Are you excited to become briefly emotionally attached to freakishly athletic individuals simply on account of their nationality as they compete in games of which you don’t know the rules? I know I am. There’s something instinctual about caring, even a little, about the Olympics—even the staunchest sports Luddite will admit they might tune in. […]
Adrian Lee
Posted inArts + Music
The Bad in each other
When Aldean Cromwell—the Digby-based rapper named Al Boogie— was growing up, attending St. Pat’s-Alexandra between grades three and six, Halifax’s north end felt a little different. He remembers his mother expressly forbidding him from going to Uniacke Square. “Everyone tells you this and tells you that, so it was always ‘better safe than sorry,’” he says. […]
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Cat’s meow
Boots the Cat began exactly like any eight-piece, three-drummer, live Afrobeat-inspired band would begin: in an apartment, with a pet. “It started with a four-piece rehearsal in my apartment in August,” says Rheo Rochon, 28. “I lived with a cat named Boots for a couple of years, and I was sitting on the couch before […]
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Lupe Fiasco
Last year, Lupe’s Lasers was condemned as a shallow sellout, a fiasco for an MC whose last two albums established him as a hip-hop wunderkind. After Lupe cited record label interference and distanced himself from Lasers, fans expected a mixtape redemption. But he’s little more than a bored braggart with superficial peacenik proclivities, daring only occasionally, […]
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Bahamas
Yes, Bahamas—Toronto’s Afie Jurvanen—was once Feist’s tour guitarist. But he isn’t so much a descendent of her tree, as he’s cultivated from the loam of Canadian folk, which is crystallizing a distinctive trait: an unfussy, believable honesty. Danny Michel, Sarah Harmer and Feist too—they sing of universal sadness and believe every word. Jurvanen does too, […]
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The redemption of Anonamyss
It’s the break of dawn, and Justin Wheaton’s still keeping on, after a 16-hour overnight shift working on Alberta’s Fort Mackay pipeline. The darkness is all he’s seen, his world shimmers with bleary sunlight. “I don’t sleep, man,” he says. “Nothing beats hard work.” He brings that ethic to everything; pipe welding, Arby’s serving, call […]
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The Art of Fielding By Chad Harbach
“The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author,” wrote literary theorist Roland Barthes—so while The Art of Fielding’s hype has focused on its author’s exorbitant $650,000 advance, let Chad Harbach be dead for our purposes. After all, Faulkner’s loudness and anger when drunk doesn’t affect my reading of […]
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A$AP Rocky
If there’s such a thing as postmodern rap, A$AP Rocky’s LIVELOVEA$AP qualifies: he’s a Harlem native who raps with a brazen Houston drawl and admires grills and purple syrup, who spits like the swaggering spawn of Odd Future and The Cool Kids, and whose name is a little too reminiscent of still-active MC Aesop Rock. Which […]
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Flower child
In a city of artistic jacks-of-all-trades, Jess Lewis is working to be the queen. With credits in technical theatre and performance art accompanying collaboration credentials in a number of Halifax bands (Brent Randall and his Pinecones, Hymm, Church of Satan, The K-Tels), Lewis is becoming more bride and less bridesmaid. Of course, it wasn’t always […]
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The Weeknd
The Weeknd’s first two mixtapes were full-bodied marvels of highly sexualized understatement. And while Echoes of Silence doesn’t share House of Balloons’ out-of-nowhere punch, or the pervasive doom in “Thursday,” it boldly shouts that, after 27 songs in just 10 months, possibility’s still possible for Toronto’s Abel Tesfaye. If you thought he was getting comfortable in his new-Prince […]
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Lights up
Even over a crackly speakerphone, Lights sounds exactly like you might imagine: she’s peppy and perky, with a sprite-like voice you might recognize from her tinkling synth-pop hit “Drive My Soul” cheerily extolling her affection for comic books, her Xbox 360 and the video game Skyrim. She giggles about her fortune, about “Drive My Soul” […]
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We the Animals: A novel
Any number of reasons can make a book impossible to put down—perhaps poignant characters who breathe between the letters, or climax-per-page narratives—but for Justin Torres’ We The Animals, it’s the torrid, heart-grappling pace. Revolving around a young Brooklyn family stitched together by nothing more than their rawest kind of love, it’s told from the three […]