual Abdulhaleem wrote to the festival in support of the play. But the most interesting part of Abdulhaleem’s story, as he tells it – the part where he got caught up in a terrorist plot because he thought the best way to deal with it wasn’t to call the police, but to try and control the situation so that as few people got hurt as possible – is largely put aside. Instead, we get “When Cate Met Shareef,” if you will, and if you can forgive me for being flippant over a play about terrorism. Just how much Abdulhaleem knew or did – whether he knew about the plan to short the TSX before blowing it up, whether he really did buy the fertilizer, whether he did anything on the stand besides yell to make the judge call his behaviour erratic and throw out his entrapment motion – is never really elaborated on. The only mildly interesting part of Cate’s story is when she tries to get a copy of some court documents, but is foiled by a bureaucrat in glasses (Hady again). We’re left to fill in the blanks about whether this is shady government cover-up stuff or not ourselves. I’m going to go with “no, probably not.”

Controversies aside, Homegrown isn’t bad because it’s sympathetic to an alleged terrorist, or because grant money was used to make it. It’s bad because it’s…well, it’s just bad. There is probably a good story to be told about Shareef Abdulhaleem. Maybe it’s one that will send ripples up the justice system and make all of us re-think what we know about terrorists and freedom in Canada. Or maybe not. Either way, Homegrown is not that story.

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