Albums

Deciding on Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra as their moniker for this recent release (How many variations are there now exactly?), Montreal trio Efrim Menuck, Sophie Trudeau and Thierry Amar conjure up more heartfelt, impassioned post rock symphonies with latest abulm, Kollaps Tradixionales. Familiarity with Silver Mt. Zion’s prior work or indeed with the musicians work with GY!BE will undoubtedly make this release rewarding if not all that surprising, ‘There Is a Light’ combinin...

The jazz section in your local record store these days could really make due with just two sections: “Albums J.P. Carter Plays On”, and “Other”. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I’m a big fan of the Vancouver’s trumpet player’s deranged dialectic of slow, flowing beautiful jazz lines and unhinged, guitar pedal-driven skree. I’ve seen him charm supper club audiences with smooth bebop lines, and I’ve seen him melt faces off with a Proco Rat at illegal art galleries. While both are great...

Country is all about authenticity—so everything well constructed, tight, beautiful, a studio project of exquisite delicacy has, these days, seem genuine while have no roughness. Everything about an album, the drum fills, the lyrics, the guitars and pedal steel—have to appear to be “country” while not smelling at all like horse shit. They cannot say anything new, but they cannot appear too hackneyed—and they have to have a narrative, a simple one—of desire, redemption, geography, and Je...

Psyche and rock-tinged free jazz from Vancouver bass player Tommy Babin and his band. The album, recorded in a single take, features Babin on acoustic bass, with Chad MacQuarrie of weird punk band Karen Foster on electric guitar and Vancouver’s omnipresent free-improv hired gun Skye Brooks on drums. Your Body Is Your Prison starts out sounding somewhat composed, with a first track or two that have characteristics of contemporary jazz compositions by Steve Coleman and Rudresh Mahanthappa. ...

Where’d the girl go? The Wheat Pool try to answer questions of lost love as well as overcome the haunting memory of symbolic Ontario. Past lived experiences play heavily in this alt-country, self-described “Canadiana” album. Filled with imagery from the Western provinces, Hauntario is built with straightforward song progressions. The album would happily suffice as a highway driving companion. Every now and again there are lyrics that make me smile, such as “I’m not an asshole I’m just no...

I was excited to hear Sanktuary as they are a thrash metal band from the Yukon, and hell who ever hears of metal bands from the North. So that in itself right there is a big point of interest to get you excited… well me, anyway. Okay so I have secret fascination with the Yukon so what? One day my plan is to drive from here to the Yukon. It’s possible: I looked it up on MapQuest. The only problem is is that I really want to drive there during the winter, but I somehow don’t think that wou...

Everything about the Les Kils ep shouts out old skool hip hop, right down from the design to the music itself. From the graffiti images on the cover of More Or Les & Fresh Kils, to the minimal, blue and white design, to the Pac Man arcade game. The images of the samplers and drum machines on the front really is the only thing that gives it away as modern. What this EP is a is collaboration between Montreal based MC(DJ etc) More or Les and Fresh Kils who I can only seem to find o...

6 is, and this a hugely shocking surprise, Pigface’s 6th album. Hooray yay. Okay not really all that important but it is. So there you go. Continuing down the road of what you’d expect from Pigface, if there really is such a thing. Dancish beats and eclectic electronic sounds and Industrial flourishes with lots of weird broken passages and a gigantic spectrum of artists participating on each song is really quite unpredictable. Unpredictable, but within that sort of Industrial rock ...

Okay so this album originally came out in 1968 and was composer Chuck Mangione and arranger Roger Karshner’s little attempt at some sort of amazing studio wizardry. Apparently an attempt at making electronic painting, and I’m not sure if that is true but it is kind of interesting. So this is what wikipedia says about Paul Klee: Paul Klee(1879- 1940) was a Swiss painter who experimented with expressionism, cubism, surrealism and orientalism. And I don’t know what the hell orientalism...

No wave noise, yeah that is what Father Murphy does. With a little jazz thrown in just for emphasis. Maybe I should say post-rock no wave, because it has these long drawn out dirges of ambience which then rush into chaotic song structures. Less interesting than I had hoped considering the album design is pretty awesome. With old crosses and stuff, I had expected something that sounded like a psychedelic apocalyptic folk experiment. Yeah the design is really cool. It looks like t...

Metal -industrial-drone. Yeah that is the best way to describe The Politics of the Irredeemable. It is like a textured nuance of metallic blasts of ambience. Using elements of noise and metal guitar, with lots anguished vocals residing firmly in the background. Then with these calming moments of stark dread, sort of mellowed out in between the blasts of pure anguish, creates a nightmare soundscape of some apocalyptic fantasy vision of the future. A fantasy where the world has been ra...

This album is ugly and abrasive. There is too much percussion. The vocals are off tune, and have not decided between speaking, between singing, between yelling and rapping. The genre signifiers move between house, neo-disco, handbag electro, bubblegum hip hop and Miley Cyrus forcibly stripped of any country influence at all. The lyrics are just weird, sometimes half a verse of a chorus hits like a 16-wheeler, sometime the details are perfect, mostly they are half a step out of fashion (P-Di...

Punt has this tagline of “live Europeans meet live Ethiopians singing and playing together”. So I suppose that is what you get here. Weirdly dubby, dancey, trippy music crossed with Ethiopian singing and instrumentation. The opening track, “Hoda Baba: I’m Worried He’s Moving”, starts the album very strongly with this crazy dub track with what sounds like traditional Ethiopian singing (I’m assuming because I have to admit I am completely ignorant of Ethiopian music). From there it be...

Featuring members of Burning Witch and Khanate sets out that Gnaw will be of interest to somebody. Well I figure I would throw the references out right away and get your attention, that was really just lazy writing to be honest, but hell there you go, got it out of the way now you’re paying attention and now that you know that you can ignore the rest of what I have to say. With that said I must admit I know more of these bands from reputation than I actually know them musically . What ...

The Strange were an underground art-rock band from Olympia, Washington and Souvenir Album is a re-release of the 1974 release. This is all very interesting, but what it all means I don’t really know. I mean I don’t know if Olympia was a big Mecca for prog-folk or in fact a total back water where nothing interesting ever happened, excuse my ignorance. But anyway that is what it is. The music is a curious mix of the folksy psychedelic rock with just plain weird hippie artistic flourish...

While I Have Hands has some really interesting songs and samples on it, I can’t help but feel there is something missing from the album. Like some sort of central concept or basic idea. There is no use of samples to make a comment about contemporary life and culture, they are instead used only to make fun jingles. But if that is the case then isn’t it really just using other people’s ideas to make your own album and fame? And that isn’t to say that it is a bad product or not well d...

Vampire Weekend are kind of interesting politically. The music is great, and it was the number one album on the country this week, so there is all of that, which I will talk about in a bit but the politics should be wrestled with first. Initially one is reminded of the Paul Simon issue—namely how do we process the music of other people while including politics and acknowledging the colonialism of it all. Simon in the 80s did this poorly; the politics were often sophomoric, Graceland and Rhyth...

KK Null has worked with basically the spectrum of experimental noise/ dark ambient musicians since his musical beginnings in the early 1980s. When you look you see a list that includes Merzbow, Mick Harris Jim O’Rourke, Zíev Matmos, and on and on. A lot of names pop up that I am marginally familiar with and others I don’t have a clue about, but all that is irrelevant to the point I am making – that Null is a powerhouse in his own right when it comes to creating noisy dark ambient. And hav...

Okay I have a problem with this album and it is not in the sound or quality of the music, or anything to do with the band or the music, which is rather quite lovely. But what it has to do with is this, as a re-release it presents very little information about the band. There is this like one page write up inside about how they recorded this album. Now perhaps they re-issued the first album and filled it with loads and loads of information, but I have never heard of Blops before and was ho...

With guests ranging from Lycia’s Mike VanPortfleet, Jon DeRosa (Arktika) and Jessica Bailiff; Brian John Mitchell’s experimental group Vlor has been part of the bedrock foundation of Silber Media in both output and style, setting the tone of what is to be expected from the little known and thus greatly underappreciated label. Six Winged, Vlor’s latest release, still manages to fit perfectly into the Silber cannon, opening with the short and ambient focused track ‘I Have Left Home’ before...

Hailing from Providence, Rhode Island, Megasus brings forth crushing doom metal with a blatant retro tinge (as the name surely would suggest). Formed by members of Lightning Bolt, Amazing Royal Crowns, Laurels & Scared Stiff, their eponymous release brims with energy and enthusiasm from the offset with opening track ‘Ten Kingdoms’ a tune deliberately reminiscent of doom’s vivid beginnings. The title track of the album follows swiftly after, combining thrash, doom and a little sprinkle ...

Just shy of a decade since ‘No Solace In Sleep’ left ripples of excitement in the drone/ ambient genre, Aarktica (N.Y artist Jon DeRosa) emerges once more to enthral and sooth in equal measure with the newest release, In sea. Taking advantage of both artistic moniker and track title, In Sea begins with ‘I Am (The Ice)’; a fluid and textured composition as cold and isolating as it is serene and peaceful, conjuring the arctic tundra within the mind’s eye much like ‘No Solace…’ did so many ye...

Cryptozoological influenced lo-fi black metal… wow; take that, Wire Magazine, I found it first and its mine I tells ya, all mine! …Truth be told, Yoga (duo Vatten Hast and Eld Anka) are far from an undiscovered gem, already wooing listeners with their unique take on a now formidable scene which incorporates black metal and all manner of offshoots of avant garde noise terrorism. This relative fame will come as no surprise once you get hold of Megafauna as right from the start with ‘seventh ...

Asleep at the Steering Wheel marks a bit of a departure of in style for L’Ombre. Well okay, okay not a radically huge departure, but a departure none the less. For instead of the very laid back ambient type beats and sounds, Letting Go At The Steering Wheel slowly unveils itself as a much more upbeat album. I suppose here I should make some really lame joke about how Letting Go is fully awake, you know the kind of stuff which everyone will surely find so ironically hilarious. You...

Darkly impressive is Dan Mangan’s latest, the next gem in an already gleaming indie-folk crown. The music is invigorating and his lyrics clever, crafted with a confidant ear. The whole thing ticks to its own time in glorious paradoxical flare, shouting timidly brilliant lines like “I’m ambitious when giving up.” It’s hard to listen to this album and not be persuaded by Mangan’s luminous style of song-writing. Mangan’s music is both diligently honest (see the ballad “Et Les Mots Croisés”) a...