King Krule The Ooz XL Recordings/True Panther Sounds If “Biscuit Town” is the preprandial mint-leaf placed on tongue, then “Dum Surfer”, which likely reached your ears in elephantine thumps at some late-August house party, is The Ooz’s first [...]
Boris Dear Daymare Recordings Boris’ Dear is the most “Boris” album Boris have ever made. And, just as the repeated pronunciation of the word “Boris” detaches the moniker from semantic meaning, the music contained in this sizable LP bludgeons [...]
Animal Collective w/ Circuit Des Yeux @ The Danforth Music Hall, Toronto May 28, 2017 It’s totally groan-inducing, but for fifteen years now the oxymoronic notion of “experimental pop” has acted as the adobe slab for Animal Collective’s music. [...]
Boris @ Lee’s Palace, Toronto August 11, 2016 Near the beginning of Boris’ set, when the shrouded Takeshi plucked his ungainly double-necked bass/guitar, I felt something hit the top of my head. No, not the swirly nub of a flicked-on [...]
BOILER ROOM SETS AND VIDEO GAMES AN INTERVIEW WITH HARRISON Toronto DJ and producer Harrison dropped out of university after a three-month stint to pursue a career in music; a career that was put in motion when, in the 7th grade, he pulled down [...]
Boris Pink (Deluxe Edition) Sargent House Boris’ Deluxe Edition release of Pink begins, as it did 10 years ago, with a goodbye. Thankfully for us listeners, their farewell was only ever fictional. There are other moments in the Boris discography [...]
CBC Music Festival 2016 | #CBCMusicFest @ TD Echo Beach, Toronto May 28, 2016 Thirty degrees, hotter still with the humidex. Every inch of shady real estate, from the VIP platform’s interstices of deck-overhang, to the audio engineer’s steely [...]
Suuns Hold/Still Secretly Canadian You’re staring at a shadow of a shadow of a shadow – what are you looking at? Hold/Still is Suuns’ (pronounced “soons”) third album in six years (if you ignore their collaborative effort from 2015 – a [...]
Julia Holter @ The Great Hall, Toronto March 4, 2016 “The first time I played in Canada was two-thousand and…early.” It was with a kind of coquettish sobriety that Julia Holter and co. strode onto The Great Hall’s stage, the building’s [...]
Cherubs Fist In The Air Brutal Panda Records This five-track EP from Cherubs – their first offering since 2015’s 2 Ynfynyty, an album which broke two decades of silence with a high-hat destroying “hello, how are you” – is a carbonated bottle of [...]
Gazebos Die Alone Hardly Art One element of music that continues to smash windows of expectation, regardless of decade, genre or nationality, is a voice. Someone with something to say and a new way of saying it. Gazebos’ Shannon Perry has one [...]
DIIV Is The Is Are Captured Tracks Every time I visit the good doctor for bloodwork, my admiration for the “vagrant junkie” type grows. The metallic barbarism, the ritualized tinkering and tapering, just to feel, in the words of Lou, “like [...]
Immersion Analogue Creatures 10″ swim~ It has been a little more than 40 years since Brian Eno released his golden-ratio-obsessed avant-pop masterpiece Another Green World, and from that time till now, its influence has only grown. All [...]
Half Japanese Perfect Joyful Noise Recordings Beneath moments of mathy chaos are 13 songs that progress rather superficially. There is a profound lack of lyrical oversight on Perfect and the result is something akin to Deerhoof with brain [...]
Enya Dark Sky Island Aigle Music/Warner Music Group Enya’s first album in seven years is a soft-spoken refusal. She refuses to ignore the pulsating melodrama she witnesses all around her. It’s always there; in every sky-scraping star, in every [...]
Kindling Galaxies No Idea On this 4-track EP, Massachusetts-based Kindling fuse the hammerhead qualities of traditional punk with the reverb-drenched ethereal quality of 90s shoe-gaze. Opening track “Blinding Wave” is undoubtedly the EP’s [...]
!!! (Chk Chk Chk) As If Warp Records Dance punk is an impossible genre. It simply should not exist, much the same way a smoothie should not be made of meat, or a strawberry be barbecued. Yet here we are, and there they are, the delightful !!! or [...]
Rome Anthology 2005-2015 Trisol Music Group If Jérôme Reuter is two things and two things only, they are these: political and reflective. The leader of Rome (not to be confused with Caesar, Nero, Caligula, et al) is known for outspokenness on [...]
Battles La Di Da Di Warp Records Preamble: I don’t really know what to expect since this is my first time visiting a restaurant run by renowned chef collective “Battles”. I mean, I grabbed ice cream at Gloss Drop once a few years back, but that [...]
R10T Digital R10T Independent Electronic music is still in a state of rapid expansion. Artists all over the world continually grope, with knobs, cords and software, hoping to touch the limits of their domain. Eno still searches for [...]
