When you know, you know

At first I was baffled upon hearing “Judah Smith Interlude”, the fifth track on Lana Del Rey’s ninth album. Of course, it’s pretty much a guarantee that when you put a four-and-a-half minute recording of an evangelical christian charlatan minister sermonizing, I will immediately hate it. I grew up catholic. I hate sermons, and to […]

Our Tattered Beauty

One thing I’ve learned over the last eight years is to stop obsessively chasing new metal music, constantly in search of the NEXT BIGGEST THING. For 40 years I’ve been keenly interested in the history of heavy music as well as its continuing evolution; having been a teenaged witness to the genre’s spectacular growth in […]

Five Other Faves

Random favourite songs from 2023

The Big Answer

Caroline Polachek’s 2019 album Pang showed just how limitless the potential was for the singer-songwriter to take art pop to stratospheric new heights, and her long-awaited follow-up does just that by smartly focusing more on the pop side. Typical of Polachek’s oeuvre, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You is so hyper-ambitious that it practically […]

Bullets on Skin

When Olivia Rodrigo became a sensation in the wake of her mega-viral song “Driver’s License”, I admired the melodramatic hyper-emotionality of the lyrics, but ultimately I convinced myself she was just one of the many other Disney kids that are continually spawned in pods, deep in the darkest recesses of Robert Iger’s dungeon. You know, […]

Gratifying.

2020 might have been a rotten year, but it was also the year Jessie Ware went disco, which was a good, positive thing I was able to take away from that year. After years of focusing primarily on R&B, Ware decided to evoke Studio 54 on the stunning What’s Your Pleasure?, and it was such […]

A Thousand Midnights

Depeche Mode, specifically the 1990 album Violator, looms large over my little family. My wife and I have little pieces of artwork scattered around the house that reference the album, and “Enjoy the Silence” featured prominently in our wedding ceremony. The band is a huge favourite of Stacey’s, and her admiration of their music has […]

Something is Broken.

Music and self-preservation have always been one and the same, at least in my rather complicated (or as my wife likes to call herself, “neurospicy”) mind. But because the most accessible musical outlet for the teenaged me was heavy metal rather than, say, hardcore punk, it became self-preservation through escapism instead of raw, emotional catharsis. […]

The High Cost of Chaos

A cool thing happened in 2022: Paramore, a band who broke into the music business as teenagers in the mid-2000s, suddenly found themselves elder statespeople, with a new generation of kids hugely influenced by their music. Everyone from drag queens to hot new artists were citing Paramore as major musical and stylistic influences and icons, […]

The Best Button

I thoroughly enjoy Metallica’s 72 Seasons. It took a few months for me to get there, but after writing a cautiously positive review when the album came out in April, I started to realize that there’s a lot more to like about it than I initially thought. But this will happen when a band puts […]

Tô Kébec

A few days ago I mentioned three favourite albums by artists I saw at FME this past Labour Day weekend. Well, I saved the best one for last, because Population II was the best thing I saw there. My socks were blown clean off. They were recommended to me by an industry pal, I checked […]

padam? Padam.

One of the most pleasant surprises of 2023 was seeing Kylie’s new single explode like it did when it went viral this past summer. I remember getting the press release about “Padam Padam”, listening to an advance of the track, and thinking, oh, this is a very cool detour for Kylie. It’s not much of […]

Guess who’s back?

For far too many years, Danko Jones has been betrayed by the Canadian rock music scene. In an age where the Canadian mainstream rock we hear on the radio couldn’t be more homogenous and algorithm-driven, here’s a dude who’s been cranking out record after wickedly good record for more than 20 years. Every time he […]

Morbid visionary

From his groundbreaking work with Hellhammer, to his visionary output with Celtic Frost, to his latter-day renaissance with Triptykon, Tom Warrior has always remained ahead of the curve, finding new ways to create the heaviest, most viscerally gratifying music possible. Constantly striving to achieve his own lofty ambitions and never for a second complacent, he’s […]

from gateway album to geezer pleaser

Inside the delightfully – and appropriately – garish 40th anniversary edition of Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the Devil are four tarot cards, one for each member, self-congratulatorily labeled as such: the Devil, the Sun, the Lover, and the Magician. If one were to be a little more accurate, the tarot cards would instead say: the […]