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While this year’s Pop Montreal new-music extravagnza may have been an indie-rock music nerd’s wet dream, those of us too overworked or underfunded to take in a week of club-hopping in la belle province could take solace in the fact that Toronto, while unlikely to ever become as much of a hipster hotspot as its erstwhile cultural rival, at least gets a good selection of touring acts coming through on a regular basis. So in the spirit of enterprise, and thanks to a coincidental confluence of interesting shows passing through town at the same time, I decided to have a little festival of my own. My plan was to see five bands on four different nights, dragging my tired self out to some overloud dank watering hole each night and overwhelming myself with a gradual blurring of one faceless indie band after another - just like at a real festival!
Herewith, a summary of my very own Pop Toronto, which, while lacking in hype, depth, buzz and wrist bands, was still full of scenesters, cheap beer and hangovers at the office the next day.
An article over at Washington City Paper tries to address that question. The answer, in short, is that literary eggheads are ruining the art of music criticism with their nostalgia. The author, Jason Cherkis, then points to a surprising place for good criticism.
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?
