For the last big night of Canadian Music Week, I hauled ass to the Royal York for the 8th Annual Independent Music Awards, a celebration of the spirit of independent music in Canada.

Yes, awards were handed out in every category from Favourite Metal Artist (3 Inches of Blood) to Favourite Children’s Artist (The Smudge Fundaes), and there was lots of conjecture in the press pool about what it might sound like if those two acts collaborated on a few tunes.

But the real reason for me to be there was the performers, many of whom had played earlier in the week while I was taking in other artists.

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For my third night of Canadian Music Week, I decided to finally find out for myself what Hawksley Workman is all about. For years, many people have told me about his amazing talents, but I’ve never had a chance to check him out for myself, so this year I decided to change all that.

For the most part, the rumours are true: Workman is an amazingly talented singer/multi-instrumentalist, and he’s surrounded himself with a diversely talented band (the inventive violin/mandolin/guitarist was especially impressive) with which to tour his sixth album, Between the Beautifuls. You’d think that with all this incredible talent under one roof I’d have my socks rocked off, but after two and a half hours of watching these performers showing off I was surprised to find myself bored silly.

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As the second night of Canadian Music Week rolled around, I found myself running just a wee bit behind. I got to Lee’s Palace just in time to catch the tail end of Rebekah Higgs‘ set. I’m not sure what the rest of her material’s like, but it’s pretty obvious that I’ve caught her and her band on their “rockin’ out” number, which seems to consist primarily of Rebekah wailing wordlessly into a microphone with far too many effects while the band bashes one chord as enthusiastically as possible. Pity.

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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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After six years, the Breeders will finally be unleashing their fourth album, Mountain Battles, on the 7th of April. They’ll be on the road to celebrate the release with a whole slew of live dates between March and June, including appearances at such low key events as Canadian Music Week, Austin’s SxSW festival, and Coachella.
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