Most stoner/riff bands hold the early Black Sabbath records as the Demonic Ideals for the genre. But on IV, Vancouver’s Dead Quiet make a graveyard deal with themselves to push the limits of their instruments, their chops, and sheer output volume. Smart songcraft manages that excess, distorting time, space and spirit in service of 45 […]
Luge’s fourth full-length album keeps you on your toes. From the slinking bass tones to the band’s absurd technical command over their intricate time signatures, the Toronto four-piece’s latest bounds from mathy art-punk into groovy, crushing riffs. Vocalist Kaiva Gotham’s sometimes foolish, sometimes deadly serious (and sometimes Latvian!) lyrics guide listeners down the rabbit hole. […]
For any impressionable adolescent, this album has the power to become the soundtrack to your life and empower you to become the main character of your own movie. That’s not a diss on It’s A Life, the debut album from Vancouver indie rock trio The Jins. That’s indicative of a timeless, universal, and rare sound. […]
Toronto rapper DijahSB is on the verge of hitting their thirties, and their latest project expresses this with some flowery language – meaning that there’s literally a lot of talk about gardens, blooming, and petals, used as a metaphor for growth and moving up in the world as a milestone looms. With warm chords and […]
Canada’s most singular baritone belter delivers an insightful, vintage jazz-mode tribute to his late father, saxophonist William James Lightburn. The younger Lightburn tenderly weaves through eras—contemplating his dad’s time in the Quebecois music scene, his parents’ love story, and the contemporary gut-check of COVID death numbers—but comes back to the present with a determined life […]
This is a further indicator of why Montreal’s Atsuko Chiba should be a household name in the experimental/post-everything genres. The way this band crosses genres between songs, still sounding uniquely like themselves, is a marvel. For the uninitiated, the best parts of this album sound like a more accessible King Crimson mixed with the Mars […]
An instrumental-driven album, Outsider tracks GOVI’s evolution as a producer and composer, building on the dark, thumping sound found on 2022’s Wonder Where We Fall. On this outing, the OVO Sound mainstay opens his woozy worldbuilding up to a cadre of capable vocalists, including Monsune and River Tiber. The added elements reveal a new depth […]
After a decade of dormancy, Steve Bays and Parker Bossley return with an impressive set of high-gloss grooves. That its title track transforms the high-stress setting of a wedding day meltdown into the record’s most blissfully-bumped Ibiza anthem is but one of many impressive swerves.
KEN mode are doing victory laps at this point in their career. The chaotic Winnipeg hardcore/noise masters are desperate lifers in every sense of the word, dedicating their careers, energies and talents to the almighty cleansing power of spidery, splintering guitar lines and throat-shredding vocals that threaten to break up into fuzzed-out static at any […]
Grief and upheaval are at the core of Kue Varo’s Cowboy Witchcraft, a complete collection of ten songs that feels like a reckoning with the whole idea of coming home (if truly coming home is ever possible). Varo’s strong vocals carry the weight of her lyrics with deceptive ease, and the gothic-western-tinged rockers chug along […]
