Showing posts with label calvin love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label calvin love. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Recording: Calvin Love

Artist: Calvin Love

Song: Creepin

Recorded at The Garrison (Wavelength Music Festival 16 – Night 1), February 12, 2016.

Calvin Love - Creepin

Wavelength's sixteenth anniversary festival was a little less adventurous than last year's sesquidecade spectacular. For the first time in recent memory, the festival settled into one home base for three nights (along with one daytime excursion off-site) and the programming eschewed retrospective turns for a future-focused weekend, daring audiences to invest in the musical here-and-now. Sporting silver designs on his cheeks (looking, coincidentally, like Wavelength-celebrating W's), Edmonton's Calvin Love and band looked to be settled into a road-tested groove, rockin' up a series of cuts from last year's Super Future.

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Recording: Calvin Love

Artist: Calvin Love

Song: I Wanna Know

Recorded at The Great Hall ("Long Winter: Year Four, Volume One"), November 13, 2015.

Calvin Love - I Wanna Know

Returning once more to bring some cultural glow to the darkest part of the year, Long Winter kicked off its fourth season — once again building on three years of experience while trying some new wrinkles. As has happened in the past, the season's first event felt a bit like a "dress rehearsal" for the year, less reliant on a big headliner as the thousand little logistical wrinkles of throwing a one-night-festival got worked out. So while a new liquor licence meant drinkers weren't confined to the floor of the main hall (easing the huge bottleneck there) there were still some flow issues, including a couple sets in the restaurant that were (as far as I could tell) utterly inaccessible to event-goers. Another slow evolution is that, perhaps more than ever, it felt as if it was the non-musical component was central to the night as a whole, with music filling in the leftover space instead of vice versa. Of course there was still a lot of music — I caught at least part of no fewer than eleven sets. It's crowded and a little claustrophobic, but there ain't nothing else in the city like Long Winter.

This Edmonton singer was less of a streetwalkin' cheetah than his recent Hallowe'en jaunt would indicate, leaning more on sophisticated rock crooning and backed by the crunch of his eponymous band. The night's de facto headliner, the group certainly played with a "big room" mentality.

[Volume Two of this year's series is already announced for Saturday, December 12th (do note that it's not on its usual Friday) with music from Isla Craig, New Chance, LUKA, Nailbiter, Petra Glynt, LAL, Blunt Chunks and much more. The LW crew is also taking over the AGO as part of the Gallery's First Thursdays series next week.]

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Recording: Calvin Love

Artist: Calvin Love

Song: I Wanna Be Your Dog [The Stooges cover]

Recorded at Lee's Palace (DEATH TO T.O. V), October 30, 2015.

Calvin Love - I Wanna Be Your Dog

For its massive fifth year of Hallowe'en covers, DEATH TO T.O. upsized from its home at The Silver Dollar/Comfort Zone to Lee's Palace and the Dance Cave. That allowed it to keep its sprawling two-stage upstairs/downstairs dynamic even as it accommodated a bigger crowd than ever. Besides curating no fewer than seventeen (!) short sets, Dan Burke and Elliot Jones also kept things running on schedule, with one set starting quite crisply as the one on the other stage ended for nearly the whole night. And as always, the bands put in a lot of work — not just musically, but a lot of the time in trying to capture the look and mannerisms of the band they were covering.

Shirtless and wired/wiry, Calvin Love managed to project the chaotic velocity of Iggy Pop on stage, injecting a dose of energy as the evening worked its way into the "headliner" portion of the night.