Monday, February 21, 2005

Baby, You're In Luck

concert review: Apostle of Hustle w/ Peter Elkas @ The Drake Hotel(Toronto, Ontario), February 18, 2005(early show)

Apostle of Hustle: photo by Mike LigonDiscovered through eye that an early show had bee added for Apostle of Hustle at The Drake Hotel this past Friday so I decided to go after work to check it out. Peter Elkas(solo) opened the show with tunes from his debut "Party of One". Following the themes of relationships, love, and loss, Pete performed each song as an extension of the previous one, with an almost storytelling approach to the evening. Pete performed primarily on electrical guitar, but ended the evening with a couple of keyboard-accompanied tunes. I was more a fan of Mr. Elkas back in his Local Rabbits days, and as much as I enjoyed Pete's songs I would have preferred to hear them in a band setting.

Apostle of Hustle came on around 9 pm or so and played an impressive hour long set. My only point of reference is that I thought they sounded like the more atmospheric side of Broken Social Scene, with bits of latin rhythms(courtesy of Apostle Of Hustle's keyboardist's latin dancing on a mic'd wooden board) thrown in. There were surprise guest appearances from Stars' Amy Millan on vocals and Evan Cranley on trombone, who both initially were just watching the show, then at different times, sauntered up onto the stage to perform. Exchanging the indie-rock directness of Broken Social Scene, Apostle of Hustle went for a more textured rock sound full of interesting rhythms and guitar arrangements. Maybe I'm just getting bored with amateurism but I've been favouring richly textured rock sounds lately, having purchased recently Doves' "Lost Souls" and Sigur Ros' "()". I purchased Apostle of Hustle's album "Folkloric Feel" at the show and I'm still in the process of absorbing it, but it's quite good. [photos]

The Toronto Star had an article on Apostle of Hustle last week, so go read it.

The Futureheads' self-titled debut CD will be released as a limited edition CD/DVD package on March 7th. The CD will contain the original CD's tracklisting plus radio versions of "Hounds of Love" and "Decent Days and Nights". The DVD will contain music videos of "First Day", "A To B", "Decent Days and Nights", "Meantime" and "Hounds Of Love", plus live videos of "Robot", "First Day", "Man Ray", and "Piece of Crap". The DVD will also contain an interview as well as the making of the music video for "Hounds Of Love". [info from the band's site] Note: I'm not sure if this is just a UK release because there aren't any listings for this release on either Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.

There are an unusually good number of interesting musical acts on late night tallk shows this week. Late Night With Conan O'Brien will have musical guests Rufus Wainwright(Tues 2/22), Ian Brown with Noel Gallagher(Wed 2/23), and The Futureheads(Thurs 2/24). Jimmy Kimmel Live will have musical guest Joanna Newsom(Thurs 2/24) making her American television debut.

BBC 6Music's Gideon Coe had a live acoustic session with Doves today[February 21, 2005]. Listen[around 20:39:50 mark].

Issue #17 of Comes With A Smile is out now!

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