Ricky and I were really excited to see Polaris Prize winners, Holy Fuck, who were headlining the Thursday night Wavelength 500 show at the Steam Whistle Brewery. On the way to the show, we both concluded that we were going to be disappointed since a quick search revealed that Fucked Up won the Polaris Prize last year, not Holy Fuck. Two bands with Fuck in their names? What the fuck? I am familiar with both bands, but still get them mixed up. We proceeded to the brewery regardless since the probability of drinking beer was pretty high. It kind of reminded me when I bought tickets to see Woodhands, and I ended up seeing Woodpigeon. What can you do?
We missed the Fembots and Professor Fingers. We did see the Russian Futurists. I love the Russian Futurists. They have some pretty poppy beats. Their set consisted of mostly new material, with some Paul Simon action thrown in at the end. I guess this is due to some new cast members (The drummer from Shout Out Out Out) and because they have a new album The Weight’s On The Wheel, which is due out this summer. Cadence Weapon came on for an ever so quick cameo wearing the best 1985 sweater that I have ever seen. The dry whit of Matthew Hart between songs was pretty comical. Also, if you need a band T-shirt, I would suggest a Russian Futurists shirt. They are cool.
Next up was Diamond Rings. This was my first time checking him out, but after hearing that he opened up for La Roux a few months ago I was excited to see what he would bring. He sounded great and the crowd was really into it. There is something about tall people on stage. They just have a certain presence about them. Diamond Rings certainly has the super star thing going on. As far as big acts to break out of Toronto, I would say that Diamond Rings is well on his way. If I was to throw a party and wanted to give it some cred, I would be sure to invite Diamond Rings. Having a member of Sloan at your party just doesn’t cut it any more.
We stuck around to see Fucked Up, I mean Holy Fuck, but we didn’t stay long and hit the road pretty early into it.
Toronto – I am trying to become a better blog writer. I look at other music blogs and I admire their penmanship and the incredible detail they go into describe the music they are promoting. With that in mind, I decided to take notes (on my iphone) at the Laura Marling show. I will share those notes in a moment, but lets introduce the person whose show I just went to.
Laura Marling is the current IT girl in terms of British folk music. If British Folk Music was a magazine, Laura Marling would be the centerfold, probably with an acoustic guitar, in a forest, with some leaves, and maybe a copy of some obscure novel by some rogue author. Guys with beards, dark framed glasses, newsboy hats and vintage second shop flannel shirts (not the ones from urban outfitters or club monaco) would buy these magazines at their local non franchise book shops (also girls with really short hair, striped leggings, diy purses and 20 buttons on their jackets), and it would be a pay what you can kind of deal. They then will discuss the various articles (philosophy, how to build your own garden, decreasing your carbon footprint) in these magazines while sipping fair trade coffees at their local coffee shop, which also doubles as someones kitchen. They will then hate on the apple airbook trotting, hype machine listening lacoste wearing hipster in the corner who is tweeting away, sending various urls to the latest internet meme + reading the latest issue of vice magazine.
That was a bit of a tangent there. Sorry. I first heard of Laura Marling when she was a guest vocalist on the excellent Rakes song “Suspicious Eyes”. Then she popped up again in the Mystery Jets song ‘Young Love’. The thing I noticed about both tracks was the magnificent voice. It was definitely very British, a bit posh, soft and had a hint of fragility to it. She released her first album Alas, I Cannot Swim to some fanfare, combining strong acoustic work and sweet melodies with mature lyrics far beyond her years. Her new album I Speak Because I Can is due out March 22, 2010, also known as the Saddest Day of 2010 for Ricky because that’s the day I return from SXSW. Sigh. On Tuesday night, Laura Marling returned to Toronto for the first time in over a year to promote the impending release of her new album.
On to the concert! It’s definitely different to take notes at a concert. I felt like such a reporter, kinda. Not really. But here are my notes off my iphone:
lovely bones
whistling
neil young heroin damage done
guy in crowd who yells
That’s it. I guess I have some improvements to make. Lets talk about those 4 points.
Lovely Bones – About halfway through the set, Laura introduced a new song she had written for a movie but was rejected. She then dared the crowd to guess what the movie was. Obviously immediately people yelled out Twilight and Avatar. Obviously wrong. She then went into the song, which was acoustic based and exceptionally dramatic. I think she does dramatic folk songs really well. Like, they would go well in a western movie or something. At the end of the song, some girl yells out with a really confident voice ‘Lovely Bones?’ Laura immediately said no… I found this funny because you can tell that this fan had so OBVIOUSLY paid attention to all the lyrics during the song, interpreted it and then try to match it with whatever current movie is out there, and came up with “the lovely bones”…and it was so wrong. I for one, could not even name a movie out right now besides Avatar.
Whistling – During one particular song, Laura noted that the song required some fiddles but the fiddle player was not present, so she was going to whistle that part instead. Let me tell you , this was the most impressive display of whistling I have ever seen. All the notes were hit and it was breathtaking to see so much talent in whistling. Makes me feel shame I can’t whistle at all. One of the show highlights
neil young heroin damage done – Laura played a cover song, and said it was a Neil Young song before realizing she was playing a cover song of Neil Young in Toronto. I don’t know any Neil Young songs other then the rocking in the free world song and the one he sang on the last episode of Conan. Any mention of Neil Young these days brings me to the episode of Jimmy Fallon where he impersonated Neil Young. I wrote ‘heroin damage done’ because I didn’t know the song, but I guess that was the chorus.
guy in crowd who yells – There’s always one or two. Throughout the night, there was this one guy who at first started yelling shyly at the stage, but at the end as he gained more and more confident, was treating Laura Marling like his bff. Obviously a big fan, he even referred to her as ‘Laura’ in one of his desperate shouts to get attention from the lady singer. I don’t know about you, maybe I’m old school, but I feel it’s kind of weird to address people on stage by their first names if you do not know them. When Laura Marling forgot the lyrics to Alas I Cannot Swim, he yelled out the first few words to the next line. Helpful, but weird.
Overall the show was pretty good, despite having a very casual approach to playing live, Laura Marling can hold a crowd with her music and voice alone. There was no one talking during most of her songs and she had genuine banter with the crowd (explaining why she doesn’t do encores). I left the show rather satisfied.
Toronto – Do you remember the Fast and the Furious? Sure you do. Don’t tell me you didn’t shit your pants the first time you saw the trailer and saw that civic go underneath that truck. You did. Here’s a refresher:
What a Limp Bizkit song. Epic. The movie is about a dude named Brian O Connor trying to break into the world of illegal street racing, and get into Vin Diesel’s group cos they are really popular in that circle. So the analogy I’m trying to make is I’m Brian O Connor, the Toronto indie scene is the ‘world of illegal street racing’ and the people who run the shows are Vin Diesel. Somehow I’ve stumbled upon their world and despite knowing very little about the music or people, I keep on getting invited to attend these cool shows (aka street races). Thursday nights was one of these occasions, as I was invited to the secret Woodhands album preview show at the Smiling Buddha. I guess for this analogy to really be complete, I would need No Shame promoter Lauren to say some of these quotes:
“I live my life a quarter mile at a time. Nothing else matters: not the mortgage, not the store, not my team and all their bullshit. For those ten seconds or less(or the duration of the show), I’m free. “
“You can have any brew you want… as long as it’s a Corona. “
“I never narc’d on nobody! I never narc’d on nobody!”
Okay, the last one doesn’t make any sense. The whole analogy doesn’t make any sense…or it might make compete sense. Think about it.
Woodhands played this show to promote their new album Remorsecapade, which might have tbe best album cover of all time:
A robot shooting horses! genius. I have never seen Woodhands before, but I have heard great things about their live shows. For example, Jen from Narratives swears by them. So I guess I had high expectations of the show. Woodhands is a two person band, with Paul Banwatt on the drums and Dan Werb on the keytar as well as a bunch of other electronical gadgets.
Now before we get to the review, let me preface this by saying before this concert, I attended the LG Filmfest Awards show (to be review by Mark), which was open bar, also, JD Salinger died earlier in the day and I decided to honor him by drinking RYE and coke. A lot of rye and coke. So I was slightly out of my elements at the Woodhands show.
Amidst a cloud of smoke and streaming lazers, Woodhands pretty much synth rocked the crowd for their entire set. I felt like I was in a 80s music video. The keytar was awesome, there was definitely a lot of energy in their set, although I feel like the narrowness of the Smiling Buddha bar hindered Dan from doing some crazy stuff, like jumping. Some people were actually almost dancing, but there probably wasn’t really enough room for that. The set consisted mainly of material was off the new album, but Maylee Todd was brought on stage to perform the song Dancer. I can’t really compare and contrast the new material to the old material, but I would probably classify it as ‘similar’. The band handed out Woodhands towels afterwards for the sweaty crowd. It’s a nice tought, if it was R Kelly, he would have pissed on us.
A good time was had by all, with such an energetic show, it’s almost impossible to not have a good time. I always, ALWAYS like light shows too. I’m like a six year old, lots of lights and colors easily distract me.
For a more sober account of the show that doesn’t reference some random movie, Frank from Chromewaves also attended the show. Narratives will also have a review up soon too I believe.
I am too lazy to type out their tour dates, so I took a screenshot from their myspace page:
Toronto – I’ve seen Low a couple of times now and while I definitely enjoyed them, I will admit that I got a little bored during their sets. In fact, Low was a band I didn’t pay that much attention to until I happened to catch the brilliant documentary Low-You May Need A Murderer, more a portrait of singer Alan Sparhawk and his own set of beliefs and opinions than a straight band documentary. After that I became a full on fan and was excited to see what they would do next. I also discovered Sparhawk’s more rockin’ side project, The Retribution Gospel Choir. Sparhawk’s desire to rock out more suggested to me that perhaps even he was getting a tad bored with the “slowcore” dynamics of his dayjob.
So you can imagine I was excited to catch Retribution Gospel Choir when they played a show at The Drake on Jan. 25 … but I got really sick and was unable to go, so I thought why not a CD review instead?
Retribution Gospel Choir is definitely a more riff oriented affair than anything from Low’s back catalogue. In fact, a couple of these tracks could probably be slipped into the Q107 playlist without anyone making too much of a fuss. “Workin’ Hard” kicks out the jams like Boston or some other geographically named 70s rock band who enjoys endin’ words with apostrophes while “Poor Man’s Daughter” busts out some Crazy Horse-isms and “White Wolf” rides a riff that’s slightly reminiscent of a combo of ACDC’s “Dirty Deeds” and Danzig’s “Mother” while still sounding like an Alan Sparhawk song. They even have a song called “Electric Guitar.” How rock is that?
In a way, this is like a beefed up version of Low (bassist Steve Garrington also plays in both bands) and that is definitely a good thing. Perhaps other performers on the softer side of the musical spectrum should consider changing things up for an album or a side project. Imagine it – Bon Iver cranks it up to 11, John Darnielle recruits his favourite black metal musicians to play in The Mountain Goats … the possibilities are endless.
