THE IMPRESSIVE LO-FI-FNK MAKE DEBUT TORONTO APPEARANCE:





















Last night I had the great pleasure in catching Sweden’s Lo-Fi-Fnk live at a small club in Toronto. It was the band’s first visit to the city and they put on a super show. The band is Leo Drougge on lead vocals, programming and bass and August Hellsing on keyboards/sampler (and they had a drummer playing live with them). I had most of the tracks from their debut cd ‘Boylife’ that I had downloaded off some music blogs (I probably first heard about them on Nick’s great #1 Hits From Another Planet blog). Luckily they were selling copies of Boylife at the gig so I picked one up for $10 (great deal, especially considering the cd hasn’t been released in Canada yet).

The guys played most of the album (setlist is below, not 100% sure of its accuracy, if you were there and have corrections please email me) and played for about an hour. Highlights would have to be Wake Up, The End and Change Channel. They even came back and did an encore. Leo said they don’t normally do that and hadn’t done one on this tour and thanked the audience for being so nice.








Photo copyright KulPop








They remind me a bit on stage of the Pet Shop Boys, with Leo being the Neil Tennant vocalist/frontman and August standing behind his equipment like Chris Lowe with the occasional dance and arm moves. The sound they create (with the help of their laptop computer) is full and recreates the produced album tracks quite well. My only criticism would be that on some songs the vocals got a bit drowned out, but everyone was enjoying the show so much it didn’t really matter. The stage was dimly lit (I gathered the guys wanted it this way, and before they performed ‘The End’ they asked that the stage lights be turned off completely for that song) which was fine but mean’t I couldn’t video tape any of their performance).

I think that Boylife is a fantastic cd that everyone should hear and these guys need to get booked as openers for a big name group like the Pet Shop Boys, Erasure or Depeche Mode to really get exposed to a larger audience. I chatted with August and Leo briefly after the show and they signed my cd and seemed like nice guys. I really hope that a North American distributor picks up Boylife and they manage to come back on another tour. Check their MySpace site to check out their music and for the rest of the tour dates, there aren’t that many dates left for North American’s to catch this great band.

Below are also links to their three music videos on YouTube in case you want to watch them.

Lo-Fi-Fnk videos on YouTube:

Wake Up

Steppin’ Out

Change Channel

BUY Boylife CD

Setlist for Lo-Fi-Fnk – The Underground, Drake Hotel, Toronto March 27th, 2007

City
Adore
Wake Up
System
The End
Change Channel
Steppin’ Out
Heartache

Encore
A.D.T. (Act Don’t Talk)