New Spins: Shows from last weekend (Feb. 24-25)

Last weekend I finally made it out to some great live music after being sheltered indoors on a multitude of winter weekends. Here's the run down.

Friday night saw The Great Hall in Toronto host the Daps Records party. Check out tracks from some of the bands who played:








Saturday night brought a last minute adventure to the Tranzac in Toronto, where label Out of This Spark was celebrating 5 years. Getting there late, and the 2-room nature of the event meant having to pick and choose, but the pickins were good. Though not footage from the event, here's what the bands we saw can offer:

New Spins: February 21-26, 2012

February has brought a good string of releases. With a few live videos and a few album cuts, here some of the best tracks from last two weeks of new records:

Field Music - "(I Keep Thinking About) A New Thing" from Plumb


Sleigh Bells - "Comeback Kid" from Reign of Terror


Shearwater - "Animal Life" from Animal Joy


Grimes - "Oblivion" from Visions


Perfume Genius - "Dark Parts" (at 2:33) from Put Your Back N 2 It


John Talabot - Depak Ine from Fin

New Spins: February 5-12, 2012

New week, new playlist. Feeling organic and guitar oriented this week. Dance with your inner hippie, cry yourself to sleep, or just bathe in the bliss this time around.

Set to the hard beats and stark guitars of "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings" dark twists follow each step of hedonism, foreshadowed with a bloody awakening on the pavement. Last week, I posted a video by The Do directed by Noel Paul, who with Stefan Moore, are the directing pair 'That Go' responsible for this fantastically shot Father John Misty clip. 



Merival (Anna Horvath) creates crushing splendour; future desires sung to an empty apartment. See her play El Mocambo in Toronto on March 7th, look for her album (hopefully) this winter from Mudtown Records or hear her as part of the collaborative efforts of First Rate People.


Dr. Dog is new to me - a random long-tail find courtesy of aggregator Metacritic - but by no stretch, are they new. Here's a live version of "Lonesome" from the Pennsylvania psych-rockers' 7th (???!) album Be The Void thanks to WFUV.


Fresh off a tour promoting his solo album The Outcome of Weather, Leathan Milne (also of Miami Device & Zoomafloome) hints at elements of Sun Kil Moon through lush harmonies and open guitar chords in his gorgeously sad song "Here I Lie With You."
 


She caught my heart with Failer almost 9 years ago now. Voyageur has garnered a lot of attention lately and the better writers have paid attention to Kathleen Edwards' ability to tell stories and captivate with a voice that sounds at the edge of breaking under the sheer weight of emotion behind it. Album production set aside, here's Edwards in her own light.


In about a month, Baltimore via Montreal quartet The Barr Brothers (not to be confused with Guelph's Barmitzvah Brothers) will play the Great Hall in Toronto with Little Scream, in what is undoubtedly, the show I'm most looking forward to this winter. As part of a CBC series, here they are handing vocal duties over to Francophone indie-folk singer Marie-Piere Arthur on the shiver-inducing "Beggar In The Morning."

New Spins: January 29 - February 4, 2012

It's been an incredibly long time since I last posted. Travel and life have interrupted my usual patterns of devouring everything I can get my ears on. Back with renewed appetite, here's what I've been voracious about lately. Quiet, loud, invigorating, enthralling, bohemian, garage, folk, bliss, post-metal batch of miscellany... eat up, it's damn good stuff.