In case you hadn't noticed yet, Bonnaroo is in the midst of announcing their 2010 lineup 1 band at a time: every few minutes, the flash thing on their myspace page chimes and a new act is revealed. Click here to check it out.

I must admit, I am more tempted to check it out this year than I have ever been. The prospect of seeing a completely unhinged, multi-hour Flaming Lips set including their rendition of Dark Side of the Moon (which is awesome) is pretty huge. As I learned at Coachella 2008...

Oh, WHAT?

... headliners matter. Still, a great undercard doesn't hurt, and a quick glance at the lineup (so far) reveals some of my favourite, including a good balance of "seen 'em, love 'em" and "gotta see 'em." Among others:

• the National
• Dr. Dog
• Steve Martin (yes, that one) & the

I just linked the logo from Google Image Search. Is that cool?

I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but yeah... this game is rad. I picked up my pre-order copy last night and plugged in around 10 PM. It took me about an hour to unlock the galaxy map then I just stumbled around until 1 AM, avoiding story-ish missions and getting a feel for changes to the overall game mechanics.

Like I said, I can't allow myself to write too much or I'll get nothing else done today, so here are a few things that are new and awesome followed by a few minor gripes, all in LIST FORM. First, the awesome:

• The way you navigate the world at the system/cluster level now is way cooler. Previously it was just a "drag your cursor and pick where you want to go" type thing. Now, there's

Photos by Charles Gunn

Last night, I had the chance to have a quick chat with the guys from Attack in Black before they took to the stage at Broken City, warming up the crowd for Julie Doiron and Fred Squire a guy who looked sort of like Fred Squire (more on this later). This band has always struck me as one with tons of potential but not a lot to show for it. Sure, I can listen to their shows and make it through their records, but it always seemed like too much of a mixed bag of middle-of-the-road folk and rock for me to get into.

Then again, the continue to crop up on my radar and every time I feel like I must be missing something. Most recently, this came in the form of the Daniel, Fred, & Julie record, featuring Attack in Black front-man Dan Romano … Read More

Final Fantasy Owen Pallett at Sled Island 2009 (photo by Charles Gunn)

Dearest readers,

In this week's issue, I wrote a review of the new Owen Pallett record, Heartland. If music editor Peter had let me, I would have written another 1000 words about this record. Here are a few nuggets:

1. This is Owen's first record on Domino, a much bigger label than his previous home (Toronto's Blocks Recording Club.) This might have something to do with the name change. However, the promo copy that I reviewed (it still says "Final Fantasy"--collectibles 4tw) was stamped with "FOR GREAT JUSTICE" and the liner notes included a link to this site.

Do you recognize the style? For those of you who aren't as well-versed in Early 00s … Read More

The Phoenix takeaway show on La Blogotheque is way too good to be missed. When this showed up in my RSS reader this morning, the flywheels on my brain's blog post machine started whirring, let me tell ya.

So, in case you hadn't heard, La Blogotheque is a Paris-based music blog that records videos of "Concerts à Emporter": bands playing impromptu live sets in the many, many cheeky public venues offered by the city of lights. Previous highlights have included Caribou (watch how they "fade in" the drums around the 2 minute mark,) Man Man, and Volcano!

UPDATE: I forgot to mention Charles Gunn's excellent piece from April 2008, in which he summoned all the strength of his Franco-Albertan ancestry to interview Blogotheque founder Chryde.

But the  … Read More

Hi y'all, it has been a while.

I bombed into Vancouver this Tuesday evening for the Fiery Furnaces. This was my third time seeing them (1: early-era at Coachella 05, they played so fast that their set ended 10 minutes early and they played 1917 as an "encore"; 2: Rehearsing My Choir tour in Toronto, Eleanor was sick and had lost her voice) and it was undoubtedly the best. Even though brother Matt opted to rock lead guitars throughout the show, eschewing organs altogether, it was a tight and energetic set. Mind-blowing, you guys.

But what I really wanted to mention was that I took a trip to Richards Street's venerable Scratch Records, which has as of yet managed to elude destruction by the ana-condo-saurus that recently claimed another YVR … Read More

So, the indie-sphere was abuzz yesterday with talk of Daniel Johnston's new video game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I checked it out and it's pretty rad.

The premise is simple. You are a dude (are you Daniel Johnston? perhaps) and you are trying to smooch your girlfriend when THE DEVIL COMES ALONG. Of course. And he turns you into a frog/block/sphere/etc. drawn in the style of Daniel Johnston. It's a 3D platformer with a fairly standard 2-axis tilt control scheme. You can also tap "stop" zones to freeze, arrows to rotate your view of the world, and anywhere else to make your character hop. Each level is constructed of an interconnected network of planar platforms and your primary objective is to touch all of the green ones then make your way to … Read More

I just finished writing my preview piece about the Deep Dark Woods for next week's issue. They're coming through town for a show at the Gateway with Little Miss Higgins, who you may remember from a blog post I made aaaaaages ago. This is actually a pretty special occasion, because I very seldom submit copy by the actual copy deadline. Because I am a jerk. Of course, I think when Peter says "Friday" he means "during business hours on Friday," but whatever. Rules are for squares, right?

Anyhow, the point of blogging here was that when I was talking to DDW guitarist Burke Barlow (stage name? c'mon... it has to be...) he was absolutely effusive about another Saskatoon band called the Sheepdogs. I decided to cue up their myspace while I was putting the … Read More

Srsly you guys, I made the best BBQ chicken last night. It blew my damn mind. So,since I've been getting huge gastro-boners (gastroners?) from reading Julie Van Rosendaal's excellent fflog contributions, I thought I'd post the recipe for my miracle marinade here. (Also, I wrote it down on the inside cover of Recipes for a Lady or a Man: the Achewood Cookbook, so there's a very good chance I'll have no idea where to find it next time I want to make it. I'm such a cheater.)

Update All of Julie's posts have yummy looking pictures, but I ate all of my chicken before I thought to take a snapshot. It looked approximately like a this:

Yummy Chicken
sweet up front, spicy in the back

4.5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1.5 tbsp Sriracha "rooster" sauce (original flavour)
1.5 … Read More

Head on over to Chad's website to grab a 9-song EP of Soft Airplane-era B-sides. I'm not finished downloading it so I don't have anything to say just yet. The Baby Beans EP that came out when Infiniheart was re-released had some pretty insane shit on it, including a rap number, so I'm not sure what to expect from this. If it's awesome, I will post a follow-up. There's one track on there with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire, so that right there pretty much guarantees greatness.

In case you'd forgotten, Chad is up for the Polaris Music Prize, the winner of which will be announced this Monday at a gala event in Toronto. I still think he's the front-runner, but Fucked Up could give him a real run for his money and Malajube is a serious dark horse contender.

 … Read More