When Trevor Larocque wants to party, he does so in fine style. The Paper Bag Records co-founder and sole owner has clearly been laying the groundwork for this weekend's massive PBR10 10th Anniversary Concert Series for some time now, and that in its own right would be celebratory enough, but to further mark the occasion, he's gone one step beyond. Or rather, one planet beyond. Larocque is what some might call a "quintessential music nerd" , but to another music nerd like me, he's the kind of guy I want to [...]
Like the three witches at the start of Macbeth , Yamantaka // Sonic Titan 's Alaska B and Ruby Kato Attwood preside over a bubbling cauldron of boil, boil, toil and trouble that threatens to erupt into a drama of epic proportions. Macabre chemists that they are, the duo manage the damage expertly on YT // ST , taking what on paper sounds like an acrid recipe of noise and metal, pop and folk, eastern and western culture, and making it the trendiest cocktail this side of cosmopolitans. The trick is to knock [...]
It's easy to forget that at one point, Grizzly Bear was the sound of Edward Droste alone in his bedroom making music for friends that the rest of the world wasn't supposed to hear. Things change, though, as things are wont to do (like the usage of the word "wont" itself), and over the course of four albums, Grizzly Bear has become an elder states-band of American indie rock circa the early 2000s, so critics and fans have been waiting with eagerness and trepidation these past three years for the follow-up to Veckatimest [...]
There's a glut of great and high-profile records coming out this week and next, and it would be a shame if The Wilderness of Manitoba 's Islands of Echoes gets lost in the shuffle. Over the course of their three releases, the band has constantly impressed me with their ability to write new songs that sound like they've been in existence forever. Few of their contemporaries are as attuned to their environment, creating music that sounds like it's sprung from fertile patches in the Canadian Shield, blooming against all odds. [...]
For the last few weeks, Japandroids ' Celebration Rock has been soundtracking my workouts at the gym, so I've spent a fair bit of time lately considering the album as part of the Polaris short list for 2012, and as one of the year's most highly anticipated releases. Walking the track to the rolling, ridiculously terrific "Continuous Thunder" the other day, I started to get this nagging guilty feeling about the review I wrote about the album back in May of this year, feeling that maybe [...]
The wordless cooing that introduces "Pray for Surf", and by extension the whole of Inner Classics , sets the tone for Snowblink 's sophomore record. Now that Daniela Gesundheit has fully immersed herself in her new Canadian home, she's adopted the crisp autumnal attitude of standing on a northern Ontario beach as opposed to the Californian variety from where she's come. The result is a refreshing, breezy collection of songs that earn the title of "classics". On the surface, there's more "outer" than "inner" to these nine tunes, with frequent references to [...]
Handsome Furs ' Sound Kapital is a multi-sensory record, meant to connect with you physically, intellectually, and emotionally. It is a call to arms dressed up in a jacket that's not-safe-for-work, but who's music can be defined as NSFI - not suited for insouciance. As the senior record on this year's Polaris short list, released just three weeks into the eligibility year, it has managed to hold on to my number one spot and my heart these past 12 odd months with such ferocity and power that I can't imagine anyone choosing any other album as [...]
As much as a Stars fan as I'd been in the past, I was never able to hide my disappointment about their last record. The Five Ghosts poured an ice-cold bucket of water all over glowing hot flames of Set Yourself on Fire and In Our Bedroom After The War , obliterating any traces of the skyward trajectory the band had been on. In my opinion, the business of launching their own music label (Soft Revolution) was getting in the way of making quality music for the label to [...]
She's the Dora the Explorer of this year's Polaris Music Prize Shortlist: cute in a cartoonish kind of way, exotic and enchanting in another way, a daredevil adventurer with a bunch of really cool friends, and-for a brief moment-at the heart of a popular zeigiest. She is Claire Boucher, better known to the world as Grimes , the one-woman musical phenomenon that has/had critics falling over from the weight of all the praise they heaped on her album, Visions . And why not? Visions is the kind of record that [...]
The wound was still too fresh, too open. It had been just a few days since Dan Boeckner announced that Handsome Furs, his musical partnership with wife Alexei Perry, was over when he and new collaborators Britt Daniel (of Spoon) and Sam Brown (of New Bomb Turks) introduced the word to Divine Fits . It was like your having your dad walk into your room and tell you that he and your mom were splitting up, then coming back an hour later to tell you that he's moving to Vegas and getting married to [...]
For the uninitiated, it can be hard to make heads or tails of Chilly Gonzales . Whether you come to his music by way of his work with Feist, or his larger-than-life disco anthems like "I Am Europe", or through his most successful album, 20042s Solo Piano , it sometimes appears that this mischievous musician seems to have as much fun manipulating music and he does making it. Whether writing orchestral rap or classical compositions, one thing is clear: Gonzales is as much servant to the keyboard as he is master of [...]
The curtain rises on a desolate, defunct city whose best days are long behind it. If this was your high school reunion, the city would be that cool kid Corey, whom all the girls lusted after because of his frosted tips and that cute dimple, but now, for every inch that his hair line has receded, his gut hangs over his waist threatening to fire the buttons holding his shirt together into the crowd. So much potential wasted. The locale could be anywhere, and the hero could be anyone, too: David, a factory worker in love with a [...]
If there's such a thing as comfort food, then there must also exist comfort music. We do it all the time, gravitate towards a dish that chases the blues away, reminds us of childhood memories, or satisfies that deep down psychological craving that only a therapist can make sense of. As consumers, we must do that with music, too, favouring sounds that trigger emotions and remembrances, that wrap themselves around us like warm blankets rather than pummel us like a winter wind. Do musicians make comfort music? Does an artist choose a particular style because it provides them [...]
When I was a kid, I thought "medal" was the same word as "metal". For the longest time I just assumed those awards pinned to soldiers' chests were called ‘metals’ because that's what they were made of. It's a subtle shift in pronunciation and accent between the two words, one that my young ears weren't tuned into distinguishing. Now all these years later, Metals is causing me some confusion yet again. This time it's not its meaning, but the strange, curious 2011 Feist album that bares the word as it's [...]
A few nights before my father passed away, I found myself awake, my sister tentatively sleeping up in her bedroom, the two of us alone in the house we grew up in, worried that by the time we returned to the hospital in the morning, he would be gone. I can remember the night in question so clearly, even these 13 years later: Sitting in the basement at my desk, OK Computer playing off in the background, a pen and paper laid out in front of me tauntingly, just daring me to find the words the describe what [...]
"Jealousy is just love and hate at the same time." Drizzy, ain't it the fuckin' truth. I never wrote about or reviewed Drake 's Take Care the first time 'round mostly out of fear. I was scared of writing about someone with his level of success, notoriety, and influence, afraid that my voice might not ring with authenticity or enough authority to grant me the right to state an opinion. I was afraid to listen to Take Care -I mean really listen to it-for fear that I would [...]
Last Tuesday, on the day Purity Ring released Shrines , I got food poisoning. I'm not saying there's a cause/effect relationship between the two events, but they'll forever be linked in my memory. After months of waiting to hear this record, I spent the day listening to unpleasant sounds that originated deep in my gut that I would rather not describe for you. Belispeak, indeed. Even once I started to feel better, I remained on high alert, as the stuttering soundscapes of twitchy synths and percolating percussion could induce involuntary contractions when [...]
Every time I read Al Spx's name in print, I want to swap her pseudo-surname with Sphinx. Put aside the finer points of Greek mythology (like suicides and murder) and focus instead on posing riddles, putting up barriers that requires access be granted, and taking on a form larger than life, and it's not too much of a stretch. My first exposure to Cold Specks came in a cryptic email back in June of 2011, addressed to be my name and including a SoundCloud link, that said: [...]
Instrumental music always seems to be a stretch too far for some, and I include myself in that, but sometimes, it's the most rewarding in terms of listener experience. The sound of a particular voice, or a lyrical couplet can overpower what would otherwise be an excellent musical performance, and God knows I've heard my fair share of music that starts off promisingly enough until the vocals kick in. Where Old World Vulture is concerned, I don't feel that the music is marred by the absence of voices, [...]
There's this FFWD Weekly article from Calgary that some colleagues have been talking about this past week. It basically chastises Canadians for reveling in musical mediocrity, in part blaming Can-Con quotas and regulations, and the media for celebrating a known entity-for arguments sake, let's say a band like Metric-and not actively looking out for a more experimental, lesser known artist like Expwy . Criticism is also leveled at the artists themselves for churning out copy-cat, sound-alike albums from the comfort and safety of the middle of the road. The co-authors also do some [...]
Quick Before It Melts
Boards of Canada – Reach For The Dead
HAERTS: “All The Days”
Sexy Track // “Devil Or Angel” // Lou Doillon
Daft Punk - Lose Yourself to Dance (Simøne Remix)
DANCE BITCH DANCE: disclosure - when a fire starts to burn
