It’s Sunday night and I don’t know how much energy I have to get through this. I like to think of it as an exercise in discipline, something I’ve been lacking in many areas of my life lately. But I thought I would write about a few of my favorite musical memories from the past year, like I usually do.
As many people who read this blog know, I moved to Montreal from Toronto this past spring.  As part of this change I noticed that I began going to shows that …

Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady perform “Let There Be Rock” from the Drive-By Truckers album Southern Rock Opera at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, California, on November 25, 2008.
Guy in a gorilla suit aside (why is there always some asshole who does that?), this is a prime example of why the Drive By Truckers are one of the best, purest rock n roll bands working today.
The closest this tour came to Montreal was Toronto. Maybe next year.
Via Fark.

See my previous post on the Drive by Truckers

Former Jawbreaker and Jets to Brazil frontman Blake Schwarzenbach has been away from music for way too long.  After Jets to Brazil fizzled out just as they were really finding their voice, Schwarzenbach took some time off to finish his graduate work and do some teaching at NY’s Hunter College. Now he’s resurfaced in a new band called Thorns of Life with former Pinhead Gunpowder drummer Aaron Cometbus (yes, that Aaron Cometbus – the man behind Cometbus, probably the best zine ever) and Daniela Sea, an actor who used to …

There is no reason for posting this, except that I’ve been listening to it and want to share. Dan Bern, live at Martyrs in Chicago on October 10, 2003. Courtesy the Internet Archive.

http://www.archive.org/details/dbern2003-10-03.

My friend Dave over at Bumpershine sent out a request to a bunch of bloggers, musicians, industry types to send in their top picks from the Polaris long list. The Polaris Prize, for those who don’t know, is a juried competition that selects about 40 Canadian CDs that were released in the previous year. The winner gets $20,000. The main idea is to celebrate Canadian music regardless of genre, sales, etc. and just focus on the quality of the music.
Anyway, Dave invited me to participate and so you can …

Looky at what I found. Redd Kross playing “Jimmy’s Fantasy” at NXNE a few weeks ago. Much of their set is posted as well.

I was trying to figure out how to get around a bug in the WYSIWYG editor when I decided to upgrade Word Press. Unfortunately, I lost the theme I’ve been using the last couple of years so I had to change it. It’s still a work in progress so please no snarky e-mails.  I’ll finish the changes to the CSS files prolly sometime tomorrow night.

This year’s North by Northeast (NXNE) festival marked a bit of a change for me. To begin with, it was my first trip outside Montreal since I moved here last month. Second, I’ve needed some time off; the two weeks that elapsed since I left RNAO and joined the CEC weren’t exactly relaxing. So I was looking forward to returning to something familiar and check out some bands I really wanted to see and hopefully discover some new ones.
The people who program the festival always do a great job; there …

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????????Update: WTF? There was a post here. I\ll have to look into this.
But yeah, I’m in Montreal now.