This video is about the Fam­ily Thrift Store in Guelph. I never lived in Guelph, but it’s a town I often visit because it’s where a lot of my friends live, and it’s where my older brother went to Uni­ver­sity. I remem­ber on one of my first vis­its a few years back being told I have to visit the Fam­ily Thrift Store. I went and thought it was a pretty neat store — heck, I bought a sweet jacket on my first trip! Since then, I made sure to stop by the Thrift Store when­ever I vis­ited, so I was pretty bummed out to hear ear­lier this month that the store would be clos­ing. I heard they were throw­ing some con­certs, so last Fri­day I made my way to the Royal City to catch one of them. This is my doc­u­ment of that night. I hope you get a sense of how impor­tant the Fam­ily Thrift Store was to a lot of people.

Tags: Guelph, The D'Urbervilles, The Family Thrift Store, The Magic, The Skeletones Four, The Stew Gunn Band · 4 Comments

I hope Nils doesn’t cut off my balls for post­ing this video. It’s from way back in March at a house party dur­ing Cana­dian Music Fest, and they were play­ing at about 3 AM. As you can see, I was lit­er­ally stand­ing two feet away from them so the sound ain’t too great (not that it was much bet­ter in per­son). This was their third show that day and they were (self-admittedly) a lit­tle sloppy. Still, I think there is some value in shar­ing this video with y’all. The Rural Alberta Ada­van­tage have been receiv­ing a lot of atten­tion lately, start­ing last fall when their self-released record Home­towns (which the band had been sell­ing at shows in hand­made pack­ag­ing for sev­eral months) was fea­tured on eMu­sic, a web­site that I wasn’t too famil­iar with but which appar­ently has quite a few users. That raised their pro­file sig­nif­i­cantly and soon they were play­ing suc­cess­ful shows in New York and at SXSW, which I was lucky enough to attend.

Yes, see­ing them play to a packed church in Austin, Texas was quite spe­cial, espe­cially since the first time I saw The RAA was in my home­town of Oshawa at the Vel­vet Elvis way back in Novem­ber 2006. While the size of the venue and audi­ence has changed, one thing that hasn’t changed at all in the last three years is the music — it’s still the same three peo­ple play­ing the same songs with the same instru­ments (I assume). That’s why I was so happy to see Home­towns get rere­leased last week all across North Amer­ica (on vinyl to boot!) care of Omaha, Nebraska’s Sad­dle Creek records. It’s a great record that faith­fully cap­tures their live per­for­mances while adding nice flour­ishes and here and there to flesh out their sound. The songs are mem­o­rable and the lyrics are heart­felt — it really couldn’t be a bet­ter rep­re­sen­ta­tion of their music. It’s a nice story that I wit­nessed first-hand which shows that some­times things don’t hap­pen overnight. That’s why you’ve gotta stick with it people!

Tags: !059, Canadian Music Fest, The Rural Alberta Advantage · 4 Comments

This is a very intense new song from Peterborough’s Evening Hymns, shot last night at Sneaky Dee’s where he was play­ing for Wave­length 452. I wasn’t sure if I was even going to put it online because I wasn’t sure if the video really cap­tures the inten­sity of the song. My room­mate John was actu­ally ask­ing me how Evening Hymns was, and I said, “He was great! I shot one song and I might put it on YouTube, but it’s a really intense song, so I don’t know if I should.”  John said, “Is it that song Dead Deer?!” and I was like, “Yeah, that’s the one!”  And then he said, “I’ve heard that song before! That’s my favourite new song of his, it is really intense! Can you show me the video?” So I showed John the video and we both agreed that it was a good video so here it is, on my blog for all to see.

Tags: Evening Hymns, Sneaky Dee's, Wavelength · 1 Comment