This Ship might be the heaviest east coast band to wield synth keytar. But the lighthearted bunch gets serious in a heartbeat, just as quickly as a melodious Ship verse shifts into chorus roar. The band’s latest EP, What’s Left to Burn, trades the hypnotizing layers of its debut for three live-off-the-floor burners. The songs […]
Andrew Mills
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Gianna Lauren
On Personhood’s six tracks have the density of a much longer album. Gianna Lauren’s beautifully captured second album, recorded over five days last June in a reconverted horse stable, is understated indie-rock existing between the meticulous and spontaneous. On “Threads,” Lauren sings “Not much foundation/flimsy construction” before concluding the song with a phrase that could […]
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Orchid’s Curse
Halifax’s metal ambassadors Orchid’s Curse’s latest, Words, reads like a dissertation from the heavier side of the tracks. All the traditional metal motifs are here, from the pseudo-religious iconoclasm of the cover art to the sort of lyrical symbolism that goes best with double kick drum. In the tirade against consumerism, “Indifferences,” Hogan screams “Apathy […]
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Mike Trask and Benjamin Allain mesh old photos with new canvases
Local bluesman Mike Trask and painter Benjamin Allain are fiercely analogue about their collaboration. Album: a Collage of Music & Art is their type-written, tape-recorded and live-painted love letter to a woman they haven’t met. Picking up an old family album to see relatives preserved in the flawed amber of film can turn loved ones […]
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Mural of the story
Brenna Lord’s EN-TRAILS exhibit stares back. Hidden faces in Lord’s wall-spanning mural, now on display at Plan B’s B-Side Art Gallery, inspire appreciative double-takes. Somewhere between Alex Grey’s luminiscent energy-bodies and Frank Miller’s pulp-noir impressions, Lord’s episodes form a mercurial whole. A faery in the mural could have dropped her wings in black ink and […]