Toronto's Blocks Recording Club staged a celebration show for the North York Central Public Library on Saturday night. What was the occasion? Well, the library is now collecting Canadian music for their archives and people can check them out at their leisure. A fair share of the music comes from Blocks Recording Club which includes Final Fantasy, Bob Wiseman, Ninja High School and others.As for the celebration, it involved bands of variation. Final Fantasy, Hank, Ninja High School, The Creeping Nobodies & Bob Wiseman all performed for an all-ages crowd, mainly full of new faces.

Photos:
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The night began with the best-of-the-best performers of all time, Bob Wiseman. Since the night started off almost an hour late, Wiseman, who had new songs prepared, decided to whip through what he could by performing his run-o-the-mill set which included short films shows which he shot. Wiseman is probably one of the most entertaining acts I've ever seen. He brings a lot of comedy to his routines which involve songs about having "the best cats on the block" and why Dave Geffen is his blood relation. Even though Wiseman is a comical character, he also brings out a heartfelt, heartstring-pulling type personality with him and injects that into his songs such as 'Sweet Gertrude' and 'Uranium'. I think it's important for people to explode both sides of the Bob Wiseman spectrum and see what he's all about. Like I said, he is the best-of-the-best.

The Creeping Nobodies got more experimental for the new crowd. The Alt-Punkish local five began their set to a slow intro of soft vocals and then a slowly-growing crescendo of noise. Lead singer Derek Westerholm made his presence felt all across the stage and the room with spazzy dance routines and grinding a tape recorder across his guitar strings. He also used a trash can lid to make noises, as well. While I wasn't turned on by the music, I can acknowledge their right to entertain those who like their type of experimental sounds.

Ninja High School, probably my favourite cathartic release band in Toronto, hit the stage with a little bit of an awkward twist: Matt Collins was sporting a Camel costume. So what's so awkward about that? Um, well, look at the photos. Anyways, NHS kicked off their set with a warm-up tune and led onward with the rest of their normal set ("It's Alright To Fight", "It's Gonna Be Us", etc.). Although the set was short, NHS ended off with "I Love World", prompting Matt Collins and Steve Kado to jump into the audience and dance/mosh around with the already-existing library pit of terror. The only negative (besides me being shoved into the stage - ow, my hip) was the set being too short. I can never get enough of Ninja High School and their efforts to bring the world together.

Hank, or The Hank Collective, were once a four-piece that had a lead singer and three back-ups, all singing over a playback. Now, Hank are a band who play instruments and create tunes worthy of moving many hands about. Everyone in the band shares a role when it comes to singing or leading. Yes, the band seemed interesting and their songs were neat. However, they unfortunately weren't enough to keep my attention for too long. As much as I'd like to add more to this paragraph, it wouldn't do much good considering my attention had gone out the window after a while.

To end the night, Final Fantasy played to the new and excited faces. Noticing that time had been passing rather quickly, Pallett decided to burst through his set "Final Fantsty XMC" style. None of us knew what he meant, so we laughed and went along with what he had offered, which was a stellar set. At a point, Pallett had indicated that the stage was wet. Water had seemed to be left all over stage (probably due to NHS' rambunctiousness). So, the local library assistants went out (more like crawled out) during the middle of a song and cleaned up the water to the best of their ability. It did manage to get a laugh out of Pallett and the crowd with him saying, "this is very erotic."

Overall, the evening was a huge success and the Blocks Recording Club managed to spread the word of their artists. Just a little word of advice from me: see Bob Wiseman.