Band Booking: Talking Warm Fuzzies with Ell V Gore

Ell V Gore is a Toronto goth-rock band who’ve been churning out rockabilly and no wave-inflected tunes for about three years now. Starting off as Brides, a sprawling multi-instrumental project combining brass instruments with more conventional rock instrumentation, the group, led by Elliot Jones, has since become a more stripped down affair, and has started to gain recognition since the release of the EP Sex Static over the summer. When I was living in Toronto, I saw different versions of Brides play […]

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Band Booking: Talking Chiptune and Cyberpunk with Infinity Shred

Last week, the highly-anticipated Grand Theft Auto V was released, making almost $1 billion on its first day. Coupled with the fact that gross revenue from video game sales eclipsed that of the film industry in 2005, it seems logical that video game culture would have begun making inroads into other realms of pop culture. Digital music has always made reference to the midi tracks of early video games; as technology changes the tools we use to make music, the impulse to revel […]

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Band Booking: Talking Pynchon and DeLillo with Grooms

I saw Grooms play their album release party for their new full-length Infinity Caller at Death By Audio on August 31st. It was maybe the first time I’d been to the venue since the summer began where it didn’t feel like a sauna. The gig was full without being packed in a way that would encourage belligerence. Like a lot of their 90’s throwback peers, Grooms and their fan base nurture a kind of slacker-oriented, music nerd atmosphere at their shows, […]

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Band Booking: Talking Indonesian Folktales with Trabajo

The best music makes you hear sounds in new ways, reframing and re-contextualizing the components of a song so that they create something novel and hopefully unique. In the same way that David Bowie took funk music and gave it an arch, English twist, good music proceeds in a zig-zag, sourcing known materials to produce something that moves the art form forward. It’s rare enough to find a band that genuinely tries to do that, and that’s totally fine. A lot […]

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Band Booking: Talking Black Magic and Tape Labels With Speedy Ortiz

Last month I found myself in an almost dangerously sweltering show at Death By Audio in Williamsburg, contemplating the ongoing 90’s alt-rock revival from up close. The evening started off with the riff-heavy California X, whose crunchy guitar sound brings to mind a hundred different grunge and alternative singles from my early adolescence, and continued with Roomrunner, a group whose music is specifically designed to encourage headbanging. By the time headliners Speedy Ortiz took the stage, the crowd had entered […]

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Band Booking: Talking Comedic Distance with The Hairs

Music, in most cases, is supposed to be fun. While there are inevitable counter-examples to that statement, comprising goals such as solemn self-expression or emotional catharsis, for the most part, music, especially pop music, is meant to make you feel good. It can also be funny, as demonstrated by indie garage rockers The Hairs, whose new album The Magic’s Gone walks a fine line between carefree goofball imagery and arch self-awareness. With song titles like “Tennis Penis” and “Birds Shit Then Sing,” […]

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Band Booking: Talking Toronto Music and DFW with Odonis Odonis

Odonis Odonis is a fantastic noise-rock band from Toronto that mixes the vampiric growl of lead singer Dean Tzenos with a variety of instrumental moods and tempos, ranging from the rockabilly-postpunk of EP-opener “She’s A Death” to the jittery death disco of “Better”. Released two years after their well-received debut Hollandaze, their new offering, Better, is a textured and multifarious amalgam of postpunk styles, skilfully produced and structured to keep listeners guessing what they’ll hear next.  I caught up with the band just after […]

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Band Booking: Talking Poetry and Patrick Kavanagh with Dublin’s Villagers

Conor O’Brien has been making music under the Villagers moniker since 2008, after the breakup of the Dublin-based rock band The Immediate. His first album, Becoming A Jackal was received in 2010 to acclaim from Vanity Fair, New York Times and other publications. While his first album drew comparisons with folk-ish bands like Bright Eyes, the latest material boasts a more collaborative approach with the band and has moved in a more experimental and eclectic direction. The band has been […]

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