Now twelve years after breaking away from Thrush Hermit and striking out on his own, there's no arguing that Joel Plaskett has established himself as one of the best songwriters in Canada. Since 1999, the singer has successfully managed to translate the small wonders in life (small towns, small town kicks, small town girls, small town bars and the love, loss and leaving of all four) into rock music capable of filling concert theaters in big cities across Canada. The...
Easthampton, MA – The Chicago rock band Wilco release their eighth studio album – The Whole Love – on September 27 through their newly launched dBpm Records. It follows the band’s 2009 Grammy-nominated Wilco (The Album) and was recorded at the band’s Chicago recording studio The Loft. The Whole Love features twelve new original tunes and is produced by Jeff Tweedy with Patrick Sansone and Tom Schick. The Whole Love is a veritable sonic stew, showcasing Wilco’s far-reaching musical prowess (multiple...
It's been a while (about ten years – give or take) since trance-y, ambient electronic music and trip hop really commanded much of a presence in the mainstream (the late greats of the explosion that happened in the Nineties included Propellerheads, Sneaker Pimps and Portishead), but that doesn't mean the music just spontaneously evaporated. No, all that music and most of those aforementioned artists simply retreated back to the dance caves from which they matriculated, continued to learn and develop...
Last Sunday night, Brooklyn’s North Side Music Festival featured an appearance by YACHT at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Blog readers were out in droves, as the nautically acronym-ed group from my beloved Pacific Northwest did their best to look and feel like a local act. It's funny seeing a band from Portland, Oregon in Brooklyn’s most infamously hipster-ified neighborhood. It's like eating a crepe at a Montreal themed restaurant in France (literally an import, not theoretically). This novelty didn’t...
Is there still time for Limp Bizkit to reclaim old glories? As of right now, it has been six years since Fred Durst and company released a new album (Results May Vary was the last one, if you missed it), but about ten since the band blew so hard with Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water that they singlehandedly smothered the nu metal craze that ruled modern rock between 1998 and 2001. Unlike so many other great fads, an...
'Ey youse,Awright, so, this week, we're gonna go whole hog on gettin' ya some free SWAG cuz half the world ain't workin'. I dunno if ya heard, but there's a mail strike goin' on in Canada, annat means'at ol' fi'dollar Billy's real good an' crabby cause nothin's movin' annat makes it awful fuckin' hard ta get stuff done innis bizness. It ain't a problem here inna good ol' U.S of A but, when yer boss is in a different country,...
Seeing The Descendents play sent me into an ecstatic orbit like only a few concerts have before. I had already been a fan of the band for a while by the time they reformed in 1996 and released Everything Sucks, but that record really connected with me; the band I started in high school covered a couple of songs from it, I made hand drawn T-shirts with the band's mascot on them and sang their praises to anyone who would...
There is no shortage of bands (and concertgoers) who complain about the truncated timelines associated with festival shows (they're tight and the sets are short – which guarantees that someone in the audience will say, “Gee – why couldn't they have played 'that' song?”), but those tenuous constraints feel like they may have been tailor-made to suit OFF! With a set of short songs (about a minute and a half or less on average) and a staggering amount of adrenaline,...
No matter how much buzz they might be generating at any given moment, you have to feel for the “baby band” on the bill of the biggest show of any multi-day, multi-stage music festival. It might be inconvenient to admit it, but the cards are inevitably always stacked against them; when the other bands on a card have more history, they also have a bigger fan base which will, in turn, make them the focus of the proceedings. The old-guard...
At fifteen years old, I went to my first legitimate rock concert. It was at AJ’s Hanger in Kingston, Ontario and the bands were Rusty and Hhead. During the finale, headliner Rusty’s lead singer Ken MacNeil took a stage dive and landed on top of me. So I stole his shoe. In my fifteen year old mind, I figured that if this band was playing the biggest club in my town and had music videos, they must be millionaires. I...