Results tagged “indierock”

"It basically started as a way to hopefully get free CDs." In what seems like a dream to those of us yet to turn our internet noise into an escape from day jobs and a licence to sleep in, Dan Wolovick has, in a few short years, turned his reviews-based music blog Two Way Monologues into a full-time job. "I became inspired [to put on live shows] by a friend from a band who challenged me for never doing anything [besides] criticizing bands in reviews, and I've never looked back."

The Diableros have always had the unusual ability to both show and grow; their jumpy beats and awkward vocals are way too in-your-face before you have the chance to actually hear what's going on, let alone absorb it, but eventually the structures unravel. The band's new EP on Outside Records, Old Story, Fresh Road, sticks close to this mandate, but a fresh lineup and streamlined recording process have also added a new focus and a clear direction.

It's hard not to feel a bit of affection towards Spiral Beach; they've always unabashedly embraced their youth and the restlessness (and awkward fashion) that goes with it, and in their element they've carved a genuine place into both the brains of moody music critics and the headphones of young Canadian music fans. The Only Really Thing, the band's second full-length (out today on Sparks Music), has a few hints of an experimental maturation, but mostly stays a little too close to the retro-beat pop that defined them.

                  

The eleventh edition of the Steam Whistle Unsigned Indie Music Series took place Friday night, and the brewery's Roundhouse was full of smiles, music, and, well, yeah. Beer.

If you haven't bothered to familiarize yourself with the overly precocious sounds of Toronto's revered Hidden Cameras, their fifth (already?) full-length might be a good place to start. Out next Tuesday on what seems like a long-lost perfect home for the Cameras' strange and wonderful indie-rock orchestra, Arts&Crafts, Origin:Orphan has tons of fan-ready appeal but burns slower than past releases, revealing a start-to-finish long-play that might appeal to a fresh crop of attention spans.

What started as a way to compile the prolific creative output of a west-end group of musician friends turned into not only a scene-defining snapshot, but a charitable project that has so far yielded more than eleven thousand dollars for the Toronto Daily Bread Food Bank. Friends in Bellwoods II, out today on Out of This Spark, is a second showcase of what Ohbijou sisters Casey and Jennifer Mecija's house can produce for a good cause.

We're cheating this week; The Wooden Sky's sophomore effort, If I Don't Come Home You'll Know I'm Gone, isn't out via Black Box Recordings until August 25, but we're excited about it, and there are lots of great upcoming releases to plan around. Throughout the vagrant Montreal-to-Toronto creation of this dense record of guilt, innocence, and wonders both abstract (God) and tangible (life), The Wooden Sky have bloomed into a resolute musical force who stand poised to carry the weight of much indie-rock respect.

There's an intriguing quality to the reflective and often eccentric scope of experimental bedroom pop. It's a romance perhaps born from the mythology-making years that Brian Wilson spent sequestered in his literal bedroom, or the similar (rumoured) window-blocking, beard-growing isolation of this generation's very own once-genius strangeboy Rivers Cuomo. While not exactly taking a page out of the lush, inextricable layers of the classic Beach Boys songbook (aside from some impeccable harmonies), Guelph's weirdo troubadour Gregory Pepper assembled his band of Problems to help him bring his self-realized musical smorgasbord to light on With Trumpets Flaring, available now through Fake Four Records.

The Junction have always been lumped into a scene that their radio-friendly rock-tinged indie pop didn't necessarily "fit"; rarely are 905 emo mainstays such as Moneen or the defunct Cain and Abel (reincarnated as the wonderfully riff-heavy Ulysses and the Siren) mentioned without also dropping the Brampton trio's familiar name. Another Link In the Chain, released independently today, is an aptly named album that may lack in songwriting innovation, but makes up for it in an audible forward momentum and maturity. It's a fitting addition to a catalogue that documents the band's old-fashioned, hard-earned place in the city's—and the country's—independent music consciousness.

We're the first to admit when we're slow to catch onto something, and especially if it's something this good. Now that we've taken a second to swallow our new-release flavoured pride, we'll get back to listening to Zeus's already-month-old EP, Sounds Like Zeus, the next sure-to-be success story for Arts&Crafts. Lucky for us, they're not going anywhere.

Anyone who follows this sort of thing probably remembers the oohs and aahs that followed after The Most Serene Republic signed to Arts&Crafts; they were the first non-Broken Social Scene-affiliated band to do so, but their inclusion was a natural fit. The Milton, Ontario, septet drew both praise and criticism for their proggy art-pop likeness to their label daddies, and on their new release, ...And the Ever Expanding Universe, they don't seem to be in a hurry to change many minds ("Phi 2").

When Three Gut Records ceased operations in 2005, it left a gaping hole in the larger Toronto-area music community. The Guelph-originated label was short lived but prolific and hugely significant, not unlike one of its primary acts and raisons d’être, Royal City. The promise of a once-planned posthumous Royal City rarities compilation has been lingering unfulfilled since the Three Gut demise, but earlier this year Sufjan Stevens' (a long-time friend and supporter) Asthmatic Kitty Records picked it up for release, and today is the day we can hold it in our eager little hands (it's distributed in Canada by Outside Music). A wise woman once said that you don't know what you've got till it's gone; awful clichés and Counting Crows covers aside, in the case of Royal City, she couldn't be more right.

A new release from mega indie(ish) entity Arts & Crafts can either elicit a dedicated excitement or a slightly more jaded (and healthy) skepticism. On one hand, there is an undisputed affinity for the little homegrown label that could—and did, and still is—and, on the other, there's the poisonous burn-out factor, the feeling that our reigning DIY community kings have grown too comfortable, too inclusive, too safe.

It's rare for something so new to have such an authentic old sound. Little Girls was born from the solo recordings of Josh McIntyre earlier this year, and with the recent release of their Tambourine EP on Paper Bag Digital, they mine a sorely underrepresented niche of assertively lo-fi fuzzy post-punk that sounds made for the sound system of a dusty record store.

Even a marginal indie pop fan should have a soft spot for Ohbijou—three years ago, their darling sounds and community contributions (both musical and social) helped define a new sector of Toronto's indie scene and made them an instant focus. After a recent signing with Last Gang Records, Ohbijou release their second album, Beacons, today (digitally, with a physical release on June 16), and it's a perfect reminder why their orch-pop left such a lasting impression.

Throughout his fifteen-year career, Hayden has been travelling a leisurely path from gravelly grunge-folkie to a more refined folk-pop sound. It's a transition still in progress, and on The Place Where We Lived, out today on Hardwood Records, Hayden gets a little help from his friends on a fitting next chapter in his ever-expanding sad-boy saga.

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There was a time—a brief, glorious time—in the late nineties and early two thousands when the word "emo" had become somewhat interchangeable with indie and was not yet a default joke about eye-obscuring black hair and all of the awful, angled mirror shots showcasing it. When some of the best of these nu-emo American pop artists (Death Cab for Cutie, anyone?) showed up in Seth Cohen's bedroom and then a barrage of commercials, the underground found its way up and into the charts, and fans were left with an empty (and very popular and profitable) shell of the worst parts of the genre; shiny young bands riding the re-brand all the way into Hot Topic and weird Livejournal role-playing communities.

When a band gets their start not by releasing their own material, but by remixing Toronto favourites such as The D'Urbervilles, Gentlemen Reg, and the Rural Alberta Advantage, the weight of expectation can be heavy. Borders, out today on Pheromone Recordings, is the debut full-length for Toronto/Guelph spaz quintet Green Go where indie rock meets electronica in the dark, and fight (dance?) to the death.

A couple of years and handfuls of shows can do wonders for a band with the potential that the Great Bloomers were oozing when Torontoist first saw them fill a sweaty Drake basement more than a year ago. Today, the Great Bloomers release their full-length debut, Speak of Trouble, on MapleMusic. A continuation of the danceable indie roots-rock from their self-titled 2007 EP, Speak of Trouble demonstrates a marked musical maturation and an embracing of eras past, complete with narrative lyrical recollections of youthful hope and exploits and an already-classic sound reminiscent of warm AM radio textures.

After releasing albums with other seminal punk/folk/blues artists such as Andre Williams (1999) and Jon Langford (2003), Toronto favourites The Sadies bring us their latest collaboration, out today on Outside Music, this time with tenacious musician and actor John Doe. Founder and frontman of the once-quintessential Los Angeles punk band X, it wasn't until Doe's solo 1990 debut, Meet John Doe, that he fully embraced the country direction X started taking in the late 1980s. He fits in just perfectly at the Sadies's Country Club.

In a change that just might be the culprit for all the Wayfarers, Toronto's film industry is shining brighter than it has in a while. As recently reported by the Star, Filmport, the almost one-year-old megastudio—still only in its first phase of development—is all but completely booked for production on various series, pilots, and feature films, most of them funded by major American studios. Despite in-fighting between the city and its various other studio owners over municipal funding for Filmport, this work is undoubtedly welcomed by the twenty-five thousand professional crew members and ten thousand unionized actors in Toronto.

Isn't a fantasy supposed to be unrestrained? A wondrous, strange imagining? It's doubtful that Metric named their new album, Fantasies, out today on Last Gang, with an intended tongue in cheek, but indeed what we get is a collection of bland, mediocre songs that don't offer anything new and don't really take us anywhere.

Snappy Answers runs every Saturday afternoon. Send your questions, be they tough or trivial, to snappyanswers@torontoist.com.

Photo by Darryl Scott.

Photo by Daniel Kahn.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset.

Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Once a week, the editors of each site—from LAist to Londonist—compile some of their most interesting posts into a brief blurb. It's Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse, and it appears, across the network, every Sunday.

Recalling an exciting time in Canadian indie rock when bands sounded less like accordion-totting balladeers and more like Dischord Records discography-totting caustic rockers, Republic of Safety are easily one of the most exciting bands currently making music in this city. Fronted by the charismatic (and Torontoist interviewed!) Maggie MacDonald, the band boasts the creative, angular guitar work of scene veteran Jonny Dovercourt, along with bassist Marlena Kaesler, saxophonist Martin Eckart, and former Quebexico drummer Steve Sidoli.

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.