When will the exodus end? Vancouver’s tom-tom beating, trance-inducing, Croatian-vocalizing band of art-weirdos Basketball is the latest act to depart our less-than-fair city.

After a flurry of media interest in response to an open letter to Vancouver city councillors by owner Zak Pashak, the Biltmore Cabaret is open for business.

Denis “Sasquatch” Barthe of local metal-monsters Cradle to Grave was handcuffed at gunpoint by five U.S. border guards on August 23, held for five hours, then returned to Canada in a U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicle.

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, the Biltmore Cabaret is once again open for business. The Biltmore was shut down by the City of Vancouver on Friday, August 15, for exceeding its maximum occupancy of 352 people.

Vancouver native and New Pornos vocalist Carl Newman discusses the daring, grownup sound that characterizes the band's latest album, Challengers.

Update: The Biltmore is open for business. Scheduled shows for Friday, August 29 and Saterday, August 30 will go ahead as scheduled. See The the Straight's music blog for details.

You hire the Barenaked Ladies to pilot the music section’s private jet, and we reward you with a Payback Time T-shirt, two recently released major-label CDs, and two tickets to a Live Nation club show taking place in Vancouver within the next four weeks. Here’s this week’s winning whinge.

Staind vocalist Aaron Lewis seemed to be in a particularly bleak mood during an MTV interview back in 2006. “I think nobody cares anymore.…We’re not the hip flavour of the moment…we’re not what’s cool right now,” he moaned.

With a mesmerizing display of its methods, the U.K. band had the young and excited crowd in the palm of its hand during a two-hour love-in at Thunderbird Stadium.

Festival season isn’t over quite yet. Jammin’ 4 Jay is an annual one-day event held in the five-acre Fort Langley back yard of Surrey Fire Service Captain Greg Drew, in memory of Drew’s son Jayson. Jayson Drew was killed in a car accident at age 17 in 2003, and profits from the event go to the Jammin’ 4 Jay Charitable Society, which promotes “safe driving practices and education for young drivers”.  

It started out as a student film, but Shake, Rattle & Roll has travelled far and wide since filmmaker Melissa James completed the 23-minute movie in 2007. The BCIT graduate recently returned from L.A. after screening the award-winning documentary at the fifth annual Don’t Knock the Rock Film and Music Festival, which is curated by filmmaker and Quentin Tarantino pal Allison Anders.  

After more than two decades of faithfully giving Vancouver the blues from its location at the foot of the Granville Street Bridge, the Yale is moving. But it’s only temporary, Yale marketing manager Stella Panagiotidis assured the Straight.  

You hire Gary Glitter to head up the music section’s daycare program, and we reward you with a Payback Time T-shirt, two recently released major-label CDs, and two tickets to a Live Nation club show taking place in Vancouver within the next four weeks. Here’s this week’s winning whine.

Music B.C. thinks you’d better sign up early for its next SchMusic B.C. party. The next edition of the popular networking event has been moved to the Biltmore Cabaret (395 Kingsway). Savry Bou, the organization’s membership coordinator, is urging people to register in advance: “It’s gonna get really packed in there.”

With an incoherent sound and Tommy Lee filming fans' oversized boobs during a sloppy 90-minute set, the headliners were blown away by Papa Roach at Crüe Fest.

NOMO’s founding member, Elliot Bergman, is sitting in a Subway restaurant somewhere between Telluride and Las Vegas when the Straight tracks him down for a chat. A few minutes into the conversation, a voice in the background starts pumping the rest of his eight-piece band for information, asking “What are you called?” and “Where y’all from?”

Day 2 of the festival finds Black Mountain raising the dead, the Tragically Hip getting out there, Sam Roberts whipping up a cyclone, and Tom Petty delivering the hits.

Despite glitches such as traffic problems, overflowing porta-potties, and disgruntled dance fans who couldn’t make it into the Bacardi B-Live tent, the man behind Pemberton Festival (which took place July 25 to 27) couldn’t be happier.

True to form, Nardwuar the Human Serviette managed to outrun the rest of the media by scoring the one and only interview with Jay-Z at Pemberton Festival.

Vancouver’s Festival Distribution, closing shop after 15 years of supporting independent roots and world music, is holding a liquidation sale Monday to Saturday (August 4 to 9), at 1351 Grant Street. President Jack Schuller told the Straight that Festival will be going digital “within six weeks”, with a new enterprise, which can be found at therecordtent.com/.  

We’ll be lucky to hear a record this year more fully realized or rewarding to contemplate than Rook.

Tommy Milburn, drummer of Vancouver post-hardcore band the SSRIs, died on July 1, two days after falling through the skylight of a Main Street restaurant. A statement on the band’s MySpace and Facebook pages reads, in part, “We loved him so much and he was loved by anyone who was ever lucky enough to have met him. We send our love and condolences to all of his family and friends, and hope everyone is doing their best to cope with this horrible loss.

Described by its founder, Nathan Holiday, as “punk opera” by “techno-anarchist slackers”, Tunnel Canary was an uncompromising experimental project whose role in Vancouver’s early punk scene has been largely overlooked.

Live music has come to the Beaumont Studios for the summer months—and maybe beyond if things continue to go well for Vancouver City Limits. Producers Bruce Gerrish, Colin Speir, and John Pippus launched the Monday-night concert series at the Mount Pleasant theatre and artist space in early June.

Eagle-eyed Tegan and Sara fans may have noticed a dedication on the duo’s 2007 album The Con to Burt Harris.

Congratulations are in order for JACK FM’s Larry Hennessey and Willy Percy. Friday (July 11) marks 20 years in Vancouver for the veteran jocks, who are perennial readers’ choice winners in the Straight’s Best of Vancouver issue for Best Morning DJs.

Although there were a few good strategically placed dance numbers to keep things moving along, the British megastar hit the heights with his silky smooth balladeering during his three-hour set at GM Place.

There’s always been a place in record-nerd world for bands whose publicity stills depict boys and girls picnicking beside sun-dappled rivers, or whose songs are typically about sweaters, boating, and turtles. Indeed, a blog entry on Allmusic last week entitled “Twee as Ducks: Indie Pop Summer Crushes 2008” rounded up this year’s crop of cutesy perennials.

Over the past 14 years, the Toilet has trudged drunkenly through seven-hour sets, “channelled the universe”, and paid tribute to Bob Dylan’s worst album. Now the group has made "the most amazing disappointing second album ever".

For the record—and contrary to information published on Wikipedia and in numerous articles—the Constantines are not named after author Alex Constantine. In fact, vocalist-guitarist Bryan Webb confesses to having only a vague knowledge of the self-styled “antifascist researcher”, whose incendiary book The Covert War Against Rock examined the deeper mysteries behind the killing of John Lennon, among others.

There’s been a shakeup at the Astoria Hotel. The Downtown Eastside venue has grown into a major destination for live-music lovers in the last eight months or so, thanks largely to the efforts of promoter M. Jordan of Come and See Entertainment. Jordan, however, now seems to be out of a job. The frustrated promoter told the Straight that she “heard the news through the grapevine” and was subsequently forced to cancel her upcoming shows.

Pride Tiger and bassist Mike Payette have separated. The amicable split comes after a year of solid work promoting the East Van group’s debut for Capitol/EMI, The Lucky Ones. There’s no word on who will replace Payette in the band he founded with guitarists Sunny Dhak and Bob Froese, and drummer-vocalist Matt Wood, in 2005.

Neko Case has left her long-term Canadian home with Mint Records and signed with the domestic arm of Epitaph offshoot Anti- Records. The label handled distribution of her 2006 Mint album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood outside of Canada.

Nashville's Be Your Own Pet's hard and fast set was the only bright spot in a deadly boring Tuesday night of advertising-driven, pseudo high jinks at the Commodore.

One of Vancouver’s best—and heaviest—bands has signed with Metal Blade Records. Bison will be joining Amon Amarth, Goatwhore, Brain Drill, and an extraordinarily long roster of other acts with terrifying names on the long-running, vanguard heavy-metal label.

Graham Brown and the Prairie Dogs will return to the Vancouver live scene as conquering heroes when they play the Railway Club on Saturday (June 21). The roots rockers were recently in the U.K., where two shows at the International Pop Overthrow festival in Liverpool saw them play to standing-room only capacity at the Cavern Club and Lennon’s Pub.

The Green Hour Band (Kingdom)

The Orchid Highway (Rainbow Quartz)

There’s a fairly well-known (if probably apocryphal) story about a British music critic whose advance copy of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Two Virgins was mispressed, resulting in two sides of unlistenable white noise. Not knowing any better, he gave it a rave review.

“We’re still a bunch of guys who can’t hold steady jobs and who fucking play rock ’n’ roll," says Jolt's Joey Blitzkrieg. "That’s what punk was, right?”

Veteran skankers and the merely curious should get themselves down to the Biltmore Cabaret on a Monday night. Open rehearsals for a theatre project called The Evolution of Ska: A Musical Travelogue from Jamaica to the U.K. to North America began at the Main area nightspot on June 9, and will continue every Monday for the next six months.

Talk about life in the fast lane. It’s taken one year for the Ting Tings to ascend from their roots in a Manchester artists’ colony to U.K. pop supremacy.

It appears that Mormon season has begun. Outside Falconetti’s East Side Grill on Commercial Drive, pizza-faced missionaries barely out of high school slouch by in the cold rain, followed a few minutes later by more of their brethren. Inside, Swank vocalist Spencer McKinnon and guitarist Doug Liddle have joined the Straight to talk about their own inimitable take on American-fried religious dementia, as laid out on the band’s newest album, Campfire Psalms.

A benefit will be held at the Railway Club tonight (June 5) for award-winning composer-musician Sandy Scofield. The quadruple Canadian Aboriginal Music Award winner and two-time Juno nominee lost a number of personal and professional items—including a hard drive containing many of her music files—when her West Side apartment was consumed by fire on January 30. Scofield wasn’t insured.

Artists and photographers are being asked to contribute to another upcoming benefit, this time for the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. The event, to be held at the Black Door (7 East 2nd Avenue) on June 14, will also act as a fundraiser for the Green Mountain Music Festival, taking place in Nanaimo on July 19.

Joey Only hit Ottawa this week on the final leg of a cross-country tour raising awareness for Insite. Along with Leah Martin of the Portland Hotel Community Services Society, the Vancouver-based anti-folksinger started picketing the constituency offices of key Tory decision makers on May 13, as the exemption expiry date for the Downtown Eastside supervised-injection site loomed on June 30.

Freedom Wind (Dead Oceans)

The alt-rock monster has survived a slump and its roots were definitely showing on the kickoff to its first world tour in three years, on the back of a dedicated return to Rockville with the album Accelerate.

Who knew the Biltmore Cabaret had an A-list? After finishing their tour-opening set at Deer Lake Park last Friday (May 23), R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe and Mike Mills showed up at the Kingsway venue to catch local chamber-pop outfit Young and Sexy as it unveiled songs from its newest Mint Records release, The Arc. “I tried not to be too starstruck, because I loved them as a kid,” Y&S guitarist Andre Lagace told the Straight.

Grease N’ Grind celebrates its first birthday on Saturday (May 31) with a full-day blowout at Pat’s Pub. The monthly meet-up began last year as a way of satisfying booker Steve Chase’s appetite for rock ’n’ roll, rockabilly, garage, and surf music, with a nice dollop of lowbrow art and classic American car culture on top. Or, as Chase told the Straight, “Basically, Grease N’ Grind is a respite from fake, crappy, just-coz-Pitchfork says-it’s-good music.