Buck 65 Saturday, November 29 Marquee Ballroom, 2037 Gottingen Street $27/$32 Buck 65’s new album, Neverlove, features raspy shrieked choruses and raw rhymes about divorce—and that’s only on the opening track. Beginning with “Gates of Hell,” the Mount Uniacke-bred MC, AKA Rich Terfry, howls his lyrics, thanks to a friend who recommended scream therapy for […]
Kyle Mullin
Posted inArts + Music
SoHo Ghetto and Thou
Marc-Antoine Robertson makes epic sounds in the most mundane of locales— his bedroom, his kitchen, and his producer’s parlour. “I spend a lot of time hanging out in these places, and they’re filled with things that make me want to write—like the record collection and movies I have stashed in my room,” the frontman of […]
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“It’s easy to think nothing will change”
Billy Bragg hoisted his guitar as if it were a picket sign, before marching onstage to rally a crowd. The audience was from a southern St. Louis suburb, and they had plenty of reason to protest. In nearby Ferguson, police and citizens were mired in a civil rights standoff. Bragg had no answers to their […]
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Halifax’s video stars
Halifax may not seem like an ideal hip-hop backdrop. The sprawling cityscapes and glamorous nightclubs that once typified the genre are sorely lacking in our little port town, compared to music industry meccas like New York and LA. But a rising number of local auteurs are filming more and more innovative scenes for some of […]
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Jinx the Cat luck and roll
They’re bad-luck tokens that will charm their way into your good graces. The members of Jinx the Cat didn’t just choose an apt name for their band—it sometimes feels like a self-inflicted curse. “We have definitely seen our fair share of bad luck,” says Drew Albert, vocalist of the Saint John-based indie jam band (who […]
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Bastid noise
Paul Murphy was jostled in his seat, like an LP scratched by a frantic DJ, as Metro Transit route 80 lurched from stop to stop on the way from his Bedford home to downtown Halifax. At the time, the late 1990s, his turntable technique was as unrefined as that skittish bus route. But the aspiring […]
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Aqua Alta country
The vessel floated through the soupy fog and choppy waves of our city’s harbour. It was a hulking ship, and its name suggested that it had ventured all the way from Scandinavia. But rather than docking at one of the piers, it instead continued floating on—past the port and into the heart of our downtown, […]
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Dusted is back to nature
Indie rocker Brian Borcherdt feels haunted whenever he returns to his home province. “There was that time the ghost of an old sea captain sang backups and then stole all the beer from backstage. That was neat,” Borcherdt says cheekily of coming back to play shows in Halifax, like his upcoming slots at this year’s […]
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Shad’s Flying high
The machine guns and machetes were half a world away, but Shad still flinched at the sound of their wounding jabs. His parents hailed from Rwanda, but they raised him in London, Ontario. That meant the would-be MC first heard his homeland’s piercing violence from the stereo speakers of his family’s television. He describes that […]
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Brian Posehn clears the air
Most comedians may be former class clowns, but few can school the teacher like Brian Posehn. Long before his appearances on cult TV hits like Mr. Show and The Sarah Silverman Program, before his 2013 comedy special The Fartist and before his headlining set at the Halifax Pop Explosion, Posehn was cracking wise as a […]
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Full of spirit
There’s no end to the master list of forlorn, lonely songs. But Jenn Grant isn’t lamenting solitude in her music. She’s celebrating it. “I was tired of debating,” the Halifax bred songstress says of her recent stab at self-management, breaking free from the type of professional support that most aspiring artists dream of. While Grant […]
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Blood brothers
Two Hours Traffic has dubbed its new album Foolish Blood. But Liam Corcoran, the PEI indie-pop troupe’s frontperson, adds it’s inspired by a serious classic—a line that bassist Andrew MacDonald came across while reading James Joyce’s “Araby.” “It describes the moment when your impulses and desires are telling you to do something, that your rational […]