Canada
The Shrouds review - he wouldn't let it lieThursday, 03 July 2025
“Dying is an act of eroticism,” suggested one of the many disposable characters in David Cronenberg’s first full-length feature, Shivers (1975), and that slippery adage could sum up more than a few of the Canadian sensationalist’s movies in the past... Read more... |
Album: Mocky - Music Will Explain (Choir Music Vol. 1)Wednesday, 02 July 2025
Dominic “Mocky” Salole has had a long career in which the tension between authenticity and pastiche has been a constant. Toronto-born, of English and Yemeni heritage, he came of musical age in the Bohemian hotbed of 1990s Berlin with a close-knit... Read more... |
Album: JF Robitaille & Lail Arad - Wild MovesSaturday, 28 June 2025
Around eight years ago, London singer-songwriter Lail Arad started releasing one-off tracks with Canadian singer JF Robitaille, once of Montreal indie outfit The Social Register (Arad’s own 2016 album The Onion is an undiscovered diamond that should... Read more... |
PUP, SWG3, Glasgow review - controlled chaos from Canadian punksTuesday, 13 May 2025
According to PUP lead singer Stefan Babcock, the Toronto foursome practiced together a grand total of twice before embarking on their current UK and European tour.Given the band’s well-known habit for disagreements and teetering on the edge of... Read more... |
Album: Arcade Fire - Pink ElephantMonday, 05 May 2025
20 years on from their first appearance on record, the seventh long-player from Canadian indie-art-rock behemoths Arcade Fire comes off the back of four consecutive UK album chart-toppers.Also lurking in the background are the 2022 sexual misconduct... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: 1001 Est CrémazieSunday, 20 April 2025
It would have been hard to pick up a copy of the album credited to and titled 1001 Est Crémazie in 1975. Just 500 copies were pressed. It didn’t reach shops but was circulated amongst the musicians playing on it, their friends, families and fellow... Read more... |
Album: The Burning Hell - Ghost PalaceWednesday, 05 March 2025
Cultural references run up the flagpole on Ghost Palace include Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin’” buskers covering Lynryd Skynyrd and Ed Sheeran, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and The Ramones’ Leave Home album.Album opener “Celebrities in Cemeteries”... Read more... |
Classical CDs: Snow, shards and swinging oarsSaturday, 22 February 2025
Snow Dance for the Dead: Choral Music by Seán Doherty New Dublin Voices/Bernie Sherlock (Voces8 Recordings)I have come across the choral music of Seán Doherty more and more recently and always liked what I have heard. His music is imaginative... Read more... |
Light of Passage, Royal Ballet review - Crystal Pite’s cosmic triptych powers backFriday, 21 February 2025
“Cry sorrow, sorrow, but let the good prevail”. The refrain of Aeschylus’s chorus near the start of the Oresteia is alive and honoured in Henryk Górecki’s rhetoric-free symphonic memorial and Crystal Pite’s response to the dynamism under its... Read more... |
Album: Basia Bulat - Basia's PalaceWednesday, 19 February 2025
Canadian singer Basia Bulat has tried on various musical hats during her career but is most associated with singer-songwriterly folk-pop. Her last album was the melancholic, string-swathed The Garden but with Basia’s Palace, her seventh album, she... Read more... |
Album: Tim Hecker - ShardsMonday, 17 February 2025
The question of personality in abstract and ambient music has always been a fascinating one. Without conventional signifiers of expressiveness, and especially in the age of AI, it’s easy for people to think “a computer could have done that”. Indeed... Read more... |
Album: The Weeknd - Hurry Up TomorrowFriday, 31 January 2025
The Weeknd is a global megastar, one of the biggest music sensations of the age. Last year, his compilation, The Highlights, was the second best-selling album in the world, and he has 27 songs with over a billion streams on Spotify, which is a... Read more... |
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