Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s most recent album, Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress, was easily one of the best of their 20-year career, but the Montreal band’s epic orchestral post-rock compositions are even more powerful live.
Most of their post-hiatus recordings have been of songs they’d played live extensively, and those intricate polyrhythms, ominous strings, soaring crescendos and mind-bending drones really come alive over a powerful club sound system, accompanied by their trademark projections.
At the Danforth Music Hall (147 Danforth) on September 25 and 26.
music@nowtoronto.com | @benjaminboles
Reunited post-hardcore legends Drive Like Jehu hit Riot Fest
DRIVE LIKE JEHU as part of Riot Fest at Downsview Park (35 Carl Hall), Saturday (September 19), 7 pm (festival runs September 19 and 20). All ages. $90, two-day pass $150.
When Drive Like Jehu played a free, hometown show at San Diego’s Balboa Park on August 31, 2014, it was their first public performance in 19 years, and fans couldn’t believe it was happening.
“It was probably the coolest thing I’ve ever been a part of,” says guitarist John Reis over the phone about that five-song set, which he ostensibly engineered to jam with the park’s famous Spreckels organ. “It was all my friends, my family, in a setting that’s very important to me. San Diego is more than where I live – it’s who I am, so it was very special.”
In the lead-up to the show, Reis said Drive Like Jehu had no future plans, but they’re part of 2015’s Riot Fest at Downsview Park this weekend. The band’s original 1990-1995 run yielded two classic albums and a two-song single, but something about their sound – post-hardcore, maybe, but definitely loud, fierce, emotive rock ’n’ roll – and their mysterious legacy has taken on mythological proportions among underground music aficionados.
Part of that is because, despite never officially breaking up, the band didn’t seem likely to ever play again.
Drive Like Jehu
Guitarists and songwriters Reis and Rick Froberg have been busy over the past 20 years. Reis had Drive Like Jehu and Rocket from the Crypt running simultaneously, and the latter kept making records and touring long after the former went silent.
Froberg is a talented visual artist, tending to that passion even when he and Reis reconvened to form Hot Snakes, another incendiary band that released only three (perfect!) punk albums before vanishing in 2005, then playing the odd show in recent years. Froberg eventually wrote songs as part of Brooklyn’s Obits, who announced their own split last year.
But despite all that activity, Drive Like Jehu never stirred.
Whenever journalists inquired about a reunion, Reis and Froberg noted that bassist Mike Kennedy and drummer Mark Trombino didn’t play music any more.
“I loved being in Drive Like Jehu,” Trombino says in a separate Skype call. “Being in that band gave me an identity. I was super-bummed and missed it for years and years. And I was especially bummed when Hot Snakes started. It was like, ‘Rick and John enjoy playing together, just not with me.’”
“I wanted to do something different and the songs to be shorter,” Froberg says over the phone, noting that Hot Snakes, which Reis started with drummer Jason Kourkounis in 1999, wasn’t a reaction to Drive Like Jehu.
“We grew out of some of that 90s stuff and wanted to do something more rock ’n’ roll, Chuck Berry. And it wasn’t like me and John started a band to conspire against Mark or anyone. John just asked me to sing on some songs, and I really liked what they had. It just happened.”
Froberg says the band is playing -select shows because promoters are asking – and paying them well. And he’s not ruling out the prospect of crafting new material together.
“I don’t think anybody would give a shit, but it’d be fun for us. So why not? What the heck?”
music@nowtoronto.com | @vishkhanna
A$AP Rocky
A$AP Rocky
Earlier this year, A$AP Rocky dropped sophomore effort At. Long. Last. A$AP, a nearly 70-minute album with a curious lack of typical 16-bar verses and bangers. Rocky had become disillusioned with rap, calling the album, co-produced by the late A$AP Mob founder A$AP Yams, “the return of the God emcee.” It established him as grown-up, more open and one of the more distinct voices in popular hip-hop.
At Echo Beach, the enlightened hippie emcee will likely draw heavily from it, but don’t expect him to leave out crowd-pleasers like Fuckin’ Problems.
At Echo Beach (909 Lake Shore West) with Vince Staples and Danny Brown on September 25.
music@nowtoronto.com | @mattgeewilliams
