Toronto – Every year, the city of Toronto hosts this thing called ‘Winter City’ where people gather around Nathan Phillips Square and do stuff to celebrate winter, and city. What this means is every weekend for a few weekends, theres a free outdoor concert. On the weekend of January 26, the free concert was GTA’s own, Tokyo Police Club. Arguably the most hyped Canadian band at the moment, TPC seems marked for the big ticket and will be releasing a LP off Paperbag records sometime soon. I managed to drag myself (and a few others) to the show.
So how was the show? Well, let me first say, this “Nights of Fire” thing that was going on at the same time was freakin wicked. There was flames everywhere, it was a pyros wet dream. The fire, along with the fog and the snow made for some crazy scenes and I wish I had brought my camera along. Here is some flickr pics that other people put up.
The band came on sometime after nine to a extremely large crowd, half of which seemed to be teenagers jacked on whatever it is they drink these days. The crowd was quite enthusiastic about the show and the band led off with the opening track “Box” off the bands latest EP – Smith. This was my first time seeing them, so I had pretty decent expectations since I really loved the song ‘Your English is Good”, as well as most of the Eps. Tokyo Police Club announced that they have a cd coming out soon and most of the set list consisted of songs from their previous releases and new stuff. I have to say, I was expected more then what I got from the concert. The new music sounded quite mellow and to me, TPC is at its best when they are delivering short, solid upbeat tunes.
Overall, you can’t complain about the free show and the visuals were stunning, with the light show from stage melding in with the snowing. I bet the band members were quite cold wearing just t-shirts and what not while everyone else was all layered up. After hearing the concert, it’ll be interesting to see if TPC loses any momentum when they release their new LP this spring. I think they are very similar to the UK band the Cribs, so if you enjoy TPC, check the other band out too.
2.5/5
+ crazy setup for winter city
+ free
+ these fluorescent tube things they handed out
+ played the songs that I liked
– played songs i thought were meh
– freakin kids
– cold
– could have been shorter, since it was cold
* Props to my friend Gary for taking pictures. He has more pictures up, but you will have to be his facebook friend if you want to see him. That’s quite the commitment.
Here is the song that they started the set off with
