Hello, I’m going to try some early morn­ing blog­ging here. I’m in a bit of a rush, my ride for Austin leaves in half an hour, yet I’m still sit­ting here scarf­ing my face with peanut but­tered toast and 2% milk. Yes, that’s right, if all goes well on the way down, I shall be at SXSW again this year. I had a blast last year cov­er­ing the fes­ti­val for the National Post, but this time ’round I’m doing it on my lone­some. No fancy media pass (no pass at all yet, though we’ll see if my for­tunes change), but unlike like year, I actu­ally feel like I know what the hell is going on as far as cool bands to see (work­ing in a record store has helped tremendously).

So yes, I must be on my way, but I’ll leave you with some fun videos from this past week­end. Didn’t have time to edit them or any­thing, just dumped the footage on YouTube. First up, it’s PS I Love You fea­tur­ing Dia­mond Rings per­form­ing “Facelove” at the Sil­ver Dol­lar on Friday.

And here’s The Magic play­ing their hit song “Down­town Line” in some weird sort of tomb off of Oss­ing­ton, at 4 AM, tech­ni­cally Sat­ur­day morning.

Tags: CMF, Diamond Rings, PS I Love You, Silver Dollar, SXSW, The Magic · 3 Comments

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