By Ashley Carter

From March 10 to 14, Torontoist is covering the crap out of Canadian Music Week, with daily concert and film previews, reviews of the latest action, questionnaires with your favourite and soon-to-be-favourite bands and industry stars, and more, maybe.

Fucked Up. Photo by lanny’s pics from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

It’s that time of year, friends! The sun is melting out that garbage juice smell, patios are nearly open, that guy who drinks on your curb is back, and that local music festival that’s almost as good as that other local music festival you like is finally here. CMW!
Or CMF—whatever we’re calling it now.
There’s a lot going on at this thing, as is the case with any citywide festival that makes all your regular haunts unnavigable: seven hundred bands, forty-five venues, and—most importantly, you lushes—last call extended until 4 a.m. to keep concertgoers satiated while waiting for the poor guys with the 3 a.m. set to go on. And as usual all the good stuff is pitted against all the other good stuff schedule-wise. So, to save you a pithy flip of the coin, here are our semi-educated best bets for Wednesday night, culled from the brains of only our most handsome staff music experts with the help of Torontoist’s ConcertTron3000 music aggregation machine.

Er, actually, Wednesday night is kind of quiet. At least as far as table-pounding show conflicts go. It’s really just between two homerun shows depending on your volume preference.
First up, there’s the Zeus/Jason Collett/Bahamas show at Lee’s (find out why Zeus is on the cover of every fricking magazine in the city! Be entertained or puzzled!). This show is part of their Bonfire Ball Revue Tour wherein all three acts perform one big set together, borrowing from all three catalogues, instead of each just playing their own songs. Also, Jason Collett’s album just dropped (wait, do we say that in indie rock?) so it should be a rager.
So there’s that, or there’s the Fucked Up show at the El Mocambo. Although it hasn’t been long since their much-hyped Toronto show at the Opera House that saw them play their Polaris-winning LP, The Chemistry of Common Life, front to back…ah, who are we kidding? We really don’t need to say much more about these guys. Get there early for Tropics (Slim Twig’s other band). Or after you get out of the Vivian Girls show at Wrong Bar.
Now, today’s wildcard, according to one Nicole Villeneuve, PhD, is Family of the Year at The Central. For the backwoods crew indie-folkies. More Ben Kweller pop than Band jams, and smart arrangements that range from lush folk Fleet Foxes atmosphere to jangly indie-quirk choruses all in the same song. They got it togetherrr.
Or! If you have lots of dollars, Alicia Keys is playing at the ACC, which is somehow part of CMW. This show has the distinction of being at the only venue where you can eat ten-dollar Häagen-Dazs ice cream bars while watching the bands. But we’d just go because Alicia Keys is so wise.
Full listings and ticket information here.