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, and where to check them out in your favorite Canadian city! Pack your bags! We’re going on a road trip!
Caught these guys sort of by accident while walking through Yonge-Dundas Square on Thursday on my way to see Sabrina Korva, Stand, and David Martel play at Sunrise Records.
They certainly caught my attention with their rockin’ guitar licks and the massive crowd that had gathered to watch them play.
On Saturday night Doug and I got a chance to see Hey Rosetta at the Horseshoe Tavern. I really enjoyed these guys. The vocals were stellar! And I’m a sucker for string instruments, man. The upright bass and violin definitely won me over. And it’s always great to see a lead singer get totally in to the music they’re making – shows a real love for the craft.
If you haven’t seen them perform before, I suggest you do. But if you absolutely can’t, do yourself a favour and watch the above video.
On Thursday night, I also stopped off at Free Times to see Andy Sheppard in action. I’ve heard his name from dozens of sources as someone impressive to see in person so I had to check it out for myself. I’ve never enjoyed folk music this much!
But Andy is not just a great guitarist and songwriter, but he’s also a storyteller. He told crazy tales of musical adventures to every — from launching rockets in South East Asia, to dodging bandits in North Africa, to living through earthquakes in the South Pacific.
The Small Sins played on Thursday night following The Wet Secrets. These guys had a really intriguing electro sound. Often times during the set I found them to be similar to late 80’s Radiohead or mid 90’s Pulp though, as we all know, I’m hesitant to compare — but I’ll qualify it by saying that I totally love both Radiohead and Pulp so needless to say, these guys are great in my books.
My favourite song from their set was “On The Line” which has very catchy lyrics and a pretty driving percussion bit.
Like many bands Doug and I saw this weekend, Small Sins had a very enthusiastic tambourine player — which was super fascinating to watch! He was really into the songs which is always great to see!
But don’t take my word for it, listen for yourself!
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.
This was an act I was told I absolutely had to see as well — Sabrina Korva, whom I wrote about briefly before on TransCanadaRadio, put on a super rockin’ show at The Hard Rock Cafe on Yonge at Dundas on Thursday night.
One of Sabrina’s publicity agents, Diane Foy of Skylar Entertainment, was super nice and loaded me up with all kinds of listenables! She also introduced me to Sabrina who was absolutely exhausted after her high-energy show. This tiny lady really brought the house down with big sound!
Be sure to check her out!
It’s a small world — David used to play music with some high school friends of mine years ago. Recently I posted a Facebook note asking my friends to recommend great Canadian artists and I noticed David Martel’s name came up many times and with good reason! I can honestly say that this guy blew my mind. I went in as a nearly blank slate, only having listened to a very short clip of his stuff via his Myspace. But armed with the praise of my friends, I went to check him out at Sunrise Records on Thursday, the first day of NXNE.
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!
On Friday I sat in and participated in a very cool conference entitled “Ain’t Nobody Dope as Me: The DJ on Display with Jay Devonish as moderator and panellists Nasty Nav from NastyMix/Play De Record, Egon from Stones Throw, Lil’ Jaz who is an artist who also tours with Nelly Furtado, P-Plus, and DJ Grouch.
The topic of the panel was what successful DJs do to stake out their turf as trendsetters and tastemakers. They also swapped ideas about how new technology – computers, digital software, mp3s, podcasts and of course blogs – are changing the DJ culture and where things will go from here.
For your listening pleasure, I’ve brought the panel to you through the magic of the internet and a digital audio recorder. Enjoy!
The 10pm show of the night for me on Thursday night was a tough call — lots of cool sounding bands playing all over the city! But I was told I absolutely had to see these guys so off to the Horseshoe I went… and man, were they awesome!
Now, normally I don’t like to compare artists but I’ll do it when I can say ‘just as fantastic as…’ so, if you love the B52’s you will absolutely love The Wet Secrets! Though they told me “Us? If you love sex, you’ll love us!” Heh.
One would think that marching band costumes combined with B52-esque vocals would be far too over the top, but these guys really pull it off. I was absolutely enthralled by their funky beats and brass solos not to mention the cool majorette costumes — very slick.
This Edmonton based band really pumped up the crowd and got everyone dancing by playing original songs like “Secret March” and the hilarious “I Teabagged Myself (With Two Really Fucking Heavy Cans Of Paint)” — got a lot of laughing and chant-a-long from the audience.
