I just can’t get to the el Mo early enough anymore. Case in point: I tried checking out an act there a couple of weeks ago that was scheduled for 10:00pm. I showed up just a couple of minutes late only to find out the act had started at 9:20 and I had just missed the whole thing.

It happened again last night. All the CMW literature said that Toronto’s Automatic Dub Riot were kicking things off at 10, so I showed up at a quarter to only to see they were already playing. Oh well, the singer was still wearing his leather jacket, so I guess I couldn’t have missed much.

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How does a band from Denver end up sounding like an exotic blend of disparate folk stylings? Well, if the band is DeVotchKa, they pull it off by having a singer (Nick Urata) descended from Sicilian and Gypsy ancestors, a classically trained violinist (Tom Hagerman), a bassist (Jeanie Schroder) who used to play sousaphone in a Civil War recreationist band, and a drummer (Shawn King) that also doubles on trumpet and was raised by Lithuanian polka musicians. I guess with such a diverse patchwork of influences, there ain’t no way in hell this band’s going to sound commonplace.

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This record’s been out for a while on the other side of the pond, but now David Ford’s long-awaited follow-up to 2006’s I Sincerely Apologize For All the Trouble I’ve Caused is being released in North America courtesy of the good people at Original Signal Recordings.

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So, this is what the kids in New Hampshire are up to these days, eh?

I have to admit that Our Last Night’s debut full length release, The Ghosts Among Us, really threw me for a loop. The first 30 seconds of the opening track, “Symptoms of a Failing System,” made me wonder whether I’d want to listen to the rest of the disc at all. I’m not the biggest fan of contemporary hardcore punk, to say the least. So let’s just say that I was a little stunned at the half-minute mark to learn about the band’s split personality.

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