Listen Before You Buy

With a range of influences from The Beatles to Radiohead, Emma Grace are the kind of pair us non-musical types look at in envy as they both play multiple instruments and sing. Oh, and create great indie songs like “Stuck In The Air”.

“Provincial” is an album firmly rooted in Manitoba, Canada, John K. Samson’s home. The album follows him and his observations about the countryside and nearby residents. Don’t let Samson’s past fool you: there’s very little punk here, but this album of stories is very much worth hearing.

TweetShareMaybe it’s just the title of the song that started the gears up in my mind but Yukon Blonde‘s “Stairway” feels like our generations version of Led Zeppelin when they made the shift from acoustic troubadours to electric gods. Yukon blonde has held my attention for some time now and this morning when I pressed [...]

Despite what the introduction headline may suggest, The Besnard Lakes are not a new band. They are Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas, a married couple that started a band in 2003, so not old either I guess. But what’s more relevant is that they are obscenely, colossally good.

There are few bands which I have been anxious to hear new material from more than Little Jungles.

TweetShare For the past few months, it seems like Drake has been the most hated man in hip-hop. Endless blogs have attacked him and his self-developed cult of personality, calling him out for being “soft” in all-caps rants or decrying his lack of being able to “say anything new”. Does he deserve all the hate? [...]

Whether ranging from folk to frenetic indie rock, The Rest’s songs sound like a new day exploding over and over again, each moment carefully leading up to the next.

One of SolarSolar’s key influences – and the first comparison that came to my mind – is the almost unreasonably brilliant Swedish electro-pop duo The Knife. Both bands trade in intricate, multi-layered shenanigans that sound stunning.

TweetShare We’ve mentioned Powers a couple of times before – we featured their video for “Second Summer” back in August, and singer Lesley also moonlights with Bad Passion. Now the Toronto-based noiserocktronigazers (sure, I just made that genre up) have delivered their self-titled debut EP – and better yet, they’re giving the whole thing away [...]

TweetShare Okay, look: I freely admit that today’s Introducing post could potentially be seen as a bit slow off the mark. Does a band still qualify as new if they’ve released two full-length albums and formed six years ago? No, probably not. Whatever: Rah Rah were new to me. Besides, as much as it’s fun to [...]

TweetShare Listen to “Bambi” and “Red Song”, the two new songs by Suuns below. Perhaps if the teacher in the first grade had played me “Bambi” I would have absorbed the alphabet more quickly. Too bad my teacher wasn’t Ben Shemie, and I’m not from Montreal, Canada. The meditative effect doesn’t go off in “Red Song”, on [...]

TweetShare The band Peter Kernel is an eclectic trio, rooting itself in Switzerland and Canada and not only music, but art, film and… well, the book seems pretty open. Originating out of a need to create music for an experimental film directed by bassist and vocalist Barbara Lehnhoff  in 2005, Peter Kernel take Sonic Youth‘s [...]

TweetShare Digits is the musical alter-ego of Toronto-based Alt Altman. Eagle-eyed readers will note that we recently featured Mr Altman in his capacity as one half of dreamy R&B duo Bad Passion, whose first EP should be arriving shortly. Listening to his solo output, it’s clear how much of an influence he’s had on their sound. [...]

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TweetShare Buy the album from Amazon – Vinyl / MP3 / CD The Rock Opera has never had an easy time of it as a genre. Over-indulgence and excess only works when it’s finely tuned, and any album with an overarching concept tends to get shoehorned into this category regardless of actual intent. From “Tommy”, [...]

TweetShare This is 100% true: at university, I was officially designated a Sexy Voiced Person. What this meant was that I got to do the voice-over for the student radio station idents. Since most of you probably never heard those, I hope you’ll humour me and imagine, for the rest of the post, that I [...]