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Recent Reviews
Mahmood Schricker
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For such a multicultural place, Canada has had scant few examples of truly ground-breaking world music. With the possible exception of Toronto's fiery Punjabi by Nature back in the nineties, and artists like the old-world Black Ox Orkestar or the trippy fusionist Mercen Dede over in Montreal, the vast wealth of popular music here - excellent as it may be - is still being created by a coterie of pasty, bearded, and guitar-obsessed anglophiles. Where is our M.I.A., Natacha Atlas or Asian Dub ...more
Les Momies de Palerme
Brulez Ce Coeur
Multi-instrumentalists Xarah Dion and Marie Davidson have been plying their striking audio/video performance pieces since 2006. The Montreal pair's first musical musings, the self-released CD-R L'Amour Sincere, surprisingly scaled the charts over at McGill University's CKUT radio station, which must have given them a bit of momentum in the increasingly crowded local scene there. The ladies even hooked up with Sam Shalabi's Land of Kush project, lending keyboards, electronics and voic...more
Bishop Morocco
Old Boys EP
Torontonians James Sayce and Jake Farley first explored their love of early-eighties new wave while living in the handsome Dutch university town of Groningen. Their self-titled 2010 debut for the Hand Drawn Dracula label made a splash on both sides of the pond, with the band even finding its way onto a podcast at Colette, the hip Parisian fashion chain. But while the pair may have connected all the dots, those retro licks sometimes came off sounding more studied than genuine.
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The Churls
The Churls
Somewhere over the years the Churls ended up near the bottom of history's overcrowded dustbin, but back in late 1967 the heavy-hitting rockers had quite a presence on Toronto's Yorkville scene, at one point snagging an eight-week slot as the house band at The Penny Farthing club. The five (singer Bob O'Neill, guitarists Sam Hurrie and Harry Southworth Ames, with John Barr on bass and Brad Fowles on drums) were probably the loudest band in the village, mixing those crunching power chords of C...more
The Poppy Family
That's Where I Went Wrong / Shadows on My Wall - 7"
When 17-year-old Susan Pesklavits asked former Chessmen guitarist Terry Jacks to accompany her on CBC's mid-sixties TV show Music Hop, she probably had little idea of the great things to come. Their union produced an alchemy, short-lived though it was, that was both romantic as well as artistic - the two married in 1967 with Susan and Terry Jacks forming soft-pop legends the Poppy Family soon after. With Craig McCaw on guitar and sitar and Satwant Singh on tablas and drums, they got ...more
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