Music

Show love

by Darcy MacDonald

Hip hop love for lonely hearts, PLUS shows and parties to help you dance and drink your sorrows away, from Sarah MK to Maysr and Vilify to Indecent Xposure’s Friends W/ Benefits to MTL Hearts Dilla.

If your tender, loving, unclaimed heart has been tampered with by insensitive (and hilarious) memes like this over the past couple of days and you just feel like shutting down, curling up and eating a whole thing of cookie dough to get you through these difficult times, I’m here to remind you how much I love you — in musical form!

Before we get to the shows, here are two quick little audio Valentines for you. At 5 p.m. today, local lover David Hodges drops The Lifeboat Mixtape Vol. 1, a free, eight-song collection produced entirely by Detroit indie bigwig Apollo Brown.

And if you missed it last year, rhyme king Brother Ali’s freebie The Bite Marked Heart EP will keep you cozy whether riding solo or hitched at the zipper.

After that, if you’re still hitting the Kleenex, all I can really recommend is switching to the bottle and throwing standards and inhibitions to the wind.

Here’s where you can pitch woo all week long.

Thursday – Set the mood with the vocal stylings of the lovely miss Sarah MK at le Piano Rouge for Afrophylia 2013, doors at 7 p.m., show at 10.

If you wanna keep it a lil’ greasier, head to En Cachette where, all night long, Daddy Maysr and Vilify promise “super cute Valentines/super gangster music.” Sounds sexy.

Friday – Keep your pants hot at the Sweet Valentines Lovin’ Party for a fearsome foursome with Sagewondah, Twitch, Djoolz and Sev Dee.

Cabaret Underworld presents Friends W/ Benefits, bringing back their Indecent Xposure series, after a year’s hiatus, to the tunes of Heart Streets, Panther & the Supafly, Leila Bogah and DJs Tommy Kruise and Montrilla.

If you’re deep in the cut with your two-day-old undies and tissue-burn under those nostrils, you can keep the torch alive with 24 Hours of Vinyl, back after nearly six months and returning live from Vancouver, where the minister of MIMS, Lexis, invites the natives to spin better black circles than the ones under your loveless eyes. Check the setlist, but I’d put the coffee on for a set by Ohmega Watts.

Saturday – Scott C and Simahlak give love and thanks to the Late Great J Dilla at le Belmont for their annual MTL Hearts Dilla commemoriall throwdown.

Concurrently, former Slum Village DJ Dez Andrés takes it from hip hop to house and everywhere in between at the PHI Centre with Rilly Guilty and Pierre Kwenders.

Back at En Cachette and Moonshine Saturdays, rez Sagewondah receives Poirier for a night of madness and mischief.

Monday – Closing ceremonies for Festival Fro don’t mean the end of Black History Month by any means. In fact, organizers are dropping an all-local compilation of music that keeps it natural, the festival’s core value, before month’s end.

That said, send the fest off with ’70s activist icon Angela Davis, speaking to the people on self-acceptance and pride, at l’Astral from 6 p.m. That’s love. ■

Shinecultmtl@gmail.com
@ShineCultMTL

Posted in Music

by Darcy MacDonald

Contributor
Darcy MacDonald has been with Cult MTL since day one, a decade ago. Which means today, he’s a middle-aged white guy (albeit one more interested in other people’s ideas than in his own). He was previously a columnist and reporter for Montreal Mirror, and has also created content (FKA “written”) for RBMA, Noisey, Montreal Gazette, The National Post and probably some other great places he’s forgotten about. Music, culture, community and miscellaneous questions in search of answers all come across his desk, sooner or later.

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