After recording the mostly forgettable and ostentatious Octahedron, the band is back in full force, sounding closest to the power and urgency that came with major-label debut De-loused in the Comatorium nearly 10 years ago. The album retains the bands signature sound of punk meets The Smiths meets prog-metal, yet sounds restrained compared to the […]
Matthew Ritchie
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Revenge of the Electric Car
As the old saying goes, success is the best revenge. In the follow up to his critically acclaimed documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, Chris Paine’s Revenge of the Electric Car details the insurgence of electric vehicles on the commercial car world, following Nissan and GM as they attempt to make the world’s first affordable […]
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Yukon Blonde ambition
As the main songwriter for BC’s Yukon Blonde, Jeff Innes has had a whirlwind career since the band hit it big with their 2010 self-titled album. They’ve travelled through the western hemisphere, hosted a New Year’s Eve concert in Australia and have been awkwardly name dropped on How I Met Your Mother. But after non-stop […]
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TemperTemper time
Singer-songwriter Thomas Hoy didn’t always picture himself being a full-time musician. After graduating high school, he spent a year travelling abroad in southeast Asia, before finally ending up at King’s College to pursue a philosophy degree. “I was halfway through my degree and realized I really wanted to start studying music,” he says. He took […]
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TemperTemper
It’s possible that TemperTemper may be Halifax’s proggiest band. On the group’s self-titled debut, the classically trained Dal students deliver a pomp-charged array of spritely electro-pop and ornate songwriting. Lead by Thomas Hoy’s powerful timbre the band’s symphonic elements shine through their rock instrumentation on the album’s seven tracks. “Boyzngurlz” is a shredding power-pop rocker […]
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Plaskett’s Happiness
To say Joel Plaskett is a prolific songwriter would be a gross understatement. In 2008, Plaskett went into the studio and geared up to release the follow up to 2007’s critically acclaimed Ashtray Rock. The result was Three, a sprawling triple-disc solo-album so ambitious he didn’t think his label, Maple Music, would even press it. […]
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Cousins
Two-piece Cousins’ The Palm at the End of the Mind picks up where Out on Town left off, delivering a much louder record that perfectly captures the band’s live sound, developed in recent years. Recorded in part by Dave Ewenson at Echo Chamber, but primarily on four-track by lead-songwriter Aaron Mangle, Palm’s lo-fi aesthetic gives […]
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Ben Caplan’s towering success
To say 2011 was the year singer-songwriter Ben Caplan broke would be an understatement. After leaving Nova Scotia early in the year, Caplan found himself on his first national tour, followed by gigs across Europe. But if his recent stop in Halifax before heading to Austin, Texas for South By Southwest is any indication, 2012 […]
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Of Montreal
In the past 10 years, Athens, Georgia’s Of Montreal released seven albums, two of them absolute pop gems (2007’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?; 2010’s False Priest). But fans tend to forget that before Kevin Barnes found his foothold as the godfather of psychedelic indie-rock, Of Montreal were a spectacularly terrible twee-pop band. Paralytic […]
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Great Bloomers’ variety club
In 2009, Great Bloomers were a young band on the rise. Their first album, Speak of Trouble, was gaining critical attention, they were asked to perform on MTV Live and they had a fan in folk-hero Gordon Lightfoot. But once Great Bloomers began to hit their stride, singer-songwriter Lowell Sostomi’s band started to fall apart. […]
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Hitchcock presented
Rope (1948) Plot: Two university grads kill a classmate to impress their professor (James Stewart), who once theorized in a lecture about how to commit the perfect murder. Did you know? This was the first Hitchcock film shot in colour, but what’s impressive about Rope is that it was filmed continuously in just 10 shots. […]
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Chairlift
Chairlift’s second full-length, Something, is a mess of retro synths and ’80s pop vocals perfect for the American Apparel crowd. The two-piece sounds like what you’d expect from a group that licenses its music to Apple: downtempo electronica that was probably made on a MacBook. Their minimalist aesthetic is most similar to the UK’s SBTRKT […]
