Listening to this record, a two-hour, three-disc epic, needs to be approached like reading a short story collection, taking in small sections at a time, not necessarily in order. But this aside, Have One on Me feels like Newsom’s most accessible album yet; those who aren’t fans of her voice may find the vocals more […]
Laura Kenins
Posted inArts + Music
Sans AIDS at the Wardroom
Sans AIDS is Edmontonian Peter Sagar, playing lo-fi, mellow guitar and drums with an alluring bedroom-recording quality. The project originated last summer when Sagar’s other band, Outdoor Miners, a “noisier” group, was scheduled for a tour. “Our guitarist had to get surgery and we cancelled the tour. I was bored, so I started this,” he […]
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KoAk
I saw New Brunswick’s KoAk play Hell’s Kitchen a few years ago, meekly announce it was their first Halifax show and captivate the audience with a performance that far exceeded the band’s confidence. They’ve cropped up equally unassumingly a few times since, and this album, available for free (koakrecordings.blogspot.com), featuring waves of mostly instrumental, lo-fi […]
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Catherine Clover is winging it
“They were able to see that pigeons could distinguish between impressionism and cubism!” artist Catherine Clover quips. She’s referring to a 1990s study done that tested animal intelligence by showing images of various master painters like Monet and Picasso to pigeons, gauging the birds’ ability to distinguish between them. This reappears in her show opening […]
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Stripmalling, Jon Paul Fiorentino (ECW)
The cover of this book describes it as “a novel,” but it’s part-diary, part-story, part-comedy, part-comic book. Chronicling suspiciously autobiographical protagonist Jonny’s journey from young wage slave in a Winnipeg strip mall to divorced writing professor in a Montreal basement apartment, Stripmalling jumps from confessional to fiction to film script. The book is punctuated by […]
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Hopeful Monster
Former Nova Scotian Jason Ball has played with The Heavy Blinkers, The Wilderness and The Hylozoists, but with a six-year break, his Hopeful Monster project has remained under the radar. Metatasking feels like a secret collection of fuzzy and, yes, hopeful, pop songs. Opener “Uncivilized” has a casual, poppy Beach Boys-like feel to it. Ball’s […]
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Christian Hansen and the Autistics
Starting off with the new wave-y “Cocaine Trade,” this record may take a couple of listens to realize that behind the ’80s club anthem sounds, Hansen’s lyrics are about such topics as sex tourism, realizing you’re past doing coke and going out clubbing (“I thought the music was sweet, it was just ’cause the drugs […]
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Basia Bulat’s travelling Heart
A few days after the release of her second album, Heart of My Own, Basia Bulat has just one day of downtime at home in Toronto between shows in New York and Europe and her Canadian tour. It’s a lifestyle she’s accustomed to now: “I wrote most of the songs while travelling,” she says. “I’ve […]
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Basia Bulat, Heart of My Own (Secret City)
The follow-up to her Polaris-nominated 2007 debut, Bulat’s sunshiny voice is again the crowning jewel of the record. This is a louder, more orchestrated record, with strings, brass and percussion appended to her own guitar and autoharp, rollicking numbers like “Gold Rush” and “If Only You” punctuated by more raucous drumbeats (provided by Bulat’s brother […]
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Jenny Omnichord on tour with her toddler
The 2008 In the Dead of Winter was a memorable one for Jenny Mitchell, AKA Jenny Omnichord. “I thought I’d broken my foot, and people kept giving me whiskey for it.” So Mitchell went to the hospital where she got a pregnancy test prior to x-rays, and “I found out I was pregnant.” Two years […]
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Frank Warren’s secret life
Once the domain of diaries, trusted friends and closets full of skeletons, secrets found a new outlet in 2005, when Frank Warren launched the website PostSecret.com. Since then, PostSecret has collected secrets—written on postcards and mailed anonymously to Warren’s home in Germantown, Maryland—and posted them online. To date, Warren has received over a half-million cards, […]
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Sean Nicholas Savage
The more I listen to this guy, the more it perplexes me as to what might be going through his head. His lyrics belie the fact that he’s in his early 20s, or even of this era, and the music feels influenced by everything from Simon & Garfunkel to Disney soundtracks to The Magnetic Fields. […]
