The Little Red Umbrella

CMW 2016: Pale Lips @ The Silver Dollar

WEDNESDAY – If you went looking for the graves of all the dead Ramones, dug them up, extracted their souls, washed those souls and dried them and carefully folded them for shipping to Canada, where they were infused into the living bodies of four women from Montreal, the band those women would then...

CMW 2016: Bend Sinister @ The Comfort Zone

WEDNESDAY – Few bands in Canada are more reliably awesome on stage than Bend Sinister are. And they proved it once again this Canadian Music Week. Their first set of the festival was a fairly low profile slot: late at night on a Wednesday, while most of the city slept. But in the basement of the...

Our Life With The Balconies by Cody McGraw

The Balconies play the Great Hall at 11pm tonight (Thursday, May 5) for Canadian Music Week. We originally published this post about the beginning of our love for them back on January 28, 2014. It must have been four or five Canadian Music Weeks ago when my own love affair with The Balconies began....

Meet The Band: Pins & Needles

Pins & Needles play the Silver Dollar at 8pm tonight (Wednesday, May 4) for Canadian Music Week. We originally published this interview with them April 23, 2014. There might not be any band in Toronto with a better age-to-awesome ratio than Pins & Needles. They got together at Girls Rock...

Holy Shit Weaves' New (ish) Single Is Great

We're been a bit slow to come out of our winter hibernation this year, which means we've been unforgivably slow to listen to the new song from Toronto's wonderful weirdos in Weaves. But holy shit. "One More", which premiered on NPR back at the beginning of March, is one of the best tunes the band...

Starting Over At 35 by Melissa Hughes

I can remember precisely when it hit me. I was staring out the window of my big, empty office, watching an even bigger home go up across the street. We were living in one of those up-and-coming neighbourhoods, selected not for its charm, but for its potential increase in value. The fact that...

The Toronto Historical Jukebox: "Tired Of Waking Up Tired" by The Diodes

The Diodes may very well be the most important punk band in the history of Toronto. They were formed in 1976 — playing together at the Ontario College of Art just as the Queen West punk scene was about to become one of the greatest punk scenes on Earth. And The Diodes played a founding role. It...

On José Bautista's Bat Flip & The Making of History in Toronto by Adam Bunch

The very first legendary home run ever hit in Toronto was hit in 1887. More than a century before Joe Carter's famous World Series walk-off at the SkyDome, Cannonball Crane hit a homer into the sky above the Don Valley to end a game at Sunlight Park. It was made all the more impressive by the...

Who Was This St. Patrick Guy, Anyway? by Rebekah Hakkenberg

Originally posted March 17, 2011 You're probably too drunk on green beer or Guinness to even read this right now, so why don't you come back tomorrow when you're sober- no wait, better give yourself a day off tomorrow and come back the next day, you know, when you're feeling more like yourself again... Hey,...

The Toronto Historical Jukebox: "Charlena" by Richie Knights & The Mid-Knights

This catchy tune from Richie Knight & The Mid-Knights was the very first #1 single in Canadian history. The band had been around since the late 1950s (originally formed with a different name and a different line-up), but as "Charlena" hit the airwaves during the spring of 1963, the group was...