The City of Toronto is apparently considering a plan to eliminate graffiti in the city by charging business owners for having it removed from their property, regardless of whether the owners request such a service or not. Which means that if a bunch of kids tag the wall outside your storefront and the city spots it, they’ll come in to whitewash it and then send you the (rather massive) bill.
As with most cool things on Brave New Waves, you seem to catch them when your attention has given up for the day: lying in bed while the show plays by virtue of the radio’s sleep function (it was 1:30am afterall). I struggled in this state to hear last night’s Out Hud interview. Their concert was great, the tracks I hear from the latest release make me wonder why I haven’t bought the album yet, but the interview was hard to listen to. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got lots of love for Phyllis and Molly, but damn, if they didn’t sound like a parody of Moon Unit Zappa. How many ‘like’s’ does a sentence need? Is it a Berkeley thing?
I was trolling through some old Torontoist mix-tapes and found this doozy (right next to Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Sussudio” [!]). It made me giggle. I found myself saying, “No! Are they really that well matched?” I swear it’s like Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz. Use headphones for full effect and so that no one hears you listening to Nickelback.
There once was a paddler named Mason,
who crossed a very shallow basin.
He hit a rock
and split his cock
and now pussy he ain’t chasin’.
Today’s the last day to enter the contest.
I have this nasty habit of missing opening acts, which is annoying when the opener is Ulrich Schnauss (for some odd reason, I feel his name wants an umlaut). For this show, I also missed my pot connection, which really does enhance this type of music. In rock venues like Lee’s Palace, the subtleties in tunes by Schnauss or M83 get washed out by the bass. The weed seems to manage the bass blunting.
Seen from the distance of the magazine rack at the grocery store checkout line, Britney Spears and her SoCal chav hubby Kevin Federline resemble a trash-tabloid train wreck destined for disaster, charting a course towards liposuction, alimony and future episodes of the Surreal Life. But surely the moms-and-pops to be (not counting the progeny Mr. Spears has already apparently produced) wouldn’t seem so tawdry if they could just let us in on what it’s really like to be them …
When I heard that Ulrich Schnauss was going to be playing at Toronto’s Lee’s Palace, my reaction was decidedly mixed. On the one hand, a rock club seemed like a poor place to experience the sounds of new age keyboard bliss soaring through the skies (or whatever other hyperbolic description you’d want to apply to someone who sounds, in the most fantastic possible way, like Yanni on a hard drug come down), but on the other hand, Lee’s is literally just down the street from my house, which is nothing short of awesome.
As it turned out, standing rammed into a crowded rock bar to see an act better suited to stoned bliss on the couch was certainly not ideal, and the sound system’s bass threatened to overwhelm almost all of the delicacy of the music, but none of that really ended up mattering; just watching the bookish-looking little German hunched over his bank of synths pounding out some of the most epic and uplifting music imaginable was still a treat (seriously, it was like the first time I listened to “Chariots of Fire” when I was 4 years old).
And to top it off, once he finished, I was able to walk up the street, drop off my jacket and backpack that I still had with me from work, and then saunter back down to catch the headlining M83. How cool is that?
Ecstasy can make you feel young. Well, it can keep you going all night even if you haven’t danced well into mid-morning in seven years. With the price per pill down thirty dollars from seven years ago, you might as well keep dancing. (Of course, there is the possibility that it was just caffeine or speed.)
When the first song came to an end and the singer grabbed the mic and started talking on and on during Out Hud’s show at the Horseshoe last night, i cringed at the thought of receiving a self-important monologue from a sanctimonious NYC indie hipster. How wrong I was. Not only did dude smooth over a potentially disastrous technical glitch with funny charm and cute observations about the petty regionalist quirks of canadians, but his band recovered from their equipment setback by delivering a flawless set of rump-shaking disco-punk gold that did nothing but leave smiles on our faces. Aside from the never-delivered encore (apparently they don’t “do” encores, but my recommendation to any band that chooses a similar path is to raise the lights and make that clear when you leave the stage, because it’s a little bit rude to do it after people have been cheering and clapping for you for like five minutes), the party people in Out Hud rocked like it was, um, 2003 and made it seem like dance punk just might have a life beyond last year’s fashion magazines. Good times, indeed.
Our very own writer, ml, made two calls about last night’s Black Mountain show at the Legion. Of the crowd he said, “dudes with beards.” If the dudes didn’t have beards, they had budding beards or had just shaved beards or knew someone who could grow a beard. I’m glad I never threw away my plaid from the nineties. Raid your dad’s closet again. ml’s second pithy gem came just after the first few bars of Black Mountain’s opening song: “Wicked, now we don’t have to feel bad about not seeing Zeppelin.” Like the members of the Vancouver band, we were born too late, but damn, could they rock. From fist-pumping riffs to swirling wall-of-noise psych-outs, they could rock. That’s all you need with your 50.
