If you can sing and there’s a fifteen-year-old inside you touchin’ himself to Boris Vallejo posters [warning: might not be safe for work], you might want to audition for Necromancer, as the poster below indicates.
Nuthin’ says “hardcore” like a cheesy hand-drawn logo and bats.
Go visit their MySpace page, check out the song Raw Meat and [...]
Category Archives: Music
MySpace Band of the Week: Necromancer
May 9, 2007 – 6:29 pm
Learn These Two Chords for Next Tuesday at the Press Club
May 4, 2007 – 9:29 pm
If you plan to attend next Tuesday’s open mic night — a.k.a. “Geeks and Guitars” at the Press Club (850 Dundas Street West, between Manning and Euclid), you have an assignment.
Make sure you are familiar with these two chords, E and A:
Those two chords are all you need for a number of songs, including one [...]
Song of the Week: "Sunny" by Bobby Hebb (1966)
April 23, 2007 – 3:12 pm
For those of you living near Accordion Cityt’s weather system, I hope that you had a chance to enjoy the sun and nearly-summer-like temperatures. The Missus and I went out on a picnic in High Park on Saturday and had a relaxing time reading, people- and dog-watching and drinking ice tea at the nearby [...]
Song of the Week: “Shock the Monkey”…by Don Ho?
April 16, 2007 – 3:47 pm
After having attended a couple of Filipino-Canadian cultural events in Toronto, my good buddy George quipped that “deep inside every Filipino, there’s a lounge singer just dying to break out.” It’s true, and a lot of the credit goes to the late Don Ho.
Perhaps some of it has to do with Filipino jazz pianist Bobby [...]
Song of the Week: "On a Plain", the Nirvana (1991) and Lullabye (2006) Versions
April 2, 2007 – 3:22 pm
I was a DJ at the engineering pub at Crazy Go Nuts University in 1991. This meant that in the parallel universe where our lives are watched as if they were television shows (hopefully with the boring bits and nose-picking scenes edited out), Nirvana’s album Nevermind was an integral part of the soundtrack.
That was over [...]
You Can Get a Master’s Degree for This?!
March 22, 2007 – 4:41 pm
You may not remember the technology, but before the World Wide Web that we know and love today, there was Gopher, its spiritual predecessor. Gopher became available in the late spring of 1991 and was a system that let you read text files on other computers on the internet. Unlike the web, where you click [...]
Bum Rush the Charts and Send a Message to the RIAA
March 22, 2007 – 3:53 pm
Today is Bum Rush the Charts day, a day on which we’re supposed to send a message to the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) by voting with our dollars. I’ll leave it to the folks at the Bum Rush the Charts site to explain:
People are sick of the watered-down, cookie-cutter content that networks and [...]
Brief Encounter with a Rock Star
February 23, 2007 – 5:41 pm
Throwing the horns at Queen’s Park, May 1999, on the first day I took the accordion out on the street.
While waiting to pick up my sister and her family at Pearson’s Terminal 1 last night (and oh yes, is Terminal 1 so much nicer than the skank-o-riffic Terminal 2), I noticed a young woman holding [...]
Song of the Week: "Don’t You (Forget About Me)" by Billy Idol (2001)
February 20, 2007 – 5:00 am
Before the Home Alone series of movies completely ruined him, John Hughes could put together some decent movies: National Lampoon’s Vacation, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, Planes, Trains and Automobiles and what I consider to be one of the most important films ever made, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. [...]
The Police, Live at the Grammy Awards
February 12, 2007 – 7:28 pm
Old fart alert: Yes, I bought the Police’s first album, Outlandos D’Amour, when I was a teenager (a too-young-to-drive one, at that). On a format that involved dragging a diamond needle over grooves on a spinning vinyl surface.
(For those of you are thinking, “Oh c’mon, record players aren’t that ancient!”, here’s something that will shock [...]
Song of the Week: "California Stars" by Billy Bragg and Wilco (1998)
February 12, 2007 – 3:58 pm
The Ginger Ninja and I are going on vacation for a week starting quitting time tonight. Expect posting up until next Tuesday morning to be a bit on the light side. There may even be an automated post or two made in my absence.
In celebration of this vacation, I present to you this week’s song [...]
"You Can’t Rap" by Example
February 9, 2007 – 9:27 pm
I was amused by the single by Example titled You Can’t Rap, which sounds like a strage gene-splice of the Gorillaz and Fiddler on the Roof, peppered with Alison Moyet’s laugh from Yazoo’s Situation. I heard it earlier this week on Tom Robinson’s show on BBC 6 Music. Here are the lyrics to its chorus:
[...]
Songs of the Week: "Spadina Bus" by the Shuffle Demons (1985), "London Underground" by Kay and Biswas (2005) and "Going Underground" by The Jam (1980)
February 5, 2007 – 4:47 pm
Update, February 12th, 2007: A week has passed and the attached songs are no longer available.
In the spirit of yesterday’s Toronto Transit Camp (which I wrote about in this entry), I thought I’d post a transit-related song. The problem is that I only have the best-known song about Toronto Transit — the Shuffle Demons’ Spadina [...]
Song of the Week: "Dragonflies" by Povi (1999)
January 29, 2007 – 10:01 pm
This week’s song of the week is the criminally underplayed Dragonflies by Povi.
It wouldn’t be technically correct to refer to Povi as a “group” or “band” — the term “long-distance collaboration” might be more apt. Povi is really two people: Los Angeles-based music producer/technical wizard Carmen Rizzo taking care of all the electronic instruments and [...]
Why Coachella?
January 29, 2007 – 6:32 pm
I have no idea why Leona is so excited about going to Coachella — most of the acts make it sound like my musical idea of purgatory…
What, no Nickelback?
Was It THAT Long Ago?
January 26, 2007 – 10:42 pm
While listening to iTunes at work in “shuffle” mode, the Propellerheads’ cover of the theme from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (from their album Decksanddrumsandrockandroll) came on. Like many of you, hearing a particular tune can take me back to a particular time, and that’s what this tune did.
Then it hit me — I was [...]
