A Counting School - Hardcore Chartered Accountancy

If Sam Roberts is in town there's a good chance I'll lose my voice

Sam Roberts played the Music Hall on the Danforth last night - they're in town all week playing 4 Toronto shows, with fellow Montreal rockers the Stills opening for them. Sam Roberts and Metric are the two Canadian groups where I can recognize pretty much their entire repertoires, by virtue of owning all their albums and listening to them relatively obsessively. I've even managed to meet and interview Sam Roberts and the rest of the band in person in my student journalism days. These guys are awesome. If you haven't heard of Sam Roberts, I'll forgive you if you don't live in Canada. Here's an America-centric review of a 2-year-old Chicago show . It'll give you some decent background. I think I did a little more damage to my voice moments earlier by trying to sing along again to Detroit '67's music video . How can you NOT resist its enthusiastically joyous chorus? Watching the video you find some incredible dissonance in the dark subject matter Detroit...

Metric has a new album coming out - the first single rocks!

On the unusually long drive home from my client tonight - curse you Friday night volume - the silver lining to sitting forever in the car was the fact that I got to hear my favourite band's new single - Metric 's new single "Help Me I'm Alive". Bless you Lezzy McGuire for doing the awesome-fantastic. The moment I see this in stores I'm buying the album - I will blindly assume the rest of the album will be this awesome. I also have to get tickets for their show next month . Above: certainly not me. Someone had to take the picture The first single is transcendent. I had some more insightful analysis of the elegant ending, Emily Haines' strong vocals and the return to earlier 'classic' Metric instrumentation but I somehow lost that paragraph. Oops. No matter. I know I'm a horribly biased reviewer. I mean Metric's last album cover is on the wall behind me. They would have to endorse Palin as a wisened stateswoman and declare themselves Nickelback...

"The last thing I expected was to receive a cubic metre of toys at work"

A happy event I alluded to earlier has finally come to pass - people have started sending me things with the hope that I will give them some word of mouth attention. Having been a student journalist, I'm an exceedingly easy target, I must admit. My plan was that I wasn't going to write about it right away, but it's a slow night and I had fun playing with it already - which is a coded way of saying I'm a sucker for anything with a blinking blue light. What you see there is a portable iPod charger. Note the clever alignment which allows you to use the audio plug while charging. To design it any other way would, of course, be insane. My relationship with that piece of Mac hardware is a funny one. I got the iPod for free, and now I got my first ever accessory for it for free too. I think the accountant in me would've said, "but your cell phone can also play mp3s for you" is what kept me from ever actually buying the player. That, and the fact that it seems like...