Quite an eclectic line-up tonight for this week’s open mic. Shad, Madison Violet, Rachel Beck and Metric
Photo by Kate Ferguson
Slowcity.ca Open Mic Night - baby its cold outside edition
By Will McGuirk
Always like an open mic, good place to gather, chill, meet, collaborate, hear new tunes, reconnect with the old, so we have a new feature on slowcity.ca - our open mic; tonight we welcome Aerialists, Tariq, Merival, Bob Sumner, Abigail Lapell to the mic, all airing new tracks.
Bob Sumner Feb 1, The Dakota Tavern, Toronto
Aerialists Feb 6, The Burdock, Toronto
Tariq
Merival Feb 7, The Burdock, Toronto
Abigail Lapell Feb 27 , The Burdock, Toronto
Weird pals The Holy Gasp build a complex album around Oedipus
Who doesn’t dig the Bo Diddley beat - The Holy Gasp do and its sweet underpinning for a jaunty jointy alt-pop track, “What I Gotta Know.” These kats are a whole lot of 80s Queen St art-punk, like Shadowy Men jamming with the Shuffle Demons only in Montreal. The track is from their album The Love Songs of Oedipus Rex.
The Dreamboats strut like stray cats into the Horseshoe Sept 8
The rockabilly can be grease and Eddie Cochran but it can be letter jackets and varsity frat a la Happy Days too I guess as TO's bro-billies, The Dreamboats, make out. They cruise into the Legendary Horseshoe Sept 8 2018. Get ready to swing.
Benedikt releases 'Dreams and Blood', and drifts into the otherworld
"We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. "
Blaise Pascal
Haley Blais plays the Baby G in Toronto May 12
By Will McGuirk
Like the late Dolores O'Riordan of The Cranberries, Vancouver singer/songwriter Haley Blais has a gritty breathy voice, which roils up before popping with an icy tingle. Her new EP, "Let Yourself Go" has just been released with "Remove Tag" and "Small Foreign Faction" the singles.
Fabrizio Cammarata to play CMW at the Cameron House
By Will McGuirk
I miss Okkervil River, waiting for new tunes but Fabrizio Cammarata is a fair substitute. The Sicilian singer/songwriter last put out an album in 2011, "Rooms", and has released an EP in the interim. But he is touring still. He will be playing a few times at the Cameron House in TO over the course of Canadian Music Week. "Long Shadows" will feature on his upcoming album due November 2018.
Cammarata says on his website, the song features “total solar eclipse of memory. Two young women. They look alike… but not quite. It’s as if one was the idealized version of the other, the real one: in black and white, she’s naked, in the wild, like an angel, perfect. In color, she’s in a household context, where she can be smiling, crying, yelling at you, violent, let down. It takes a moment to understand. It only takes a total eclipse inside yourself.”
Fionn make cool pop tunes, open for Royal Wood at Massey Hall May 11
White Rock BC twins, Fionn, want you to suspend your first impressions, get past the looks and think deeper, think soul, think bones, think "Skeleton" and maybe skip around your living room while you contemplating how quickly we sum up things in just one glance or one listen and perhaps we could slow down a tad. The Good Lovelies are also on the bill. Ticket details here.