Indie Week 2011

Be patriotic and increase your personal itunes Can-con. We went to Indie Week 2011 during their media preview and were pleased with the vibe, the venue [The Hideout] and of course the lineup. We caught last year's winners, These Electric Lives who set the bar high for 2011's cohort of hopefuls. Their mix of catchy electro indie pop is great to dance to and lead Mark Stanfield's energetic stage presence is infectious. We liked Zoo Lion and Fox Jaw Bounty Hunters but they weren't in the finals, which kinda sucked but it's still good that we got to see them. Wild cards are the reason Indie Week is fun. Its indie, you may never hear them ever again, bands split, people get married, the circle of life continues.

We sent a partygoer to the Tattoo Rock Parlour for the final night. Titled Best of the Fest, he/she went incognito and is hence totally free to speak his/her mind. The winner was declared to be Tiny Danza and well, to the opinion of our partygoer, it was spot on, yet it felt like The Ascot Royals deserved the Indie title for being more off-center. We love dishing the dirt, but in the end Tiny Danza satisfied what a concert goer wants to experience. Their tunes have varied styles, are fun to dance to, a little unpredictable yet totally of this era where all of us have ADHD, mashing a bit of grunge, rap, electronica and spoken word. It helps that they hail from our fine city of Toronto.



The above is a live ipod video of their speech, many thanks to brockmclaughlin for the video!

The nick in the cloth is this: Tiny Danza sound too good, too polished to be indie. Yes, we want it all and none of it. 30% of the people our reviewer spoke to said that they were almost too 'into it' to be the winners, that their music was so varied that you couldn't NOT like some of it, their stage presence rehearsed, that the band's accessibility to a wide audience made them an easy pick for the judges at Indie Week.

You can't win them all. For the people there, including our Mata Hari, Tiny Danza's set was more fun than their rivals The Ascot Royals and was a furious mosh. You can't help your hipster indie hips from shaking when they want to.