Low Life is dark and gritty rock that would shine as brightly in the seventies as it does now. The track has a number of bold and brash elements – vocals, drums, and guitars all vie for dominance – but the constituent elements are able to gel into something fun and hard-hitting. I particularly like Three State Famous’ ability to just stop the instrumental side of things and allow the…
Blue Muse begins with A Fiddle Player’s Love, a tender track that shows the intricate arrangements that are commonplace during the release. Tozer’s vocals link together Stevie Nicks with Reba McEntire, while the instrumentation will resound loudly in listeners’ ears long after the title ceases.
The band begins Fire Work with a tremendously interesting use of time signatures, meaning that the act has a sound that has equal parts of Tool, 311, Sublime, and Primus. The vocals are able to expand upon the work of bands like Coheed and Cambria and Fall Out Kid, along with hints of Incubus and Godsmack.
Sacred Earth has created one of the most cohesive meditative albums that we have heard this year. Each of the disc’s first five tracks range in length from eight to ten minutes, and provide a wide array of distinct influences along with considerable twists and turns over the course of the sixty-plus minute run time.
The Haiku Project is a musician that is looking to further the ambient genre into something that is tremendously effecting while still being approachable by the widest swath of listeners. The album begins with Atlantis, an eight-minute track that feels to be a fraction of that.
How did your debut release, Stephen Farrell move from initial thought to finished effort? Initially, I was working on demoing some of my songs and I began thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great to really put this down on some tracks with some great musicians and play the tunes live for a change instead of just demoing the tunes with machines and synths.”
Musicians are notoriously a sensitive group. Even more so when it comes to poking fun at their own legacy. So it was particularly admirable of longtime cult rocker Graham Parker to play himself in 2012’s This Is 40, a film where Paul Rudd’s character is losing money because his record label banked on the failed notion that there was still an audience for Parker and his longtime band The Rumors.
Since the last time we had met with DownTown Mystic, much has changed. The band has gone through considerable successes (reaching the Top 25 on the Euro/Americana charts) in Europe, and Sony Music spreading their Standing Still album throughout the continent. Jingle Punks had slated their music to be played on US cable & network television, ensuring that millions of viewers were familiar with DownTown Mystic through programs like American…
People don’t normally consider Canada to be a hotbed of extreme metal. When talking about the best black or death metal bands, Scandinavia is constantly mentioned, along with a few American bands, German bands and various regional scenes but the Canadian scene is often overlooked which is a shame because some of the bands to come out of the Great White North are some of the best bands metal has…
Prospect is a very emotion track that requires nothing more than Thorpe’s fantastic voice. The different harmonies that she achieves before the whistling begins is simply unparalleled in music, with comparisons being drawn to Sarah McLachlan or Paula Cole.
