Downtown Boys at The Horseshoe Tavern

Photographs by Sarah Rix.

Toronto’s classic Horseshoe Tavern is so tiny and intimate that anything abrasive will shake it up rather easily. That’s what Downtown Boys did in many ways with their hyper political punk tunes last night. They opened for EMA and added length to their set by having social rants that denounced hatred and promoted equality in between each song. “Melanin existed before the word slave”, singer Victoria Stellastar Taco Ruiz (as her Facebook profile goes) dictated. She’s absolutely right in separating skin colour from labels and generalizations that were created for control in history. She and her band were right about many stances they took.

While these statements were hard to hear during their actual songs, of which were quickly chaotic and averaged under two minutes in length, their anger was felt through the music itself. As most of the band jumped off the stage and went ballistic on the Tavern’s checkered floor, their energy and passion spoke volumes about their views of society. Their want for ambiguity seems intentional, as Ruiz spoke a lot of her passages in Spanish which would alienate a portion of the audience that couldn’t speak the language. It didn’t matter, as we are all angry about something politically and thus we could attach our own concerns to the music itself (not entirely, as each song still had a specific topic to cover). With a sword fight with the necks from a guitar and a bass, a saxophone solo on the very floor of the venue and walls of absolute noise, Downtown Boys showed volumes of determination and small reminders that they were there to have fun as well as convey specific messages.

Thanks to Collective Concerts for media access.