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 [...]
Tindersticks The Waiting Room City Slang Ambient music is risky business. The genre’s key players tend to find themselves stuffed into film soundtracks or humbly playing in the low recesses of a dinner party. Tindersticks, however, find a medium [...]
Black Sabbath Past Lives (Reissue) Warner Music Canada With the end of Black Sabbath’s career rapidly approaching, the band strategically reissued some of their best albums including the long-out-of-print Past Lives, now released with a [...]
Panic! At The Disco Death Of A Bachelor Warner Music Canada In all of their weirdness, Panic! At the Disco have hit their stride multiple times. Since “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” had its time in the sun, the band has fluctuated throughout a [...]
Vicky Speedboat Two Years No Basement Independent More than halfway through Two Years No Basement, vocalist/guitarist Will Lindsay declares “I tend to fall in love at first sight/ two or three times a night.” Vicky Speedboat writes [...]
Peru The Band Ordinary People EP Independent Peru the Band get eclectic on their debut EP, rifling through various levels of modern blues not atypical from the likes of The Black Keys. It’s the symphony backing that truly gives life to Ordinary [...]
Coldplay A Head Full Of Dreams Parlophone/Atlantic Records Whereas Coldplay’s sixth album Ghost Stories dealt with themes of regret, wondering what might have been and promising unconditional love to those that have come and slipped away, this [...]
Jen Foote Rock Chapel Road Independent The first thing that stands out on Jen Foote’s Rock Chapel Road full length release is the superb production quality and playing that supports her wonderfully comforting voice. The producer and musician [...]
Ty Segall Ty Rex Goner Modern-day garage rock hero Ty Segall has never been bashful about showing his roots. Listening to both his original material and his musical contributions to others’ work (most notably Mikal Cronin), it’s [...]
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 [...]
Conjure One Holoscenic Armada Music Rhys Fulber is legendary in the ranks of Canadian electronic music engineers, a visionary artist with a magnificent range of talent who has impacted the industrial, EBM and synthpop scenes for decades. Conjure [...]
Die Form ÷ Musique Concrète Cinema Obscura Trisol Music Group/Bain Total Cinema Obscura is a menacing oddity that harkens a return to the experimental and obscure roots of Philippe Fichot’s body of work. This new disk was strategically released [...]
King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard Paper Mâché Dream Balloon ATO Records King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, the prolific psych-rocking Aussies, released their seventh and most versatile album, Paper Mâché Dream Balloon. After listening to [...]
Neil Young Blue Note Cafe Warner Music Canada/Reprise Records If you are not familiar with Neil Young’s official Archive Performance Series, this is a great time to immerse yourself in this latest offering. The live Blue Note Cafe is the [...]
The Pains of Being Pure At Heart Hell Yebo Music Packaged as a sort of afterthought, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart’s Hell EP is a pleasant three-track offering from the New York band. The title track is ostensibly about “how [...]
PALMAS To The Valley EP Lost Colony Music On their swinging debut, Philadelphia indie band PALMAS shake and shimmy to their inventive blend of sunny Californian rock with some modern, alternative rhythm. The six-track release starts off with a [...]
Ty Dolla $ign Free TC Atlantic Records (sung to “Saved” with apologies to Ty Dolla $ign) L.A. artist Ty Griffin Hip hop and rap his callin’ After years of working with others he’s got his own thing Chorus Debut album From Ty Dolla Collaborates [...]
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 [...]
Library Voices Lovish Nevado Music If you’ve familiarized yourself with the typical pop melodies of Library Voices, you’ll know that their formula has proven to be fairly limited at times. Their tracks, such as “Generation Handclap”, remain [...]
Sun Club The Dongo Durango ATO Records The Sun Club describe themselves as a group of buddies from Baltimore, Maryland playing happy music. On their Facebook page they recently posted that the group was mentioned in Rolling Stone under Missy [...]
The Neighbourhood Wiped Out! Columbia Records When “Sweater Weather” hit radio two years back, The Neighbourhood’s concoction of hip-hop, pop, R&B and indie rock fueled fire to their popularity as a genre-bent band capable of producing [...]
Ian Fletcher Thornley Secrets Anthem Records/Warner Music Canada Part of being human means that we constantly grasp and sometimes desperately cling to all our secrets. We hide within them. We are defined by them. They hold us captive. If the [...]
Den Sorte Skole Indians & Cowboys Independent The global Black School goes old, old school turntablism!!! No soundscape boundaries. Trying to pigeonhole these Copenhagen-based DJs in a genre is like trying to earn the respect of an online [...]
Odium Terraform Year Of The Sun Records Delivering a punishing new album titled Terraform, Hanover, Ontario Canada’s Odium is set to crush the masses with 11 new songs. This melodic genre of death metal gives you the best of two worlds with [...]
