Bandwagon, the local video series featuring intimate performances from excellent bands, continues its seventh season with a performance of “Parade” by My Son the Hurricane. My Son the Hurricane are a “14 piece brass-fuelled funk and dance beast.” Hailing from Toronto and the Niagara region, this unweildly orchestra, including a beefy brass section, mixes New Orleans-style grooves […]
Montreal’s the Famines have made a career out of disruption. Lead singer and guitarist Raymond Biesinger has described their music as “damaged 60s garage songs”—wry, cynical, and noisy, with sharp and insightful lyrics that challenge the modern world. It’s earned a cult following for the band, a duo of Biesinger and drummer Drew Demers (a […]
The first time Benj Rowland and Josh Fewings heard it was driving along Highway 2 between High River and Calgary, Alberta. Or maybe it was somewhere on the Trans-Canada Highway between Lewisporte and Woody Point, Newfoundland. Or maybe it just Highway 7, heading home to Peterborough after a gig in Tweed. At some point, all […]
At least at first, Peterborough rapper Fresh Air comes off on his new album as a blissfully braggadocious, vaguely sophomoric, and occasionally misogynistic man, superficial and simple in his desires. “Pussy, money, weed—that’s all I need,” he proclaims on “Higher Axis.” But as the album progresses, this simple philosophy starts to feel more like the […]
Bandwagon, the local video series featuring intimate performances from excellent bands, continues its seventh season with a performance of “Bad Poetry” by Megan Nash. Saskatchewan roots singer-songwriter Megan Nash has a knack for sincerity and rawness of emotion. Often unaccompanied on her critically acclaimed 2015 album Song Harvest Volume One, except by her own seething electric guitar […]
This 17-song record shows veteran singer-songwriter Cris Cuddy to be a moralist, eager to offer the world-weary wisdom of an “old man with the blues” to those in thrall to sexual lust (“Time Bomb Baby”), or power and fame (“Nashville Star”), or some twisted combination of the two (“All the Pain (Money Could Buy)”). Even […]
At the risk of losing all pretense of objectivity, I will say that I unabashedly love Fred Penner. I grew up watching Fred Penner’s Place, his CBC television show that ran five days a week for 12 years, and I think “Sandwiches” was the first song I ever memorized. I feel relatively comfortable sharing this […]
Far off in Sweden, under pristine, snow-swept fields that seem to extend off into an endless night, lies a deep well of no-holds-barred, scorched-earth violence. This gorgeous and terrible contrast has come to define Swedish metal, and it’s clearly a huge influence on the umlauted Peterborough progressive metal band Hjärna Waves. The band have cheekily […]
It’s a strange feeling, disquieting yet oddly gleeful, while the President of the United States is musing on Twitter about the relative size of his nuclear launch button, hearing Jane Archer and friends sing these Cold War-era hymns to the life-giving power of the almighty American nuclear arsenal. We’ve been asked “Are you ready for […]
All the songs on Are We In Love?, Emily Burgess’ debut album, released late last year, are good. Most are in an electric blues vein, and feature stellar guitar fills and solos, of exactly the kind you’d expect from a musician with a little over a decade of professional experience as a lead guitarist. The […]