On the third track, “Splitting the Atom,” Daddy G sings in his husky whisper how “It never stops/And we’ll never learn.” That sums up the spirit and sound of the fifth offering from enduring UK band Massive Attack. They’re back to being themselves. The last outing, 100th Window, driven by the other dominant member of […]
Sean Flinn
Posted inArts + Music
Against the Hard Angle
This fourth collection from Halifax-based Robinson is divided into two sections, “What the Rest of Us Would Call Falling” and “Toeing the Slack-Roped Narrows.” The first half then divides into three parts and the first of those, “Against the Hard Angle,” won the Malahat Review long poem contest in 2009. All this dividing and subdividing […]
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Oore scores silence
Sageev Oore has full grasp of experimentation and risk. On one hand, he’s father to a 15-month-old boy, who’s found his feet and legging it about the house. On the other, Oore is a pianist, an improviser who describes his frequent live scoring of silent films as a way of “seeing the connection between music […]
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Alex Cuba
From the west coast—Smithers, some 14 hours north of Vancouver—Alex Cuba returns with his third solo album. And he still hasn’t quite solved the riddle of his own sound. Is his heart in the rock tune, “Que Pasa Lola” or the jump-up, “Tierra Colora”? Perhaps it’s in his funk innovations, the jazzy “If You Give […]
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Bitter Medicine
Two of Clem Martini’s brothers have been diagnosed with schizophrenia. One is Ben, the youngest. The other is Olivier, or Liv, an artist. He illustrates this graphic memoir with a subtle hand. Spend time following the lines in his black ink drawings and his short, considered captions. This is his side in a long conversation, […]
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Gil Scott-Heron
This is a gift from Gil Scott-Heron, whose last studio album, Spirits, came in 1994. But the best gifts are worth the wait—witness “Running” or “Where Did the Night Go.” The buzz threading through the poet and performer’s baritone is beautifully matched by minimal, monolithic electronic production, courtesy of XL owner Richard Russell. His use […]
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Gigi
Producer/engineer Colin Stewart (Black Mountain, Destroyer) and songwriter Nick Krgovich (P:ano) gathered a pop orchestra, chorus and vocalists into a Vancouver studio. They often recorded live to tape, evoking the sound and sensibility of the radio hit parades and the Brill Building of the early to mid-’60s. The thrill, though, of that era came from […]
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Pain-Proof Men
In “Storm Night at Gus’ Pub,” Barger presents the bar as a nexus of magic (the musical variety, in this case) and misery. They should print the verse on the venue’s walls to complement the forest photo-mural. He situates many poems in the mythological north end, geographically central Halifax: along Agricola, where, in “Cousin’s Diner,” […]
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Daniel, Fred & Julie
Singer-guitarist Daniel Romano (Attack in Black), Fred Squire (Calm Down It’s Monday) and the Julie Doiron join finger-pickin’ and harmonizin’ forces here. The dominant theme of these songs, mostly ballads, is hurt. Points of view switch from the one harmed to the one harming. Accordingly, the mood of this staunchly mono recording is mainly “dark […]
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Channeling history
The wind’s whipping pedestrians into shape, insisting they play its game of Dodge the Debris. Another kind of detritus tells a story of the city. Susan McClure, HRM archivist since 2005, calls it “the byproduct of people’s activity.” For Dawn Sloane, some of those byproducts could end up in a Halifax history museum. “What we […]
Posted inArts + Music
Postdata’s family ties
In summers, the Murphy family would drive from Yarmouth to Antigonish to visit the maternal grandparents. They piled into the station wagon and went from the bottom to the top of this province—its mainland, at least. “It was a bit of a drive,” recalls Paul Murphy from Montreal, where Wintersleep, the band for which he […]
Posted inArts + Music
Colleen Brown
Colleen Brown’s big, broad voice rolls right over the vogue for wispy, wiry, whimsical vocals. Sure, she sings mostly about that universal theme, love, and she does so with robust romanticism—belief in an ideal—but this idealist’s way of phrasing lyrics and vocals set this Edmontonian apart. Listen to her talk back to “the woman on […]