The Consumption

Alright, “Daily” is probably going to be stretching things, but I’ll keep this as regular as I can. I haven’t really taken in all that much in the last four days anyway, but let’s keep this going:


CONCERT: No More Shapes w/Beneath These Idle Tides and Free Nude Celebs: Weeds Cafe isn’t my favourite venue in town, but the cramped quarters really did help make this one feel special — 60 people in the back room of a coffee shop listening to avane-garde noise can’t help but warm your heart. Shapes and Tides collaborated for the opening set, and the warm drones of the latter provided a sturdy foundation for the more freeform explorations of the former. BTIT’s solo set started off familiarly enough, with a simple melodic line filtered through the most powerful reverb this side of… um… a really large room, but actual, clearly defined picking patterns actually emerged at the end — a welcome development. The real suprise, though, was Azeda Booth frontman Jordan Hossack’s Free Nude Celebs set. Dressed in hippie garb that would’ve made Ken Kesey blush in 1967, the singer abandoned the falsetto and electronics that have served him well in favour of an erratically strummed acoustic guitar. The strumming patterns were steady enough to provide momentum, but off-kilter enough to keep things on edge. Lyrics were a bizarre mix of poetry, self-confession and humour, all delivered with an almost superhuman transparency — Hossack seems completely incapable of artifice. He’s a thoroughly weird dude, and that can be off-putting, but there’s a real brilliance behind each of his bizarre tunes.


CD: Dr. Dre – The Chronic: Yes, I should have heard this album a decade ago… Seventeen years of mainstream gangsta posturing have dulled the album’s danger, but that only makes it easier to appreciate the actual music on the disc. Dre’s production is impeccably funky, but I’m more impressed with his vocal delivery, ghost-written or not. It doesn’t blow me away technically, but there’s a toughness that just isn’t there in the Eminem cameos that introduced my high school self to Dre. Plus, Snoop actually seems more than half-conscious on his verses, which is a plus.