About: Andre Gagne

You know those drinks that everyone warns you about?

Come on, you know the kind! They got names like Corpse Reviver or Nuclear Grandma (this one may not actually be a drink but don’tcha think it should be?). They start off nice and silky smooth to the point where you think you’ve been had and then, whamo bamo slamo! Boom went the dynamite and you feel it from your pinky toe to your cerebral cortex. One second steady and the next you are knocked out of your pair of BOGO Payless. You don’t quite know where you were at, where you are now and where you are going but damn you just want to go. Damn, you just want some more.

A Lumineers concert is kinda’ like that only with less booze content( (debatable) and more whamo bamo slamo!

Sometimes you need squealing solos, mosh pits and eyebrow scorching pyro. I mean, hey, who doesn’t a bit of that stirred into their Monday night, amiright? But sometimes, yeah sometimes, your chainsaw mangled, steamroller backed over heart just needs the mellow mood vibes provided by Dallas Green’s usual melancholy  City and Colour. Tunes with names like “Difficult Love”, “Lover Come Back” and “We found Each Other in the Dark”…oh yeah, that’s the sentimental sombre saccharine my stung sorrow-filled soul yearned for. (It also, apparently, requires a shitload of alliteration!)

Before we sling some Silver with David Usher and the Moist boys (a band name I’d bet an unencumbered ride on the LRT was only bypassed for the shorter Moist due to it fitting better on album covers), I gotta’ give props to the new digs over at the Bronson Centre. No, waits, my apologies, the Bronson Centre Music Theatre.

If you haven’t been to the former 1920s nun run school  turned office space turned one O-town’s hidden gems of concert hubs, you owe yourself a visit. Heck, even the Wikipedia page will throw you as it mentions seats! Renos have removed those, opened up the floor space, added a few bars and turned it into a full-fledged zone to get your 90s alt rock on!

Say an airplane carrying a large polar bear were flying above the Nation’s Capital and, say, just say, said polar bear’s carrier were to jangle loose in a bad patch of turbulence that also opened the security hatch whooshing the bewildered bear out and sending it buffeting through the clouds. Now say, and we’re just saying here, that bear plummeted towards a recently upended truckload of beanbag chairs where it fell safe and snugly, shook off the air sickness and rolled into, say, the Rideau Canal where it slowly but surely swam its way towards,I dunno, City Hall? Stepping onto land with a mighty shake, say, and let me reiterate, I’m just saying, it were to sneak somehow undetected unto the grounds of the TD Ottawa Jazz Festival, park itself behind those jerks who decided to chat all the way through, saaaayyyyy, a Norah Jones concert, and then, just then, suddenly realize how hungry it was and….

As a staple of Toronto’s music community for years, if you were looking for a collaborator, musician Lydia Persaud was your go to. Now she’s stepping forward with her debut album and she leaves no mystery of her intent when it comes to the title. Let Me Show You, she says.

Released in May via Next Door Records, she’s bringing her new songs to the NAC’s Fourth Stage tonight. Ahead of the show, we had a chance to chat up her influences, putting the new album together and shifting from her work with wild cover band Dwayne Gretzky to this solo tour.

For fans of epic superhero awesome sauce, when it comes to the big screen, Endgame is a new beginning of possibilities. There’s a lot of choice and seemingly endless directions. Within the source material, that thrilling vastness of comic book lore, there have been some epic team-ups. The Flash and Green Lantern! Deadpool and Spider-man! Ghost Rider and…Howard the Duck?

Ok, so they haven’t all been the sauce of awesomeness but O-town’s own geektastic conjoining of mighty entities is, bub!

“Hit Me with Your Best Shot”, “The Final Countdown”, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” … you know the tunes. All three of ‘em are probably blasting off somebody’s classic rock radio somewhere on this spinning ball as you read this while humming synth riffs softly under your breath so the dude in the next cubical doesn’t hear you reliving your leather clad glory days! Are those devil horns forming between ENTER and the SPACE bar?

Fun fact: According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, we here in The Great White North have about 1000 organized zoos housing an estimated one billion wild animals. Well, the Canuck Capital is about to get a whole lot wilder as, from the subways of New York, return the boisterous buskers Too Many Zooz!

Alright, I know my buddy Matty McKechnie has a new band called The New Band but, between you, me and that guy who doesn’t look at me sideways when I pour ten pounds of vanilla powder in my Bridgehead cup of java, I gotta’ say Graven and the O-town Scene is a pretty vanilla caked coffee sweet runner up.