Best Artist / Band To Be Blown Away By

Strap on a helmet and watch for the debris: Tomcat Combat blows you away. Tomcat also baffled the military when the instrumental band played the Stadacona bowling alley last year. “We tried to go easy on the feedback and noise,” says Noel Macdonald, the band’s guitarist. “The DayGlo decor and purple carpeting was quite agreeable with our style of music, I must say.” Not only do Tomcat Combat blow you away, they’re cheaper therapy than a shrink. “What’s exciting to me is when a band has a big and loud presentation and there’s an underlying seriousness to everything. I want our live shows to be like that,” says Macdonald. “The kind of show where you feel the vibrations and sounds from the amps actually hitting you and we’re all driving chords into the ground. Because we’re an instrumental band we can take a lot of liberties with arrangements and take time to pound on our riffs to a point where it’s really cathartic and satisfying.” As for that cover art, the style was inspired by a poster for Immaculate Machine’s Fables, and was actually painted by that band’s lead singer’s sister, Caitlin Gallupe. “It’s dark but colourful and a little mysterious.”