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Recent Reviews
Roger Rodier
Upon Velveatur
Roger Rodier was originally a member of the Mike Jones Group, whose 'Funny Feeling', the b-side of their only single (Jet Records 1967), seems to have struck a chord with garage rock collectors after all these years. By 1972, however, the Montrealer had already released a couple of painfully obscure psych singles on the Pax label in the late sixties, one anglophone and the other francophone, before settling into the Andre Perry studios in Montreal to record...more
Liz Worth
Treat Me Like Dirt (An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond)
Has their been any other scene in pop music so obsessed about and fawned over as 1970s punk, a movement that lasted a scant two years in its prime, was rejected outright by North American audiences, and in the end probably left us with more musical chaff than wheat? Poet and frequent Exclaim magazine contributor Liz Worth was not even born when the Toronto scene exploded, probably somewhere around Yonge and Isabella Streets on September 24, 1976, when the Ramones played the New Yorker Theatr...more
Windsor Tunnel
Windsor Tunnel
For the Viscounts, a move from Amherst, Nova Scotia to the gritty Detroit area in 1966 - in this case to Windsor, Ontario on the Canuck side of things - proved to be just the thing Clayton Moore and company needed. After setting up in Canada's motor city, the band must have endeared themselves to the locals with a name change to the more geographically relevant Windsor Tunnel. What's more, their maritime accents proved to be more exotic than expected. Moore recalls, "The band became very p...more
The Curse
Shoeshine Boy / The Killer Bees - 7"
Ostensibly Canada's first female punk band (with challenges to that throne by the B-Girls and the Dishrags), Toronto's Curse were there right from the get-go, slotted to open for the Tools on a cancelled May 27, 1977 gig at the SEED Auditorium on McCaul, later backing up the Viletones at the infamous Crash 'n' Burn club in June, and then taking the stage at CBGB a month later on an all-Canadian bill ("Outrageous punk bands from Toronto, Canada!") that inclu...more
The Nils
Sell Out Young 12"
The Nils were chronic underachievers, with their gifted singer/guitarist Alex Soria meeting an early drug-tainted death in 2004 at the age of 39. Hatched in the south-shore Montreal suburb of St-Hubert as far back as 1978 - this when the precocious Alex was a mere 12 years old! - the Nils issued the five-song Now cassette in 1982, as well as songs on the BYO compilation Something to Believe In and Psyche Industry's excellent Primitive Air Raid collection. But without a...more
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