Stone Temple Pilots live – Eye Weekly (11.18.09)

No one seems to like the fact that seeing the Stone Temple Pilots play the Kool Haus wasn’t the greatest moment of my entire life. And I thought I was giving them a positive review.

Gwar interview – Eye Weekly (11.2.09)

That’s right, I had a strange and hilarious conversation with a not-quite-in-character Oderus Urungus of legendary horror thrash band Gwar.

The Jesus Lizard live – Eye Weekly (11.13.09)

The Jesus Lizard reunion proves that sometimes noise rock gets better with age. Incidentally, my appreciation for this band has increased exponentially from the first time I saw them play live a mere 13 years ago.

Fiery Furnaces live – Eye Weekly (11.9.09)

The Fiery Furnaces being their sibling revelry to the El Mocambo.

Tucker Max film review – Eye (11.11.09)

A satirical fan letter to Tucker Max in honour of the Canadian release of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell the movie.

Metalocalypse interview – Eye Weekly (10.21.09)

A chat with the voice and mind behind Dethklok, the world’s most brutal metal band (on the animated Adult Swim show Metalocalypse anyway).

Ad Hawk Activism – Eye Weekly (10.7.09)

Rami Tabello has won a lot of battles in his guerrilla war against illegal billboards — and, soon, city hall will have his back

Riding with Rami Tabello when he’s on illegal-billboard patrol is a harrowing adventure. Acceleration comes in brief, block-long bursts. Equilibrium-shifting U-turns are a regular occurrence. No gap in traffic seems too tight for him to squeeze his red Mini through. No amount of honking deters him from creeping through an intersection in order to observe the distances between two rooftop signs, and his four-way flashers get heavy use.

He drives like a man on a crusade, and behaves like one too: an anti-hero operating above the law to bring down the companies who have covered Toronto in illegitimate advertising.

Stick Tabello in a City Hall committee room, surrounded by councillors, billboard lobbyists, concerned citizens and public-space advocates and he’s less brazen, but equally driven. Normally clad in a black leather jacket and button-down shirt, which add to the crisp GQ stylishness of his perpetually shaved head, Tabello looks, if not out of place, a little too intense for something like a public consultation.

Still, there’s a reason the city’s licensing and standards chair, Howard Moscoe, considers Tabello a public hero, and why he occasionally defers to him during meetings about billboards. That’s because for two and a half years, Tabello has been doing, in his spare time and at his own expense, what a whole city department gets paid to take care of — and he’s been doing it better.

Flaming Lips: Embryonic review – EYE (10.7.09)

“Finally, the punk rockers are taking acid… again!” At least that’s what The Flaming Lips’ double disc worth of epic weirdness Embryonic sounds like to this critic.

Meet: Monotonix – Eye Weekly (9.30.09)

The roving DIY punk rock party that is Monotonix return to Toronto in support of their new album Where Were You When It Happened?

Nick Cave (the book) – Ashgate (June 2009)

This summer, Ashgate and La Trobe University in Australia put out a book called Cultural Seeds: Essays on the work of Nick Cave for which I wrote one of the chapters. It’s available at Amazon.ca, but you can also read my chapter in full at GoogleBooks.