TURF: Dawes

The Toronto Urban Roots Festival, or TURF for short, is a 4-day music festival in downtown Toronto. For its first year, they had a really good line up of artists including She & Him, Camera Obscura, Arkells, Fitz and the Tantrums, Hannah Georgas, The Felice Brothers, Skydiggers, The Wooden Sky, The Sadies, Yo La Tengo, Whitehorse, Cat Empire, Neko Case and Belle & Sebastian to name a few. There was also a club portion with live performances at The Horseshoe and Lee's Palace each night.

I only attended Day 3 and saw Dawes, Matt Mays, Frank Turner & The Sleeping Souls, The Lowest of the Low, The Hold Steady and Flogging Molly. I found it to be an amazing experience. The festival was well organized, easy to get around and had a good variety of food and drink options including great food trucks, plentiful beer gardens and free water. There was a kids area, too. The VIP option was well worth the upgrade. I think I would attend more festivals if they were all this well run and had such well organized VIP options. I do wonder how close to capacity they were, and whether the manageable crowd levels were by design or not. Hopefully, TURF was profitable and will become an annual tradition on the Toronto concert calendar.

LA band Dawes had a comfy afternoon set. I wasn't familiar with their music before I decided to attend the Saturday show and I came away a fan of their straight-up rock with a classic 70s vibe. Perfect music for a hot and sunny day.

Here are a bunch of tunes:

"From a Window Seat" from their latest release Stories Don't End.

"Most People" from a performance on Letterman in late June.

"Time Spent in Los Angeles" from their 2011 album Nothing Is Wrong.

"When My Time Comes" from their 2009 début album North Hills.

The pictures in this post are mine. I'm gettin' better, aren't I?