By my count I went to about 80 gigs in 2008, ranging from quick, stripped-down in-stores to all-day festivals. Most of what I saw was good, and rather a lot was really good. Given, however, that a lot of them fell into the category of "stood in a dank bar and watched band play", there isn't as much to say about them. Because besides the relative goodness of the music (which is either subjectively enjoyed or technically appreciated — neither of which I'm particularly well-equipped to describe), it's also that everything else going on that combines to make a show into a memory — and it's usually the everything else that makes for a better story. Of all the shows I saw, these ones stick out for one reason or another: some for what was happening on the stage; some less so.
The Airfields / Love Kills
2008-02-02 (Sat)
Sneaky Dee's
CD release gig on a cold Friday night, we headed down to Sneaks after taking in some of The Weakerthans set at Nathan Phillips Square. Inside, it was a pretty full house and the average age was pretty young, a very university crowd1. I'd caught bit of sets by the Airfields as other people's openers a couple times, and liked them enough to want to see them as headliners. On stage, the band played a rawer, more shoegaze-y sound that lent urgency but belied the depth of the songwriting on their album2. The bartender from Communist's Daughter played trumpet with them for a couple songs. Definitely a a show that left me a believer and eager to see them again. Which turned out not to happen, as shortly after this show, they more-or-less seemed to just disappear from the face of the earth.
Love Kills / Yellow Wood / People Noise / Pooma
2008-03-08 (Friday)
Rancho Relaxo (CMW)
Liked this band enough seeing them open at The Airfields show I figured I'd check 'em out again. Which led me to pick this Friday night CMW showcase. I wasn't part of the wristband-totin' hordes and just figured to stick in one place all night, so this was as good as anything. The night is most notable for being the only gig I snuck into all year — a rather pointless feat given that I actually had a ticket.3
As for the gig itself, People Noise managed to distinguish themselves by the fact that the band members went from table to table after playing, desperately trying to flog merch so they could afford gas money to get back to Kentucky. Pooma were the Buzz Attractors of the night, a Finnish combo doing a sorta widescreen ambient/electronically pulsating rock thing that seemed a bit out-of-place crammed into the tiny stage. On showcase nights like this, it's always amusing when staying put to watch the crowd size suddenly balloon for one band that someone, somewhere had hotly tipped, then quiet back down again. They were... nothing special.
Love Kills possibly had the bad luck to be JAMC revivalists at the same time The Raveonettes were more successfully exploiting the same shtick — feedback-laden pop songs, sunglasses on stage, black leather, stand-up drummer with kettle drum. They had some good material and were terrifically bracing in twenty minute bursts, though that didn't stop them from breaking up not too much later.
Laura Barrett
The Breeders / Flash Lightnin'
The Pigeon Detectives / Sunriser, Rock Plaza Central, Yoav
2008-03-09 (Saturday)
Soundscapes / The Phoenix (CMW) / Lee's Palace (CMW)
Three reasonably good shows but I felt adequately rock'n'roll given that I went to them all on the same day. On a mushy, snowstormy day, no less.
One of, um, four times I would see her in 20084, Laura Barrett played a pleasant in-store set in a fairly full Soundscapes, the windows fogging up from the crowd within while the beaming kalimbist, backed with the bf on banjo and "rockenspiel" floated through a short set of new and old stuff. Some bands are fine to see in a bar, but Laura Barrett ain't one of them.
The Breeders, however, did a nice job of filling up the spaces in The Phoenix. Kim Deal is someone who knows that good rock'n'roll requires a bit of sloppiness to it, and The Breeders' career has sort of been a series of gestures on one side or the other of that edge between the good sloppy and bad. On this night, the band was well-rehearsed and tight (well, relatively) and confident in playing the material but, being freshly on the road, not bored of it. A fairly full house, and while there were undoubtedly no shortage of nostalgia-seekers there, at least they were a more refined sort who were as enthusiastic to hear "Iris" as "Cannonball". The new material was also fairly well received, helped by the fact that it's mostly pretty good stuff. All told, an entirely satisfying experience.
The nightcap was a mixed bag, but on the whole okey. Notably memorable (and thus worthy of a spot on this list) was Yoav, who was one of the two or three worst things I saw at a gig all year. This dude played acoustic guitar with a looping pedal, his "hook" being that his songs were essentially dance music. Coming off like an A&R wet dream, eminently marketable to women who want beats with their sensitive, James Blunt-ish pop. Lamentable, insipid stuff.
The headlining Pigeon Detectives were far more entertaining, even if they were just as much of a marketable pop product (albeit more in the "NME approved" vein). Disposably hooky contempo British guitar rock, they were distinguished by the fact that they were as eager as hell to entertain with a greatest hits assortment of rock'n'roll swagger moves, and never acted like they were on anything less than the grandest stadium stage. This was especially true of vocalist Matt Bowman, who primped and fussed like Jagger and twirled his microphone cord like Daltry. I couldn't ever imagine wanting to listen to their music, but this was the sort of this that was enormously fun for forty-five minutes.
"The Kalimba Summit" (feat. Matt Smith, Laura Barrett, Njacko Backo, Kahil El'Zabar)
2008-03-28 (Friday)
Tranzac (Main Hall)
The Tranzac's not a bad place for a gig. Rather than a bar it feels like an old community centre turned into a rec room, and if a little ratty around the edges, it feels more 'lived in' than 'dank'. The event was a co-presentation of the Music Gallery and Wavelength, trying to break down some of the walls between the indie community and other musical scenes. Hence the cross-cutting element being the suddenly-fashionable plinky little thumb piano.
Matt Smith (who operates under the nom de guerre Nifty) was first up, operating as a one-man orchestra, layers of loops built up via laptop and a table of gear as well as his kalimba, finally adding several strata of vocals. It was decent enough, but for my money once you've seen someone do this once, it always sounds kinda the same – plus I cannot stop myself from counting the bars in my head, waiting to get to sixteen for the sequence to begin again.
Laura Barrett is pretty much the one who single-handedly made the kalimba a big thing in the Toronto scene. Her set was as much fun as ever.5 Njacko Backo, a local (via Cameroon) musician, was entertaining and full of sudden yelps and sing-song bursts, but tried a little hard to get a sit-down kind of crown into a stand-up-and-dance kind of mood.
The treat and genuine surprise of the night was Kahil El'Zabar. A master percussionist and AACM member, he played a wide-ranging solo set on a series of kalimbas and other instruments, every motion filled with an easy natural rhythm. At one point, feeling the vibe to be just so, he asked the audience's indulgence and launched into an unaccompanied soul song not unlike something by Gil-Scott Heron. The entire set was played with effortless joy and was quite mesmerizing.
As El'Zabar called everyone out on stage for a grand finale, I whipped out my notepad and quickly traced the degrees of separation, of stages shared and jams jammed: Charlie Parker > Miles Davis > John Coltrane > Pharoah Sanders > Kahil El'Zabar > Laura Barrett. Rather impressive.
“Concrete Toronto Music” (feat. CCMC, Sandro Perri & Tony Dekker, Smith & Wiernik, Knurl, Erik Ross)
2008-05-25 (Sunday)
Polish Combatants’ Association Hall
Celebrating the Concrete Toronto book with a show in one of the buildings from its pages, The Polish Combatants Association is sort of a cheerful bunker6 and inside has a cool lobby, like a 70's retro-futuristic version of a Legion hall, with regalia and old uniforms on display under a mirrored ceiling, and military-style paintings throughout and large versions of unit insignia etc.
The first act of the night was the dodgiest: an opera singer accompanied by solo saxophone performing a piece with libretto composed of texts solicited for the occasion by three local writers including Carl Wilson and Darren O'Donnell. Zoilus' was not so good, mostly phonetic plays on words based on the phrase "Concrete Toronto" ("Crone, rent to coot. Crone, contort toe./Not torn to coerce, retort on cot once"). O'Donnell, who I'm generally suspicious of, was more successful, a piece written from concrete's point of view ("Skin your knee on me/ I want to be warm")
Then the part that I was doubtful about going in, a noise artist called Knurl, who did this thing actually playing chunks of concrete, hooked up with contact mics and run through a table of effects. It started off with scratchy friction noises being looped around, with pictures of "smooth" concrete buildings like City Hall projected behind him. Then it shifted to a blurry pic of the bottom of the Gardiner, on Lakeshore. Which slowly revealed itself as a moving shot from a car on T.O.'s concrete highways, heading up to the 401 and back down the DVP. As it went along, things got increasingly abrasive and extremely loud – I was really glad I had my earplugs, I tell you what. It was loud enough that a fair number of people left the room during the performance, esp. once he started adding distortion, and some effect that, as he pulled one piece of concrete off another, it created a shrieking feedback loop. Though the piece ran a little long, it was pretty impressive.
Then two dudes on laptops, one doing sounds, the other images. This fell into the problem of live music from dudes with laptops: I never actually figured out which was doing which part, and what, besides hitting "play", the music guy was doing. It was generally pleasant electronica, the visuals a meditation on the subway bridge over the Rosedale Ravine, between Castle Frank and Sherborne stations.
And then CCMC (on this night standing for "Canadian Concrete Music Company"). The venerable CCMC's basic lineup is Michael Snow, piano/synth; John Oswald on sax; and a poet named Paul Dutton on vox/muttering/harmonica. To me, the closest sort of thing I could relate them to would be the least rockin'/most out there side of Pere Ubu – or some of Dave Thomas' weird solo stuff, as Dutton had a similarly sputtering sort of style. He'd brought up a page of notes and basically riffed on the Concrete Toronto book. In paraphrase, his rant was something like "They say concrete is good for you! It has calcium. So eat the concrete! The Gardiner is made out of concrete – so eat the Gardiner! That's the only way we'll ever get rid of it!" And riffing on about other concrete landmarks and the positive effects of consuming them. Then, holding up a fist-sized lump of concrete: "This is the appetizer! And this [holding up the Concrete Toronto book] is the menu!" All the while, sax skwonking and piano rattling behind, with interludes of analog-synth sawtooth static. Quite good fun.
Closed out by Tony Dekker/Sandro Perri, commissioned to write some sensitive songs about their relationship to concrete geography. They had three new ones, plus played GLS' "I Will Never See the Sun". Tony had a nice new song called "Concrete Heart" which was quite winning. Perri had a requiem for Exhibition Stadium called "Mistake by the Lake". A warm hug of an ending for a memorable night.
Mary Margaret O’Hara / Johnny & The G-Rays, The B Girls / Parachute Club
2008-06-07 (Saturday)
McCaul Street Stage, OCAD (Luminato)
McCaul Street was shut down and the shadow of the Tabletop acted as a benign version of Burns' sun-blocker that was ideal for an outdoor show. Billed as a tribute to the Queen St. W. scene of the 80's, the street was full of a greyer shade of hipster (leather jackets, sagging bellies) forming a little community of mutual recognitions and impromptu reunions. Openers were original punks Johnny & The G-Rays, who rocked out with a genial "us old farts still have it" kind of edge. They were joined by The B Girls for a few numbers, who brought a crusty kind of happiness to the stage. Good fun.
I was mostly there to see Mary Margaret O'Hara, out for a rare gig. I've never been a giant fan of Miss America, but I figured this was too unusual an occasion to miss. As it turned out, it was everything I was hoping for and more. I knew MMO'H has a rep as an, er, eccentric sort, but she was six times as crazy as I'd have guessed. Or perhaps 'daffy' is more apt. Never coming across merely affecting the role of an autistic diva, Mary Margaret just comes across as one of those rare sorts whose world is just a couple degrees askew from ours. Wearing a yellow librarian-style dress with a picture of Handsome Ned pinned to her hip, she proceeded to... participate in the gig, but always a beat off-sync, conceptually. Songs would start, and she would decide that the mood didn't strike her to sing that song. Sometimes the tempos weren't exactly as she wanted. She'd occasionally take notice of the crowd and recognize and wave to someone, then return her internal world. And then when she was done, it all just sort of ended abruptly. This was marvelously fascinating entertainment.
The nominal headliners were the Parachute Club, and I hung around mostly because J.'s uncle, who is pretty cool, plays guit in the band. It was a fine enough set, and best when they brought up some guests, including Lillian Allen and local reggae godfather Mojah. Though I find their politics of ameliorating uplift mildly grating, it connected well with the crowd of aging raging activist types.7 It was a pleasing afternoon and made me think ahead to 2025, when I'll be amongst the nostalgia seekers at the free Broken Social Scene gigs, thinking that it all didn't seem that long ago.8
Grant Hart / Kingdom Shore / Sandro Perri / Basement Arms
2008-06-08 (Sunday)
P.S. Mirvish Village (SoundAxis on the Street Stage)
Got to Mirvish Village in time to catch the end of Kingdom Shore, basically an abrasive string quartet augmented by a guy with a laptop and table of electronics treating the sound. I dug what I heard.
I used to be uninterested in Sandro Perri, given that I found his electronic/ambient stuff as Polmo Polpo to be rather dull, but in his current phase as an avant singer-songwriter, I think he's starting to win me over. He played an old Gibson and kick drum, and his band ran drums, tuba, and keyb. His songs aren't overly hooky, but they're melodic enough to get over.
Grant Hart came on with one guitar, a borrowed amp and no setlist, and following a pitch from some reps from Democrats Abroad that he'd brought over from the street fair, proceeded to crank out tunes as he felt 'em or as people called them out. Hart looked every inch the aging, possibly impoverished punk: tore up sneakers, slouchy jeans, white t-shirt (reading "INDIE MY ASS") with Camels tucked away in the sleeve and a Gumby-esque handkerchief on his head. He had a sort of crusty persona, going back and forth between trying to be endearing to the crowd (chatting politely with one woman's elderly mother) and abrasive (being slightly unkind to the poor soul who gauchely requested "Celebrated Summer").
He played a good selection of his Husker tunes ("Books About UFO's", "Terms of Psychic Warfare", "Don't Want to Know if You are Lonely", "Green Eyes" and more) and some good-soundin' solo tunes that I didn't recognize. Once he got going, he just kept throwing out more songs as they came to him, eventually well overrunning his timeslot. Eventually, I could see the soundman going over to Jonny Dovercourt, and gesticulating like "can you get this guy off the stage?", especially as the dark storm clouds were starting to roll in. At one point, he unplugged his guit from the amp like he was done, but seemed to think better of it, plugged back in and did about three more songs. At one point, he muttered, kinda to himself, "Now I should play a Dave Grohl song — why not? He appropriated everything from me."
I decided to stick around for the final act, Basement Arms, who weren't really known to me. I can't really improve on Dovercourt's description of them as a mix of "Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart and the Muppets". As if on cue, just as they started, the sky opened and it just poured. The stage had a little canopy over it, though the keyboard player was set up mostly outside of it, so as the thunder roared and the others played on, he managed to tug his gear to safety, as the crew hastened to cover the amps, monitors and speakers with garbage bags. The played a spastic sort of funky gutter blues, the singer trading barbs with his buddies who were settled in on the patio of the restaurant beside Southern Accent. I enjoyed this completely. Eventually, it mostly stopped raining, but the wind picked up and felt like it was going to start blowing gear away, by which point the band had had enough.
Ohbijou
2008-06-28 (Saturday)
Harbourfront Centre
On a pleasant Saturday afternoon I was, for one reason or another, weirdly tired when I made my way down to Harbourfront. But my sleepiness transformed into a sort of detached, focused mellowness that just let me lean back and soak in the orchestrated prettiness of my beloved Ohbijou. I'd seen the band my fair share of times, so it was a treat to see them showcasing some new material — even moreso given that the new stuff was very good. Sitting there in my drowsy haze as Casey Mecija sang songs about the Queen St. fire and riding the Bathurst bus, I felt – included in something. And then the pirates showed up.
In one of those mildly strange Toronto moments, a fairly large crowd of politely boisterous pirates made their way across the footbridge and headed eastward along the waterfront. Momentarily flummoxed by the procession, the band actually stopped for a minute just to watch the parade trail by before picking back up again.9
Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 / Seckou Keita SKQ
2008-07-02 (Wed)
Harbourfront Centre
The Harbourfront people pulled off a veritable hat trick for their world music festival, with Seun Kuti, Lee Perry and Orchestra Baobab playing in the space of four nights. This one was, by a titch, the best of them, though they were all quite excellent.10 With a band filled with vets inherited from his father, Kuti mixed old and new songs in a veritable throbbing kettle of funk. Also inherited from the father: no small amount of charisma, contained in Seun's wiry, cocksure frame. The music was so sweaty I felt exhausted after this one.
Agnès Varda presenting La Point Courte / In Conversation With Lynda Barry
2009-09-09 (Tues) / 2008-10-25 (Saturday)
Jackman Hall (TIFF) / Harbourfront Centre (IFOA)
The two best punk shows of the year, both from strong, idiosyncratic women who, by making it up as they went, managed to create something fresh and unique.
Varda, in town for TIFF with her latest flick, took the time for this screening and discussion of her first: 1956's Point Courte, a wholly unusual mix of neorealist docudrama and mannered art-film that prefigured both nouvelle vague and Bergman's Persona. Not a masterpiece of a film, but certainly a visually striking one. The night was made by the on-stage interview that followed, where Varda discussed the difficulties and the freedom of not only inventing her filmic language from scratch, but the practical mountains that had to be climbed by an independent woman in France in the 50's to make a film.
Alt-cartoonist Lynda Barry was awesome, like a crazy aunt from a novel. Full of joy in the face of a grumpy and spiteful world, she talked about her work, but the real focus was on her method for teaching creative writing. You are a storyteller, is her message. There's no trick to turning the images inside us into stories, just a certain amount of practice and elbow grease. Along the way, she managed to burst into song, discuss favourite parlour tricks and attempt to deflate the techno-evangelistic hype around wind power.
The DIY gigs of the year.
Chad VanGaalen
2008-10-04 (Saturday)
Sonic Boom
Nuit Blanche started so promisingly. Two mistakes were made: first, I must have skipped lunch. I had some running around to do, and was downtown in the late afternoon for some chores. It was a fine day out, and I decided to walk from 'round Yonge and College to Sonic Boom for the evening's in-store performance, which I was going to before meeting up with friends for some pre-Nuit Blanche camaraderie. Somewhere around the time I was passing through U of T, it seemed like it might be a good idea to have a taste of the cheap brandy that I was carrying with me for fortifyin' warmth later on in the evening.
I'd had a couple more nips before settling into the basement at Sonic Boom, a warm glow beginning to radiate out from my belly to shine the light of happiness on everything around me. This may be one of the reasons that Chad VanGaalen, who I had no particular expectations of, totally rocked me.11 After opening with a plinky-banjo number that reminded me vaguely of his not-particularly-interesting Skelliconnection album, the band switched over to the electric gear and suddenly were swinging their Crazy Horse mojo. I pulled my water bottle of apricot brandy from my bag and drank a toast to them.
Which, by this point was sorta like "snowflake becomes blizzard", as I'd had enough sips to mostly make me think that it'd be a good idea to have another. Walking east on Bloor after the show, it was right about at the sunset time that marked the beginning of the night's activities, and I was full of a boozy glow, a warm feeling of amiability and beneficence for all mankind. Plus, I was feeling the poetic pulse of the city flowing around me enough that it seemed like a fucking good idea to duck behind Rochdale to walk down bpNichol Lane. And, of course, while I was there, it seemed the respectable thing to do to raise a toast to the Concrete Poet.12
So now as I emerged from the laneway onto Spadina, things were getting a little wobbly. I figured I was in good time to meet my friends, so I took an extra loop round Yorkville before finding them. I was walking past a gallery, and, on a whim, stepped inside. It turned out to be this weird, surrealist stuff, both as paintings and also in an animated form, designed to turn big flat-screened TVs into slowly transforming objets d'art. The artist and the gallery people were all standing around drinking their white wine, so I pulled out my brandy to raise a toast to them, and for some reason I ended up in a long, rambling conversation with the artist about whether or not allowing a programmer to create the algorithms to animate his paintings compromised his artistic intent. Or something like that. The brandy had imbued me with a (probably unwarranted) belief that I could converse functionally with him in French.13
The rest of the evening (the part that was supposed to be the "evening" part of the evening) is probably best not dwelled on, save to mention it involved, in between some large blank spots, being bounced from a respectable Yorkville resto and a subway trip home navigated with drunken triangulation (the conductor roused me at Downsview and I assured him I knew where I was headed; I woke up next at Glencairn and managed to stay awake enough to get off at Eg West and switch trains back northbound). Got home, and collapsed solidly into bed. My Nuit Blanche was done and I was in the forgiving void of unconsciousness by about 11:30 p.m.
The Sea and Cake / Death Vessel
2008-11-14 (Friday)
Lee’s Palace
Of this one, I might have the least to say. Sleek, sophisticated tunes by an unassuming looking group (looking more like well-turned-out professionals in one knowledge industry or another than rockers) whose stage presence was as unassuming as their appearance. And yet... so well-crafted, with a never-ending variety of rhythmic variations bubbling under the surface. Sometimes the sense of the event, or a wacky bit of banter, or who was in the crowd are the things that make the night, but on luckier occasions the music itself just folds itself around you and serves as its own final cause.
No Age / Silk Flowers / Soft Circle
2008-11-21 (Friday)
Lee’s Palace
Of course, sometimes the spirit and the antics of the band bring it home. I think the apt term for No Age might be "guileless" in that they seemed to be living out their ethos, cranking out their abrasive squalls of noise with a sort of aw-shucks humility, just happy to be there and glad to be playing somewhere they could get a decent falafel.14 A bunch of youngsters up front formed a good-natured little mosh pit and the band gave the sense that they were more hanging out with, rather than playing for, the crowd. That didn't stop guitarist Randy Randall15 from growing increasingly adventurous as the gig went on – by mid-point duckwalking out onto the drink rails in front of the stage (which wobbled but held up) and by the end jumping on and shimmying down the stage left banister (which wobbled and then snapped) – all without missing a note. Left me with a pleasing feeling that the kids are all right.
“transmission.LIVE” showcase (feat. Pacifika, Woodhands, Wendy McNeill, USS, Radio Radio, Final Flash, Winter Gloves)
2008-12-04 (Thursday)
The Storyeum (Vancouver BC)
By sheer luck, Frank had a contest for passes to this show in Vancouver during the week I was headed out to meet The Nephew, and by luck I won. So, got a ride from my sister down to Gastown (like pretty much everywhere in downtown Vancouver, eerily empty after dark) and found my way into The Storyeum, a museum-cum-tourist-attraction gone bust, and now serving as a fancy corporate event venue. A lovely space, probably a warehouse originally, high ceiling, brick walls and so forth. The event itself was some manner of industry conference with this as the musical showcase. Meaning on the one hand, sponsor logos were projected on walls all over, but on the other it was fancy and well run.
Got there just before the first act went on, a vaguely exotic worldbeat/MOR band. Not terrible, but slightly dull. Best thing going on was in the audience, a striking chick across the room that beguiled my eye. By the time the band finished, I was convinced I should step over to chat with her. I'd been rapidly mentally flipping through my ambits, wondering what possibly interesting thing I could say, and thinking, like, probably nothing. As I stood there, running through scenarios in my head, I saw her walking away from the stage area.
Shot down before even starting, I stood around for a couple self-castigating moments, feeling dumb and mopey. Unsure what to do with myself while waiting for the next act, I decided to wander. Following some people through a large doorway at the far end of the room, I suddenly realized there was a whole second room at hand, with a second stage. Toronto's Woodhands were on and must have just started. Woodhands are a band I'd not previously been won over by, their keytar-based DOR seeming a little silly, frankly. As I moved up to towards the stage, I spotted that same chick, mildly bopping away, and I fell in love a bit and felt simultaneously crushed by, well, mostly being myself. Just then frontman Dan Werb — a true rock'n'roll nerd if I've ever laid eyes on one and probably understanding these things— started chanting repetitively, "Why – can't – I / speak to you?" Sometimes at the right moment the most unlikely band will say the exact thing you're thinking.16
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