A day after a full hour opening slot for Kings of Leon (sans Pigeon shit), it seemed The Stills may have left some of that energy behind when they played to a sold out crowd at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern. Launching right into things with “Lola Stars And Stripes”, a crowd pleaser off their celebrated debut Logic Will Break Your Heart, the energy on stage remained underwhelming throughout most of the set, despite the hits. That is until the encore where the band seemed to loosen up a bit and enjoy themselves for an audience that was asking for more.

AUX Weekly chatted with drummer Dave Hamelin earlier in the night about their forthcoming album, which saw the original lineup back together for the first time since their debut.

“Oceans Will Rise is really sorta outward looking and then during the last two years of touring, we realized we’re a lot more fucked up than we thought we were,” Hamelin tells AUX. “I think this album will be a reflection of that – a little more personal. We’re big on departures… It will be personal.”

In 2005, guitarist Greg Paquet left the band to finish school, bringing Hamelin from the drums to the front, a position which he struggled to fill on Without Feathers, notwithstanding his role as the band’s primary songwriter. Paquet has returned to The Stills for their fourth album. Hamelin describes the reunion as a natural one, based more on their friendship than anything else.

“He kind of just resurfaced. We hadn’t seen him for like four years or five years and he literally just resurfaced. We were just like, ‘You should, you know, come back and he’s like alright and so that was it – it was that simple. We started seeing him at bars out and having drinks. The good ol’ Greg – just really simply, we we’re like, ‘What are you doing? Let’s jam.’ ”

“Now that he’s back, I’m playing drums again… It’s a little looser. We got a looser, “slivlier” kinda, it’s less rock n’ roll, it’s more like sludgy & dark, – sex and dark.”

Cheers from the audience brought the Stills back to the stage following closer “Snakecharming The Masses”. Tim Fletcher crooned the first ooos of “Still in Love Song”, breathing energy into their debut hit, at last putting on the show that Stills fans waited patiently for.

It remains to be seen if our patience for their forthcoming effort will be rewarded, but the success of Oceans Will Rise and the renewed excitement of the band with the re-addition of Paquet certainly suggest so.

This weekend Arcade Fire, a band certainly in their prime thanks to their third album The Suburbs, and Pavement, one of the most notorious ‘indie’ bands from the past 20 years, will play together at Osheaga in Montreal. Pavement are set to go on right before Arcade Fire on the BlackBerry main stage and ‘pass the torch’ to one of the greatest bands to emerge in the last decade.

In an interview with AUX during their current reunion tour, Pavement member Bob Nastanovich spoke about playing with Arcade Fire and how excited he is to see them for the first time.

“I think they’re a pretty cool band and am interested to see what they are all about live,” Nastanovich said. “They’re pretty big so it’s always interesting to me to see these cultural phenomena at work. They seem like they’re one of the more successful interesting endeavours that’s come around in the last decade.”

Rising in the early ’90s and becoming one of the leading bands in the burgeoning independent rock scene, Pavement have seen all the buzz Arcade Fire are getting now and are used to seeing the ‘indie rock royalty’ handle being past from act to act.

“We were always a well-liked band and treated well by critics,” he said. “Always very comfortable with our success in terms of sales and live tours and size of followings. This ‘indie rock royalty’ type thing I think that might have more to do with when Pavement started than anything else. To be considered as one of the spearheads of a respected genre of rock ‘n’ roll, whether it be punk or new wave or techno or indie or whatever, a lot of that has to do with making good songs and having them fit into a genre. Indie rock royalty is a pretty modest state of being I’ll tell you that much.”

Photo by Sophie Samson, AUX TV

AUX TV’s Nardwuar catches up with Drake at a Vancouver studio with his long time collaborator, 40. Nardwuar pulls out a few records, including a few classics that Drake… discovered his sexuality with. Drake gives a shout out to Toronto hip hop legend Mindbender and the best part comes at the end. Watch the new interview below.

After spending fall and winter known only as an obscure duo hailing from Sweden, London’s Summer Camp finally came forth and revealed themselves to be UK artists Jeremy Warmsley and Elizabeth Sankey, whose earnest and heart-warming brand of sunny electro-infused folk-pop have  won over critics, audiences and listeners on both sides of the Atlantic.  Now after recently coming off their premiere tour with fellow Brits Slow Club, the two are readying themselves for the release of their debut EP in September and for another UK tour alongside current indie-pop darlings Frankie and the Heartstrings.  Recently, we had the chance to speak with Summer Camp about their prior anonymity, their existing artistic backgrounds and whether an online presence is really important.

Summer Camp: I Only Have Eyes For You

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AUX TV: Was the decision to remain anonymous at the beginning a response to the over-exposure many bands tend to receive in their early career stages?

Summer Camp: No, not at all.  We never intended to be a band, and only recorded a song for our own personal entertainment when we were bored one weekend.  Then we set up a fake MySpace – claiming we were Swedish (why? Seriously, why?) – which we thought no one would ever find, and we’d return to it in ten years time and cringe.  [But] within half an hour, we were on blogs and everyone was referencing the fake information we’d put on our MySpace when they wrote about us.  It was very surreal.  Almost as a way of dealing with the surprise of having people like it, we stayed anonymous – which ended up being pretty stressful in itself.

Eventually, we were “outtid” (so dramatic!) and suddenly everyone was like, ‘why were you anonymous? It’s just you two – boring’.   Needless to say, we’re kind of relieved that secret bit of our lives – which we never intended to start – is over.

AUX TV: Jeremy, did your background as a musician change the way you approached Summer Camp?

Jeremy Warmsley: Well, although I’d been in bands before, this was the first time I found a collaborator I really trusted.  It’s a dream being in a band with Elizabeth – she always has amazing melodies and great musical ideas.  I’d mostly worked solo before, so it was really exciting opening up to new influences and ways of working.

AUX TV: Elizabeth, do you find your experience as a music journalist has influenced the way you approach making music?  What about your background as an actress?

Elizabeth Sankey: I’d only been a music writer for about six months when we started doing Summer Camp, so I don’t think it’s really inferred our creativity as a band that much.  Luckily, I only ever wrote about bands I like, so there weren’t too many people I’d annoyed that I was likely going to meet on the gig circuit.  I guess it has made me more realistic about the whole hype thing, and also I know just how many amazing bands there are out there, and that you have to work really hard and be really good to get any attention.

To be honest, though, Jeremy has taught me far more about this game than anyone else.  He’s a wise man.  As for acting – I mainly do voiceover work which is obviously all about your voice and how to use it in different ways, so that has definitely been a help when it comes to singing.  And because I’ve been performing in plays since I was very young, I’m used to being on stage and all that jazz – although that didn’t stop me from being ridiculously nervous at our first gigs.

AUX TV: Do you find an online presence is necessary in order for a band to establish itself?

Summer Camp: Depends on what kind of a band you are, really.  It’s probably still possible for bands to do well without being blogged about, but then so many individuals have blogs now and therefore it’s kind of inevitable that if someone likes you, then you’ll have an online presence.  We love the little blogs, we love that everyone is now a critic and that a lot of the time, bigger blogs and the print press look to small blogs for new bands.  Probably if a band didn’t put any effort into the online thing and established itself the old fashioned way – with touring and stuff – the online people would pick up on it soon enough anyway.  It’s a chicken and egg scenario.

AUX TV: What did you learn from your time touring with Slow Club that you hope to apply to your tour with Frankie & the Heartstrings?

Summer Camp: Slow Club are amazing live, actually.  They’re incredible performers and have great songs.  They also really know how to get a crowd excited about being there – just through their onstage humour and good-time-having ways.  So hopefully we’ll bring a bit of that to our upcoming tour.

Caribou is looking to collect his second Polaris Music Prize for his latest album Swim, his first since 2008′s Andorra, which picked up the Prize for that year. In an interview with AUX Weekly’s Barry Taylor, Daniel Snaith, aka Caribou chats about some of the inspiration behind his latest opus and reveals he only recently learned a normal childhood activity.

“I learned to Swim in the past year…I learned to swim properly anyway,” Snaith said. “I became obsessed with it like a lot of things I do I suppose.”

It seems that element has a lot to do with the album and not just relating to Snaith learning how to tread water. “The aesthetic idea of production of the album was making all the elements sounds fluid the way everything moves around your head when you’re listening to it in a way water would flow around,” he said. “My only distraction was going swimming everyday.”

The opening track on Swim is called “Odessa” and for the music video Snaith hired some video artists from British Columbia who had previously sent him a video for a song from one of his older albums unannounced. He liked it so much that he gave them “Odessa” and a proper budget to make a new video, which features a Mountain Goat.

“I forget exactly where it was filmed, but somewhere where you can just come across a Mountain Goat.” Check out the music video below.

AUX Weekly interview with 2010 Polaris Prize nominee Caribou. Catch AUX Weekly every Saturday at 8 pm.

Caribou’s “Odessa” music video from Swim.

During last week’s folk festival in Calgary AUX sat down with Philadephia’s Man Man, a band known for their muli-instrumental and heavily experimental rock music, where frontman Ryan Kattner, aka Honus Honus, revealed details of the band’s forthcoming album.

“(We’re) still working on it but tentatively might be called Life Fantastic,” Kattner said. “The hardest thing was wrapping my head around it. It’s a strange record.” This will be the band’s first release since 2008′s Rabbit Habbits.

Kattner said they chose that name for the new album “because the past couple years have been anything but…at the same time you can’t really let it get you down. Doing this is really a very special thing and being able to channel any problems you have into something that you can share with others, I think that’s a pretty fanatic thing.”

He added, “you can get bogged down some dark times and let it take you over or you can have a way to make a laugh at it. It seems that  thats how it fit in, it makes sense with the album.”

Having come off a North American tour alongside Florence and the Machine this past spring, Brooklyn’s Holy Hail have used their momentum to release their latest EP, The Dying (After) Party with newfound enthusiasm, effortlessly straddling the worlds of political awareness and accessibility while grabbing the attention of new audience members unsure of what to expect.

Using elements of punk, pop and rap to musically express their artistic and socially-conscious personas, the New York four-piece have become synonymous with transition, as line-up changes and creative evolutions have resulted in an album that mixes the heavy with the light.  After releasing their 2008 EP, The Dying Party to listeners for free – suggesting they instead make a donation to Education Through Music – Holy Hail has secured their reputation as a band with more than just musical integrity, using their status as a group to bring attention to more than just scenes and sales.

“Indie bands are kind of rightfully complaining that they’re not going to make money now because everyone’s just going to take their songs,” explained vocalist and keyboardist Kevin Cooke. “But if you’re not going to make any money anyway, why don’t you just encourage people to send five bucks to something worth it?”

No stranger to the controversial, the band’s previous work has been primarily political, and while each song was masked with the friendliness of pop or the addictiveness of rap, both The Dying Party and The Dying (After) Party, have agendas not to be taken necessarily likely.

“We don’t do as many politically-oriented songs anymore, but we definitely [still] do,” shared Cooke.  “Like our first song on The Dying (After) Party’s about Afghanistan.  We used to just go – every single song was political.  Cat and I would read the paper and just be like, ‘oh my God – let’s put this into a song’, but I think lyrically we were rapping a lot and that’s kind of conducive to talking about things.  And I think when you make pop songs or indie songs and you get kind of political, sometimes there’s a backlash and that just makes you want to do it even more.”

We were really specific in what we wanted to talk about so we didn’t come off arrogant or not aware of who we were dealing with in [terms of] charities or lyrics,” he continued.  “And I just hate that apathy.  It’s like, you can sing about boyfriends and girlfriends forever – [and] not that there aren’t a million great politically-oriented songs and bands, but I just find that stuff a little more gripping.”

When the Raveonettes were scheduled to play at this year’s NXNE festival, Sune Rose flew in to Toronto a day early to see one band – LA’s Warpaint. Wagner tells AUX, “It was the best show I’ve seen in ten years.” Watch the interview below.

Barry Taylor chats with Mark Arm and Steve Turner of Mudhoney about what it’s like to be “big” and play Dundas Square during NXNE. The band talk about how they’re writing new material and have always had to goal of playing on David Letterman’s show.

Jesse Hughes from Eagles of Death Metal chats with AUX Weekly about why likes playing big shows and loves the ladies. Check out the short interview before his set at The Phoenix during NXNE.