“Vote for your favourite DD/MM/YYYY boy!” the band screamed at their Toronto record release. It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek, but you’re never quite sure. Bouncing from multiple drum sets and tossing instruments across the stage at each other to switch off, DD/MM/YYYY always ensure an active live show, and Black Square captures that frenetic energy well. […]
Laura Kenins
Posted inArts + Music
The Decemberists
Supposedly The Decemberists’ rock opera, there’s minimal rocking on this slow-paced, folk-pop concept album—more a prolonged saga of tongue-twister lyrics, dead babies and 19th-century newlyweds. With their last few releases, The Decemberists seem to be moving further from the catchy, verbose pop they made their name on, to a more cerebral, inaccessible language of literary […]
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Friday Sure Thing: Tongan Death Grip EP Release Show
Tongan Death Grip’s record release show will be their last for a while, but guitarist Craig Hamlin is relatively confident that drummer Mike Belyea’s impending move to Montreal won’t be the end: Belyea has already been living in Saint John for most of the band’s lifespan. “We basically get together [to practice] 30 minutes before […]
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Spiralling in all directions
Spiral Beach’s drummer, Daniel Woodhea, has his hands full, so he passes off his cellphone to his brother, guitarist Airick Woodhead, who’s like a volcano erupting with energy. The Toronto band is hanging out at the Nanaimo, BC, home of musician Carolyn Mark, relaxing and partying on an off day of their national tour. It’s […]
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Story
Sam Wight, formerly of local punk bands Cross, Eviction Party and Missed Life, picked up an accordion last year and put down her guitar. Things Left Unsaid… is the culmination of a rough year in her life, chronicling a breakup, a death and a move back home to PEI. Accordions run the risk of being […]
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Melnyk’s key strokes
Composer and pianist Lubomyr Melnyk seems, at times, to have landed from another place or time. It’s possible, too: He claims that his “continuous music” technique lets the pianist “transcend all limits of time and space,” and that the “continuous pianist operates at speeds beyond human capacity.” Melnyk has been clocked in as the world’s […]
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The Creeps
p>Shortly after finishing their album last year, Creeps frontman Skottie Lobotomy was dwelling on the idea of a “dystopian future world” and wrote several songs which the band decided to record immediately and release on an EP. The result is less of The Creeps’ typical stab-happy lyrics, but more of a punk record that seems […]
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Gut reaction
From afar, Mary-Anne Wensley’s installation, inescapable shelter glows peacefully and appears to be constructed of a thin parchment-like material. But, on further inspection, there’s a sense of the grotesque—the translucent material is actually dried pig intestine. “I struggle with the definitive ‘why’ that I work with this material,” Wensley says. “It’s almost like the material […]
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Drawn & Quarterly Showcase: Book Five
For their latest compilation, Drawn & Quarterly heads north, with three stories set in northern lands from two Scandinavian artists and one American. North American publishers have been steadily putting out translations of work from the Franco-Belgian comics tradition over the past few years, but there’s some great work coming out of northern Europe these […]
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Upstairs Bachelor party
Walking down Agricola on a cold January night, you might think the crowd of people and clouds of smoke behind the Halifax Coalition Against Poverty’s office is just those HCAP kids up to something again. But this crowd has come for the bachelor apartment above the office—home of the Upstairs Apartment Gallery, a monthly one-night […]
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The Rhythm Method
Making fun of hip-hop can come off as downright offensive, but that’s not what’s likely to offend about The Rhythm Method, who expertly merge hip-hop and third-wave feminism. The perfect rebuttal to dumb jocks and girls wearing pyjamas and Ugg boots to class, they hail from the wilds of the Dal campus with ridiculously clever […]
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Harbour solutions
Weird things floating in the waters of city harbours are hardly unusual, so, at first glance, photographs of Doug Guildford’s nets and other sculptural pieces bobbing in the water against the Toronto skyline might not look out of the ordinary. Guildford, a Halifax-raised artist who’s made Toronto his home for 30 years, still strongly feels […]