
Frank Yang For a band for whom a large part of their appeal is being unknowable and otherworldly, there's been a high degree of predictability with Sigur Ros , at least when it comes to their Toronto shows. For over a decade, they've come through town in support of each record for an exquisite show at Massey Hall that would send 2700 or so of their fans dazed into the night. For the last time they set up anywhere besides the Grand Old Lady of Shuter Street, you'd have to go back to May 2001 [...]

Frank Yang The arc around The xx's 2009 debut xx was a narratively perfect one, rich with mystery, sex, and drama as the London trio vaulted from obscurity to Mercury and, most prestigiously, a place on my year-end list . And perhaps most crucially for a perfect story, they ended. Or at least went away for a while. Real life differs from stories, however, in that it generally doesn't let you just ride off into the sunset, and so after some deserved downtime [...]