A Toronto Jam Band Turns Conceptual Dystopia Into Living, Breathing Groove
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Toronto’s Shapes make music that seems happiest before it knows exactly where it is going. Songs open into side roads, grooves loosen at the edges, and the space between players becomes part of the composition. On Planet Android, their debut album, that improvisational instinct meets a distinctly modern anxiety: humanity’s dependence on technology, and the distance it can place between people and the natural world. The record carries that tension with a crooked grin, setting warm, exploratory musicianship against a future imagined in colder, more mechanical terms.
At the centre are lifelong collaborators Bryan Silverberg and Dave Hollingshead, whose chemistry gives Shapes much of their identity. Guitars bend around rippling keyboards; percussion nudges songs forward without pinning them down; sections expand and contract as though the players are following the same thought from different corners of the room. Frank Zappa’s mischief, Phish’s improvisational freedom, Funkadelic’s low-slung funk and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s restless appetite for mutation all sit somewhere in the band’s musical vocabulary, but Planet Android is less an exercise in reference than in trust.
That freedom gives the album’s cautionary concept room to move. Nature Girl
arrives through a dreamier haze, drawing the listener towards the organic world the record fears humanity may be losing. The title track pulls in the opposite direction, tightening around mechanised funk and clipped, deliberate motion. By The Showdown
, the record has taken on something closer to cinematic confrontation, its closing stretch carrying the sense of a system pushed towards overload. Technology may provide the story’s threat, but the music itself stays stubbornly physical: fingers on strings, bodies keeping time, players reacting to one another before the moment can be repeated.
That physicality becomes even clearer in Village Sessions (Nighttime)
, a live video that revisits Shapes’ world after dark. Where its daytime counterpart suggested open air and sunlight, the nighttime performance feels more enclosed and conspiratorial. The reduced light puts greater focus on the exchange between the musicians. Passages stretch further. Ideas are handed across the room and returned in altered form. What emerges is not simply a live replication of recorded material, but a closer look at the decision-making underneath it.
That distinction matters for a band built around improvisation. Shapes’ music depends less on reproducing a definitive version of a song than on preserving enough flexibility for each performance to develop its own internal logic. Their touring history has strengthened that language: the small cues, sudden openings and collective detours that develop through sustained time onstage together.
There is an appealing contradiction at the heart of Planet Android. Shapes use technology to imagine the consequences of too much technology, then answer that anxiety with music rooted in immediate human interaction. The live session makes the contrast sharper still. Strip away the conceptual machinery and what remains is elemental: musicians listening closely, reacting in real time, and letting a song become something none of them could have built alone.
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