Our tour of Central Canada is upon us and rather than pollute the website with updates from the road, we have created a tour blog to keep you up to speed on the happenings of the bots as we head off to new and exciting adventures. Just a quick update, we have added a Sherbrooke date to the tour which is on July 15th at Bar Le Magog and our Montreal date is now at Divan Orange on July 16th.

The tour blog can be found here: http://theshagbots.wordpress.com/

For the full dates and venues, our Tour poster can be seen here: http://theshagbots.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=10

wish us luck!
-bots

First of all, we returned home from Austin, TX with our stomachs expanded, our minds exploded, and our breadth of Star Wars/Earth, Wind and Fire trivia knowledge explored. SXSW was truly the craziest experience we have ever had as a band. We chose to don our tiger suits for one more farewell show and the results were overwhelming. I do believe that the bots appeared in probably 6900 photos that night, but Nevertheless, the show was well attended and a lot of fun! We were very pleased with the show and really hope that we can come back next year.

We also travelled to San Antonio to do an interview on KSYM radio from San Antonio College. They were really nice  and very generous with their time and afterward we ate at the legendary Cove Restaurant. Delicious.  I cannot write about every single culinary adventure we embarked on during SXSW but I can assure you, Texas cuisine is tailor made for our eating habits..

This summer, we are heading out on our very Eastern Canadian tour! We have confirmed the first dates of the tour July 7th at the Casbah in Hamilton, July 13th at the legendary HORSESHOE TAVERN in Toronto, and July 16th at the Casa del Popolo in Montreal. We are working to secure our dates in Guelph, Brantford, Winnipeg, and many others as we speak, we will keep you posted as we find out.

Sadly, this month Calgary had to say goodbye to our friends The Fast Romantics who left to move to Toronto to live the dream. A great band and great guys, we hope they invade Toronto and become bigger than Nickelback. We were fortunate enough to play their farewell show at the Marquee Room which was killer. We wish them all the best and will see them soon we we stop in to Toronto in July.

This summer is going to be legendary. Central Canada, here we come.

-bots

It is really cool to think that we are just about one month away from making our trip down to Austin, TX to play at the RedGorilla Music Festival that takes place during SXSW. This will be our first show on foreign soil and judging by what people have been having been telling us about Austin during SXSW, it sounds like its going to be insane. The show in Austin is on Friday March 19th at 8:00 @ The Chuggin Monkey.  We are all really excited at the prospect of hundreds of bands, warm weather, and most importantly.. BBQ.  We have also arranged some interviews with Texas radio stations (that were nice enough to spin our album during its release)while we are there to help promote the show in Austin. Very exciting stuff!

I can promise that we will attempt to make the most of our journey down to Texas. We will do our best to make it a very memorable show;  we wont be leaving anything in the tank

Also, we have been trying to enhance our live show with the one thing that any truly professional, serious, talented, inspirational, or handsome band needs…. LASERZ.  This is our first venture into the land of visual stimuli so we apologize for any seizures/vomiting/visions of the Virgin Mary that our light show may have caused at the Den in January (outside of the usual quota of these occurrences). We are still stumbling through this technology and we promise to become more proficient with these lights as time goes on. We all think that it will eventually make our show a lot more enjoyable for anyone.

Well that’s all for now, I promise I will henceforth be more diligent with these updates! We are counting down the sleeps until Texas and brainstorming ways to impress some people while we are down there. If  you would like to keep up with us, you could always follow us on twitter where you are updated on the happenings from Bots-ville, whether or not it is relevant.

see you in Texas!

First off, Our album is officially available on iTunes!!! You can also buy a physical copy of it through Amazon.com, or through the link on this website.  There is also a link to iTunes under the Merch section of this site!

Earlier in September we were lucky enough to open for Shout Out Out Out Out in Lethbridge @ Henotic. That was by far one of the coolest shows we have ever played, and what was even cooler is that the guys in SOx4 were some of the nicest guys we have ever met. We patronized the afore mentioned Red Dog Diner (see Lethbridge entry) 2 times that day and night and will now live approximately 3.9 weeks less. Nonetheless, quite worth it for the   (basically meat salad) and burgers.

After that, The Shagbots launched their ambitious attempt to conquer U.S college radio. The College radio system in the states is a vast system of hundreds of freeform stations, each of them with their own unique styles. What rules over these stations is a charting system called CMJ and they release a Radio top 200 every week that basically serves as the billboard charts for indie music. On top of this, every station puts out a chart every week of their own individual top 30 and using a complex calculation of the size of the school, its listener base, and other things I don’t really know, CMJ spits out their top 200 according to these top 30 lists. Soooo the objective is to get on as many of these lists as possible!. With the help of our friends, Tinderbox Music in Minnesota, we blitzed the stations that would play our music with the hopes of expanding our listener base.

Things started off well, we were #18 on the CMJ Top adds chart, which basically meant, we were #18 out of all the bands that were added to College radio for edition of the chart. This was pretty cool! What was even cooler though was seeing our name on our first top 30 chart which happened to be: #27 on WUMD, North Dartmouth Massachusetts. This was REALLY cool thinking that somewhere that far away from home was listening to us and actually liked us enough to put us on the charts! Things really started to pick up and the next thing we knew, we were #195 on the CMJ top 200, and we didn’t stop there…

The Shagbots have been able to reach #130 on the CMJ charts which we feel is pretty cool for an un-signed, Canadian, self-released, debut album. As of right now we are still on the charts which means we have spent a full month on the CMJ top 200! We have charted in places like Chicago, Portland, Columbus, Staten Island, Iowa (all over Iowa, we LOVE Iowa), Santa Clara, Monroe (Louisiana), Kansas, Arkansas, Texas, Maryland,  Maine, New Jersey, New York, and a whole lot more. This has been a really cool experience for us and we are really optimistic about what we can do with this progress in the U.S!

We are hoping we can now do the same in Canada!!

-bots

The first night we drove to Revelstoke through the rain and stayed in a nice hotel, playing card drinking games until pretty damn early in the morning. The next morning we had made the long but incredibly memorable drive to the coast. What was incredible was we experienced the dry desert-like heat of Kamloops and the ocean breeze all in about 8 hours. We arrived at the ferry before the evening and were able to see the sunset on the ferry ride over, very romantic. 

We arrived in Victoria to stay at the house of our very charitable friends. We repaid their kindness by getting them in trouble with their neighbors, shawtily assembling their furniture (sorry Ali), and invading their new rooms . The next day we set off to explore Victoria and we discovered the pinnacle of culinary delight, The Noodle Box. This place was unreal. We are considering pooling our money (around $317.43) and buying a franchise for Calgary. After seeing most of the downtown area, we went to play our show at Logan’s Pub which featured Chocolate Porter and free Foosball. Despite a pretty sparse attendance, we had fun and woke up the next day to sail back on the ferry to the largest city we have ever played, Vancouver. 

Perhaps our only real complaint with Vancouver was the road systems and the drivers on these roads. Flashing green lights, roads that didn’t line up, and a love affair with the horn made driving in the city a little frustrating. Apart from that (and squeezing ourselves into a hotel room that might have  fit 3) we had a blast.We explored the English Bay waterfront and ventured down Robson street, which both were very interesting.  Vancouver is a vibrant city and our show at Pub 340 was great, with lots of people and the All Purpose Voltage Heroes their usual awesome selves. We found ourselves wishing we had more time to truly appreciate one of Canada’s coolest cities. We departed Vancouver through the infamous East Hastings and headed down the Trans Canada to our final stop, Kelowna.

We arrived in Kelowna to a feast prepared for us by semi-relatives who lived in a very nice area of what is a really nice city. We arrived at Doc Willoughbys  and realized that we had forgotten Davis’ keyboard adapter which forced us to modify our set a little. We began to play and the bar was only really half-interested, we seemed a bit of a nuisance to polite conversation at first. This changed drastically however about half way through and as if by magic the bar transformed into one of the rowdiest, enthusiastic, and enjoyable crowds we have ever played for in any city, ever. The crowd was so involved we ended up re-hashing songs that hadn’t been played for months previous and seemingly lost covers that are rarely played at all. The Kelowna show was the perfect tonic for a summer of touring that had its share of adversity and set-backs, a perfect vindication for a lot of hard work. We hope that we can be back in Kelowna, Vancouver, and Victoria again really soon!

All in all, we ended the summer on a very high note. We were able to basically take a week vacation with our best friends and see some cool things, meet some awesome people, and play music for people who had never heard us before, which is one of the coolest feelings I have ever felt being in a band. Heres hoping we can do it again soon, on an even bigger scale next time (2 hotel rooms!).

-bots