Reviews

Britain’s sexiest dance-floor nerd-lingers, Hot Chip, returns this month with fifth studio album, In Our Heads. The glorified electro-Pavement enthusiasts follow up where 2010’s One Life Stand left off, delivering even more obtuse renditions of Devo songs that were never written by Devo, creating an LP that shows off the band’s soulful chops. “Motion Sickness” […]

It’s too easy to throw together three chords and play some variation of any given punk band. Instead, Money in the Banana Stand opts to champion the impetuous yet insightful virtues of small town frustration with punk rock merely as its template. In this follow-up to the debut, the band eschews the traditional power chord […]

Same Old Feeling is not flashy or over-produced, it’s an album that will quickly put a smile on your face, as it harkens back to a time before the recording industry wrung out the heart and integrity in favour of payola. Jim Henman (founding member of April Wine) has recorded an album that is completely void […]

After a seven-year absence, the easy path would be to make an album that sounds familiar, to take up where Extraordinary Machine left off. But easy is not Fiona Apple’s style. So when you hear her latest be patient—it’s a gorgeous and challenging return, but insists listeners suspend expectations. Stripped of the luscious production that […]

The Tallest Man on Earth, greatest man on earth, whatever you want to call him, Swedish folk singer Kristian Matsson will be winning over more hearts with his third-album There’s No Leaving Now. While this new album doesn’t vary much from Shallow Grave and The Wild Hunt, there are no complaints here—hell, why fix it […]

On her fourth album, Spektor ditches the producer superteam of Far for Mike Elizondo solo, and together they’ve created a bittersweet sampling of her special brand of cerebral pop. With her piano at the core, Spektor—who NPR aptly called an “oddball sentimentalist”—sings of loves lost and treasured, lives wasted and resurrected and it’s mostly beautiful […]

On first listen, the fuzz-drenched, echo-y, tambourine friendly tunes on the Alberta darlings’ Spaced Out sound deceptively simple. But Ketamines run deep. One criticism of the early 2000s garage trash bumper crop is that under the standard heavy blanket of reverb, bands have a tendency to blend together. This is not the case with Ketamines. […]

Much as the blues were embraced by white boys 50 years ago, ponderous lyrics over ethereal keyboard sounds are no longer the province solely of British depressives with peculiar hair. On its fourth album, this Baltimore duo is nearly indistinguishable from Cocteau Twins and the like. Their achievement is to inject new life into what had […]

Best Coast is hitting its sophomore slump in a big way with The Only Place, a collection of barely there pop tunes that lack way too much creativity or imagination for a band that was being heralded as the next Giant Drag a few years ago. Lead songwriter Bethany Cosentino delivers paint by numbers lyrics […]

One of the most unique artists in Canada appears to be branching out, each move characteristically distinct. Now based in BC, Petunia was once easily identified as the the best damn yodeler since Slim Whitman. With the Vipers, he’s got rockabilly in range and can still summon a time before you were born with a […]

Mike Diablo of the Urban Surf Kings must be both organized and nimble-fingered. Longhorn is named for the bass he played to back the tracks made in a one-day session with drummer Frank den Haan, a dozen mostly original instrumentals. You’ve got one guitar instead of the Kings’ usual two with hints of metal and […]

Not for the faint of heart, the album opens with an unsettling cyclic meditation, with the fittingly nonsensical title “Nepenenoyka”, played (possibly) on the high pitched lap harp for which the song is named. A toss off perhaps, but it’s a jarring introduction to an album that’s as raw and honest as they come. No […]