TRANSCANADARADIO is proud to celebrate Canada’s Current Cultural artists and their locations! Traveling across Canada’s vast surface and finding the best of the under and above-ground artists who are rooted in, Soul, Funk, Reggae, Beats, House, Breaks and all that afro-Jazz… and where to check them out in your favorite Canadian city! Pack your bags! We’re going on a road trip!
The Balconies — Rest Up
Politique — Old War Cold War
Just because we ran around Toronto for a week covering Canadian musicians doesn’t mean that we can’t find great acts in our hometown of Ottawa! I was at the legendary Zaphod Beeblebrox to catch two fairly new O-town bands: The Balconies and Politique.
As we wrap up our NXNE coverage, we wanted to give you one last chance to grasp a taste of what it was like to be in Toronto for one sweaty week of music. Check out the best images we took of NXNE (ignore the poor composition and low resolution; we’re very DIY).
It’s late Sunday night, which means I’ve just started to recover from Saturday night at NXNE. Here’s what went down:
**Bring more than one pair of shoes to NXNE** Two straight days of pounding the pavement to check out bands and then grooving to their tunes will do serious damage to even the sturdiest of footwear. The final blow was the Spiral Beach show at the Horseshoe; I should have taken their advice to remove my shoes and dance in my ‘tomatoes’.
**Toronto bands know how to represent** Seriously, the Hoa Hoa’s Friday night and then Spiral Beach last night? Pretty much from the moment they took the stage, they had a packed and sweaty crowd screaming and jumping until they could nary jump and scream any more. I particularly enjoyed the pylons, the speech bubble, and the ET finger-touching moment with the crowd. Check these guys out before they become so big you can’t get as close to the stage as we were last night (check the Flickr feed for evidence).
**Front stage is not for the meek** That reminds me, why do fans of bands get in line early, rush to the front of the stage, then spend the rest of the evening hating being there? This one goes out to the poor girl at the Horseshoe that spent her evening covering her ears and trying to avoid stray limbs hitting her. Other people who should not be front stage: NXNE photographers who take up too much room, stay too long, and refuse to dance; overtly drunken ‘friends of the band’ and their girlfriends.
**Listen to Rebekah Higgs** She has a wonderful voice and a big guitar. You are doing yourself a disservice by not checking out her cd.
**My ears are still ringing** Rock ‘n’ roll.
For me, NXNE has been a blur. A late arrival last night, Old Testament-style weather and Internet problems makes me wonder how I’m going to survive the rest of the festival. Here’s some quick thoughts on what I’ve seen so far:
**Don’t plan major travel on Friday the 13th** Seriously, I don’t know how we survived in our ‘83 Yugo as flash flooding and concentrated blasts of electricity battered us along the highway. Only the desire to rock kept us alive.
**Plan to dance on Friday the 13th** All the bands playing at the Silver Dollar Room had one goal in mind: sweaty booty grinding. A special nod goes to the lead singer of Oholics for bringing his Happy Mondays inspired Swedish dance moves to Canada.
**Swedish bands are weird** On that note, it was quite a trip to see Oholics. They describe themselves as a six-piece psychedelic electro-rock band, but you have to think of them in terms of The Hives meets INXS meets the Yardbirds. I mean, they have one member of the band dedicated to playing two tambourines at once and a sitar, as elctro-wails whirled around him.
**Band of the Night: the Hoa Hoa’s** These Toronto natives certainly represented for the hometown crowd. There music is a combination of groove and evil: you just want to dance and/or punch someone in the face. Their guitarist was great — loud, crunchy, articulate playing — and their bassist set her amp on fire. Major points for the predominance of hollow-bodied guitars.
That’s it for now. Off to a Vice-sponsored BBQ and then the Horseshoe for the CBC tract. Follow our exploits on Twitter and Flickr!
