Tickets are already sold out, but that doesn’t mean you should give up on seeing Bon Iver tonight (August 8 @ Sound Academy). Prices on Craigslist are, as usual, double to triple market value ($80 to $150), but even if scalpers were demanding your firstborn child, the offer would deserve serious consideration.
Justin Vernon, maestro and lungs behind the band’s trademark falsetto, has graced the covers of virtually every music publication in Toronto over the past few months for a very good reason: because he’s, like, the real deal, a bona fide genius.
The cabin-in-the-woods mythology cloaking his first record has been discussed to death, so let’s just not go there. What’s important is that his second, self-titled album bucks the sophomore slump, pumping his sound with enough electricity and liquid nitrogen to transform gentle folk into a huge, coldly glowing juggernaut of beauty. Guitars — electric and acoustic — choral voices, slide guitar, French horn, sax, banjo (the list of instruments not in Vernon’s arsenal is actually shorter) orbit his scarred-angel falsetto, whorling into a staggeringly coherent, well-orchestrated and unique product. Check out another live performance here and then do what you have to do to be there.
Speaking of indie folk musicians steeped in mythology: anyone who was an alienated, angsty or artsy teenager around the early 2000s has fond memories of waxing poetic about Neutral Milk Hotel in the shamelessly geeky fashion I just gushed about Bon Iver, and less-fond memories of that band’s sudden drop into oblivion. Diehards can catch legendarily eccentric lead singer Jeff Mangum (August 12 & 13 @ Trinity St. Paul’s) for two consecutive days this week — and you can bet a lot of folks will be going to both. If you care about this sort of thing, you should probably go see him. There’s no telling when he’ll phase into another fifteen-year wormhole.
Another entry into the week of earthy folk and choral singing: Canadian country-folk-pop-rock-polka (kidding) choir, Bruce Peninsula (August 11 @ Lower Ossington Theatre). Lead singer Matt Cully‘s gravelly smoker’s rasp conjures a more-rugged, less-battered Mark Lanegan vibe, blending weirdly but seamlessly with an eerie female choir and propulsive, shuffling beats to evoke both the expanse of Ontario’s wilderness and the strangeness of solitude.
2009 Polaris prize winners F***ed Up will be waiting for you in the parking lot outside of the Air Canada Centre (August 9) with brass knuckles and chains. Not really, though. Damian and the boys are the nice, literate sort of punks, and they’ll be bringing their shoegaze-y, big-sound pseudo-hardcore (stadium punk, maybe?) to town this week to open for the Foo Fighters. Their latest record, David Comes to Life, is a smart and sprawling punk opera — no, no, no, like a real punk opera.