Wolf Parade alumni Dan Boeckner and wife Alexei Perry are Handsome Furs (August 2 @ Horseshoe Tavern), maybe my favourite live act going. I’ve seen them blow the doors off at least three Toronto venues with their manic, crisp, minimal indie-pop. That I have to throw a caveat in makes my liver hurt a bit, but I do: their most recent effort, Sound Kapital, is claustrophobic electronica — stripping the propulsive force of Boeckner’s bone-saw guitar out of the mix. The songwriting is no less solid, but it’s worth checking out the new material before you go, just to see if the glitch-and-whirl beats are down your sonic alleyway.
Beirut (August 2 & 4 @ Phoenix Concert Theatre) is musical wunderkind Zach Condon and his troupe of merry men. At 24, Condon is already setting himself up to be a legacy artist. Troubadour’s a word that gets tossed about quite a bit, but this guy is one of the few who can truly lay claim to the title — trotting the globe, collecting musical influences and soldering them onto his hypnotic brand of folk-pop. This one comes off without a hitch: the guy is something to see, and his musical circus is going to be crossing borders and genres for a long time to come.
Opening for Beirut will be Owen Pallett (August 2 & 4 @ Phoenix Concert Theatre), previously known as Final Fantasy. His eccentric brand of pop, which relies on pedal-looped violin and gentle, loping vocals in place of a band, might be too weird for some or too bland for others. Those in the middle will find that he is a radiantly charismatic performer with enough stage presence to fill an auditorium — necessarily so, since it’s just him up there.
Choose your own adventure with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (August 2 @ Opera House): 1) Does the word "twee" mean anything to you? If yes, continue reading; if no, skip to next paragraph. 2) Does it inspire a) nostalgia and rose-tinted images of bike rides, retro clothing and awkward teenage romance (continue), or b) a borderline-homicidal mania (skip it)? Finally: 3) Is My Bloody Valentine a) one of the great shoegaze acts of all time (go see this show), b) an indecipherable, overrated wall of noise (skip it) or c) two hard-sucking horror flicks (time to up your pop IQ)?
Sloan (August 5 @ Echo Beach): Ah, the 90s, the heyday of Canadian alt-mainstream radio rock. Sloan issued a series of solid, jangling power-pop hits back in the Big Shiny Tunes era, with a catalogue of great material to back them up. And where their contemporaries have largely wandered down softer, more meandering roads, Sloan have stayed true to their roots for the most part: delivering pop gems that gracefully walk the line between polished and manufactured. Suffice to say, these guys are a Canadian institution in the vein of The Hip, and deserve to be.
Next up, appropriately enough, are The Sheepdogs and The Trews (August 7 @ CNE’s Festival of Beer), two possible heirs to the CanRock throne. You’re going to be hearing a lot about The Sheepdogs over the next few weeks: they’ve scored a major indie coup, beating out fifteen other bands to win Rolling Stone‘s cover contest, and will bring home the proverbial bacon with an Atlantic Records recording deal. The Trews are, well… The Trews, and you’ve been hearing that ‘Hope and Ruin’ song nonstop on the radio, so you already know whether you like them or not, right?
