Results tagged “elliottsmith”

Toronto’s Five Blank Pages have been making delightful, rough-edged indie rock for the last four years, and with the release of Last Blush this Friday, the band enters an exciting new stage in their sonic development. Their first full-length record since morphing from frontman Noyan Hilmi’s solo project noyz in 2003, Last Blush promises to deliver the same fragile-voiced power of their 2004 EP, Spaces to Occupy and Abandon, a well-received slice of Brampton-bred pop that managed to recall Elliott Smith at the same time as the slightly more raucous bands that put their hometown on the musical map. Having made the 905 / 416 leap to Toronto, the band, composed of Hilmi, wife Pinar Ozyetis, sister Chelen Hilmi, and non-relative Rajiv Thavanathan, will be celebrating their new records’ release at that most Torontonian of venues, the Horseshoe Tavern, this Friday, October 19. Featuring openers Tin Bangs, Infighter, and Elephant, this will be awesome, so you should probably go.

At the end of the second verse of one of Bright Eyes' new songs, "Reinvent The Wheel"—a eulogy for a dead musical idol, possibly Elliott Smith—lead singer Conor Oberst laments to his fallen hero that "you never understood what we loved you for." Coming as the line does in the song, with guitar chords and drums emphatically struck together to highlight Oberst's voice and the backing vocals, the moment is both uplifting and tragic, a beautiful example of the ambivalence and catharsis that runs through much of Bright Eyes' work. But standing in the Opera House at the band's concert last night, surrounded by an ocean of half-drunk couples with side-bangs awkwardly making out, half-pretty under-aged girls wondering when the slow sad songs were going to start, and most of the rest of us just wondering when it was going to get good, it was hard not to feel that Oberst's lyrics lamenting the misunderstanding of a crowd's love might very well apply to him.