In-store: Shad

Shad

Sonic Boom Records. Monday, May 24, 2010.

Out for a Monday night show by Vancouver-based¹ rapper Shad on the eve of the release of his third album TSOL. Though hardly a hip-hop guy these days, I've kept an eye on Shad's advancement, having seem him relatively early on in November '06² where he was a striking presence — rapping while playing an acoustic guitar and wearing an "I Want a Clair Huxtable" t-shirt. His trajectory has been onward and upward since then, getting plenty good notices for 2007's The Old Prince and playing to increasingly larger crowds. Truth be told, that was an album that I'd admired more than liked when it came out, and as such, I wasn't particularly on the lookout for his new one — even if I'd felt that his success was well-deserved for a guy who eschews most of the shallow, materialistic trappings of a lot of current hip-hop and harks instead back to the more conscious golden age.

A good-sized turnout filling in the basement for this, skewing younger and, it would seem, more towards a hip-hop crowd, though with a good variety of curiosity-seekers such as myself mixed in. Throwing himself right into the new material, Shad started with "Rose Garden" from the new album before reaching back to 2005's When This Is Over for "Rock to It". "This will be more like 'Jazz to it'," he commented, fighting against an unco-operative guitar at the start of the song before rolling with the punch and abandoning it for the set, while turning the song into a freestyle.

Backed on keyboards and bass by Ian Koiter, and his DJ TLO, Shad then proceeded to fly through a set that mixed older material in with the new, apparently doing some of the new stuff before an audience for the first time. Included in that category was "A Good Name", which merged the personal and the historical as he broke down the stories of his given and family names. He was joined by Relic the Oddity on "We Are the Ones" ("This is a weird song, I'm not going to lie to you," he told the crowd at the start) and got a strong reaction for the new album's lead single "Yaa I Get It", with many of the crowd already knowing the words. A clap-along version of "The Old Prince Still Lives At Home" extended into a freestyle, which might have been the best moment of the evening.

Some songs got dropped in for only a verse or two, but the group managed to crank out an impressive dozen titles in their forty-minute set. With no shortage of nible-minded rhymes and dexterous delivery — not to mention a wide-ranging variety of pop-culture references³ — this was a thoroughly fun and entertaining time. Certainly enough to make me realize I'd have to pick up a copy of TSOL.

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ Though raised in London, Ontario and born in Kenya.

² At one of the first Make Some Noise shows at the Toronto Reference Library.

³ Anyone who can slip in a shout out to Otis Nixon is all right in my book.