Golden Dogs Rivoli setlist (06.21.14)

 

The Golden Dogs

Rivoli

NXNE

06.21.14

Good Feel

Permanent Record

Nevermind

Do It For You

Feel Like A Bridge

Runouttaluck

Pretending

Saints At The Gates

Birdsong

One Last Time

Yeah!

DIIV - Past Lives (lyrics)

DIIV - Past Lives

Past lives I was your home and you locked yourself outside

and ran with your ghosts

back to a place you'd already known

Nowhere to crawl but to your past life

and hide from it all

a buried flower convinced you'll grow

 kept enough to remind but stayed outside

with nowhere to go you left nowhere to go

words and music by Zachary Cole Smith



DIIV - NXNE, Lee's Palace, June 15 (review, setlist)



There's a very short list for the 'breakthrough' if you like bands of the 2012 NXNE music festival, they include but are not limited to: The Hundred in the Hands, Purity Ring and undoubtedly DIIV.  In spite of Ghostface Killah, and Raekwon The Chef devastating an already Yonge and Dundas Square to close out the festival with a free performance one could make a handy argument that it was these young lads in DIIV (pronounced Dive) two nights prior that stole many of the hearts and minds of this years attendees. 

 They're perspicacious and preternaturally gifted take on whatever their influences happen to be makes one wonder seriously about the exponential rate of talent growth and craftsmanship. Primary songwriter Zachary Cole Smith (Cole will do), as distinguished from bandmate and former Smith Westerns drummer Colby Hewitt, declared at outset that they'd be playing their forthcoming 2012 release for Captured Tracks in its entirety: Oshin.



Later Cole conceded that despite dropping in a few 'new' songs (Big Joke) the set largely followed the analog flow of their distinctive release.  My listening companion heard the obvious strains of homage and reference to Ian Curtis and Joy Division, but also Echo and the Bunnymen or even the Stranglers.  Though not fully evident on the recorded product, the relatively terse and succinct pop numbers, were stretched out into filetted slivers of sound and dense guitar interplay that belied their tender years.  This listener was reminded fondly of two concerts he'd seen Built To Spill play in the selfsame venue a couple of years back.  The appeal of DIIV seems to lie somewhere between the Christopher-Robins-In-Never-Neverland waifish (and very Ian Curtisian) charm of Z. Cole Smith and the long soloed crunch of influential guitar based bands like Dinosaur Jr. and the latter Built To Spill albums.  They're short, wistful inspired bits of (sometimes maudlin) songwriting brought to life on the backs of a wooly improvising beast.  It may be also that the band prefers the effects, pedals and signal processing sound associated with the 80's but that their pushing magnificent solos inspired by the 90's through vintage setups.

DIIV, Lee's Palace, June 15

(Druun)

Past Lives

Human

Big Joke

Air Conditioning

How Long Have You Known?

Wait

Follow

Sometime

Bambi Slaughter *

Doused

* Nirvana cover

Raekwon & Ghostface Killah NXNE, Toronto, June 17 (review, setlist)

Ghostface Killah and Raekwon - NXNE (Sunday, June 17)

Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, DJ Skratch Bastid
Yonge Dundas Square, June 17 2012

(partial setlist, all songs sung as duet)

Incarcerated Scarfaces (Raekwon original)

Ice Cream (Ghostface Killah original)

Glaciers of Ice (Raekwon original, Ghostface featured)

Winter Warz (Ghostface Killah original)

Da Mystery of Chessboxin' (Wu-Tang Clan)

Surgical Gloves (Raekwon)

R.A.G.U. (Ghostface Killah)

Mighty Healthy (Ghostface Killah)

Verbal Intercourse (Raekwon)

Eye for an Eye (Raekwon)

Apollo Kids (Ghostface Killah)

Broken Safety (Raekwon)
4th Chamber (Genius/ GZA)
new mixtape cut (JD Era)
Mt. Olympus (JD Era)
Protect Ya Neck (Wu-Tang Clan)
Raw (Ol' Dirty Bastard)
Uzi (Pinky Ring) - (Wu-Tang Clan)
CREAM - (Wu-Tang Clan)

Can't It Be All So Simple - (Raekwon)
>>>>

(note: this is a partial setlist - I caught at least 30 musical cues of seperate songs, here's 20 in order that I was able to identify.  More was played after Simple I just had to leave. Anyone with gaps or who heard a different song, sequence or sample please mention on the comments.)

Young Empires

I didn't need to read in Toronto's Now Magazine, that Young Empires was the one band that 'blew up' this year at NXNE- I blew up with them. Essentially the music conference- which has little if any of the clout of it's similarly marcated Austin, TX based conference to the south by south west- took over my little honky tonk local (The Dakota Tavern). In what turned out to be an opening slot for a surprise show by last year's critical darlings Japandroids (who were immminently and immediately forgettable from the opening notes) the crew of Matthew Vlahovich (Hooks), Aaron Ellingson (Swagger), Jake Palahnuk (Rhythm) had the audience torn asunder within moments of their opening notes. For this devoted listener and dancer- having been a part of Toronto's burgeoning Jungle scene as far back as '94 (when one could see global talents like Kenny Ken, Darryn J, Nicky Blackmarket, MC GQ and oh my golly golly gosh wicked Mickey Finn) it was like too many worlds colliding. I am incredibly proud to be Canadian, incredibly proud to be from Toronto but the music renaissance as of late that has been most engaging has been the re-emergence of so-called Roots artists like Zeus (Jason Collett formerly of the Broken Social Scene's backing band often compared to a modern day The Band) at specifically The Dakota Tavern. Each night I bathe myself in the honky filth and analogue shuffles at The Dakota Tavern, and each morning I wake up and wash that honky filth right off with as much Prince and Black Milk as I possibly can. The morning of Friday June 18th there was not a speck of honky filth upon me. Their altruistically pyromaniacal set that night included their anthem Rain of Gold and the instantly recognizable from the first note (re-cognizable, from before, a priori) was the hook and innnate melodic sweep of White Doves. Just missed them in Toronto (July 21) prior to a brief UK tour, then NYC, Chicago and motherfucking Bogota, Columbia back to to Toronto which even Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post agree is the 'hot new destination for all things crazy, sexy, cool.”
07.21.10 /// Toronto
07.27.10 /// London
07.29.10 /// Bristol
07.30.10 /// London
07.31.10 /// Brighton
08.01.10 /// Glasgow
08.03.10 /// London
08.13.10 /// New York City
08.28.10 /// Chicago
09.03.10 /// Bogota

De La Soul NXNE '10

After a very weary week of 4 days of extended drinking hours, sets, surprise sets and mainstage headliners the NXNE music festival in Toronto, Ontario, Canada has thankfully wrapped up with a mainstage free concert in Yonge Dundas Square by pioneering Hip Hop legends De La Soul. In a by-no-means chronological (in career or setlist terms) order De La Soul, (literally translated as 'Of The Soul' (feminine)), had a truly multicultural and multi-lingual audience rapt and spellbound as they kicked through cuts not limited to Potholes In My Lawn, Ring Ring Ring, Oooh (originally De La Soul featuring Redman here with Canadian Hip Hop legend Kardinal Offishal), the title track of The Grind Date and possibly one of the greatest Hip Hop tunes of all time (the singularly J Dilla produced) Stakes Is High (which contains a definitive sample of James Brown's Mind Power).

"I be a piece of the East Coast, so give a toast to Plug Wonder Why / Back in the day who soaked his words in ginger / So when I ran a phrase in June, you didn't catch it 'til December"

- Stakes Is High/ De La Soul Encores included; audience favourite Me, Myself and I (their breakthrough single from 1989 that ensconced the bands, somewhat frustrating as expressed lyrically in this particular song, 'hippie' label which they addressed in their typically dry humour), Rock Co Kane flow (unfinished due to the lack of MF Doom in the municipality of Toronto), and early rarity Buddy (Native Tongue Decision) originally by the Native Tongue Posse (De La Soul,, Jungle Brothers feat. Q-Tip, Queen Latifah and Monie Love. Buddy famously contains a brief definitive sample of the hook of The Five Stairsteps Ooh Child (quite possibly the greatest pop song of all time) bringing the total soul tally to at least 2 James Brown Samples and a very brief 'Skiddley-bo-oh-oah' reference to Barrington Levy). The sample of the Burke family's song Ooh Child appears at 3:19 in De La Soul's Buddy. Although live in their rendition at Dundas Square MC Posdnuos ((aka Mercenary, Plug Wonder Why, Plug One born Kelvin Mercer) repeated the refrain for an extra bar milking raw emotion out of the crowd after a heartfelt spoken word by Trugoy the Dove (aka Dave, Plug Two, born David Jude Jolicoeur) about how no one talks about the emotion of Hip Hop painting a picture of a young black man on a bus stop bench nodding away in his own heartfelt world. For his part P.A. Pasemaster Mase largely known as Maseo, or Plug Three within 3 Foot High and Rising's concept) pushed the sheer utter limits, at times testing new counter-insurgency sound cannons just in time for the G20, of the federally, provincially and municipally funded sound system. If Socialism means I can get hit by a bus and walk into any hospital and get fixed up right quick with a green card and De La Soul playing for free in a pedestrian space, adjacent to Toronto's first scramble crossing, then bring on the Socialism Teabaggers.