Music, musings and miscellanea

This review originally appeared at Exclaim.ca

Austin, TX’s Ringo Deathstarr are doing a good job of making themselves inescapable. After dropping their excellent debut, Colour Trip, last March, then bundling together a bunch of EPs and singles as Sparkler in the fall, we get the Shadow EP, four songs showcasing their growing fame and willingness to push beyond the My Bloody Valentine-esque shoegaze forming the basis of their sound.

The title track, features …And you will Know Us by the Trail of Dead’s Jason Reece’s trademark howl, screaming “Don’t fade out” over some beautiful swirling guitars. “New Way” is a minute-and-18 seconds of childish rants while a pounding beat drives the tune and “Prisms” finds the band at their most ambient.

But the surprise is “Just You,” an Angelo Badalamenti cover from the television show Twin Peaks. They turn the ’50s-style song into a gorgeous, fuzzed-up power ballad. According to a press release, these tracks will appear on the band’s forthcoming second record.

Based on these selections, the album is unlikely to dissuade comparisons to the Creation Records catalogue, but the band are increasingly up for experimenting within their self-made box while honing their pop hooks.

This review originally appeared at Exclaim.ca

Brooklyn, NY four-piece the Men have made a habit out of confounding expectations, abandoning sounds quicker than a pop star changes costumes. Just as the bleak noise of their debut gave way to the warped hardcore of last year’s much lauded Leave Home, their third effort sounds like a lost collaboration between Bob Mould and the Replacements.

Linking these disparate styles is the visceral power the Men bring to everything they do. Even on their surprise detour into country, on appropriately titled instrumental “Country Song,” the reverb ripples around your eardrums as if you were standing next to an amp in the studio. During their latest transformation, the band developed some tremendous hook writing chops that until now were barely hinted at. Jam-y album closer “Ex-Dreams” contains some of the record’s best melodies, while “Please Don’t Go Away” and the title track could have been alt-rock radio hits two decades ago.

But Open Your Heart‘s greatest triumph is its ability to hearken back without feeling retro. The comparisons to ’80s American underground luminaries come more from the live-off-the-floor feel than any stylistic trope the Men have absorbed into their arsenal of sounds.

“Open Your Heart”

This review originally appeared at Exclaim.ca

Anyone wondering how Daps Records so quickly gathered international buzz around its burgeoning roster need only have witnessed this show. The label — run by Ian Chai, along with Hooded Fang’s Daniel Lee and April Aliermo — has rekindled Toronto’s DIY spirit, producing and releasing records from their friends and like-minded artists.

After L Con opened the night, former Spiral Beach members Maddy Wilde and Daniel Woodhead took the stage as Moon King. Woodhead opened their set, back turned to the crowd singing a Peter Gabriel-esque version of “Walk on By.” With Wilde on guitar and Woodhead playing a tom and snare drum while triggering beats and samples, they delivered a tight set of tracks off an upcoming album that matched the Jesus & Mary Chain’s swagger with the shimmering shoegaze of Lush, quickly finding a groove that Spiral Beach always lacked. Their energy and charisma was palpable, and the anthemic nature of so many of their songs made it very easy to imagine the duo playing much further up the bill soon.

Woodhead remained onstage for his brother Airick’s solo projectDoldrums, who quickly shot to indie notoriety through their split single with England’s Portishead. With Daniel on keyboards and a live drummer, they worked through the chopped and sampled grooves of Doldrums’ debut, Empire Sound. Recalling Primal Scream’s dubbiest moments tossed into a blender, Airick proved to be a formidable frontman, and their set, backed a pastiche of video images projected onto the stage, captured the groove and hedonistic spirit of acid house’s halcyon days.

Hooded Fang felt like the night’s de facto headliners; the longest running of the Daps roster, the band already have a pair of records under their belt. But a massive lineup shift (they’ve downsized from eight members to four) and an abandoning of their original glock rock sound in favour of surf-inspired garage has alienated some of their original fan base. Ignoring their debut, Album, the band played a tight set that on most other bills would have been a triumph. But the songs didn’t quite transcend the ’60s garage trappings and lacked the enthusiasm of the night’s earlier performances even if Hooded Fang’s trademark hooky songcraft remained.

After an extra long break, Phèdre marked their debut performance by literally emerging from the womb of a digital projection of Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life on their massive handmade screen. The trio unites Lee and Aliermo with Airick Woodhead in a sleazy and decadent take on electro pop. Throughout their quick set, they were flanked by an entourage of courtesans covered in gold who performed purposely stiff dance routines while similarly garbed performers threw feathers and gold-glitter-filled condoms into the audience. At times, the performance threatened to overshadow the music itself, but their final track “In Decay” proved that Phèdre are more than an excuse to wear gold lamé, as half the crowd joined the band onstage to close the night in a glitter-covered haze.

Phèdre – “In Decay”

Damian “Pink Eyes” Abraham may get most of the attention but third guitarist Ben Cook is certainly the busiest member of Toronto psychedelic-punks Fucked Up.

In between the steady stream of singles with his day job, Cook has released his own army of EPs and seven-inches as Young Governor, the Bitters and Marvelous Darlings, the latter of whom gets the compilation treatment on Single Life.

Formed in 2007 and rarely playing live, the quartet released half-a-dozen seven-inch slabs of punked up power pop, in the vein of the Exploding Hearts and White Wires, each performed with the abandon of a band playing for its life. Cook proves to be a formidable singer; opener “I Don’t Want to Go To the Party” bubbles over with bratty energy while “Teenage Targets” shows-off his knack for complicated arrangements without losing the band’s visceral edge.

Cook and co split the record in half, with A-sides at the beginning and B-sides at the end, meaning that the Single Life’s back half is a tad weaker (emphasis on “a tad”) than its front. But the overall quality of material will leave listeners hoping this isn’t this group’s swan song.

“I’ll Stand By Her”

This review originally appeared at Exclaim.ca

No matter how much we want them to be, Islands are not the Unicorns. Since Nick Thorburn and Jamie Thompson struck out on their own, the group have been viewed as an extension of the famed Montreal trio, rather than a separate entity.Thorburn, in particular, spent the band’s first three records simultaneously embracing and running from that expectation, but fourth time out finally finds his voice.

A break-up record written on a keyboard, A Sleep & a Forgetting features some of Thorburn’s most personal songwriting and it’s difficult as a listener to decide where the line between band and reality lies ― is “Never Go Solo” about his lost love or his music? Islands have always had an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to their arrangements, but here the group hold back, peppering songs with splashes of horns, handclaps and what have you only when necessary, allowing individual tracks to stand on their own instead of smearing the album with a wall of noise. Their brand of quirky indie pop runs throughout, but the slower numbers are as effective as the upbeat tunes.

There’s a streak of R&B and even soul buried in these songs ― “This is Not a Song” could easily find new life as a torch song to a leaving lover. The press release explains that Thorburn started writing A Sleep last Valentine’s Day and is releasing it this Valentine’s Day to bookend the process. Gimmicky? Yes, but given the subject matter, not altogether inappropriate.

“This is Not a Song”