Throughout the pandemic I’ve noticed an uptick in long-distance musical collaborations, and the new self-titled debut from dyed-in-the-wool indie rockers Central Heat Exchange (Sunroom/Citrus City/Birthday Cake) is among the best. Chicago provides an anchor for the four-piece group, since more of the members live here than anywhere else: brothers Jake and Paul Stolz of local […]
Tag: Canada
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Heavy experimentalists Nadja turn from shoegazing to stargazing on Luminious Rot
Experimental drone and postmetal outfit Nadja got their start in 2003 as the solo studio project of ambient musician Aidan Baker, but by 2005 he’d enlisted the help of bassist and vocalist Leah Buckareff to bring his music to the stage. They’re a married couple as well as bandmates, and they’ve since relocated from their […]
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Quebec trio Big|Brave get heavier than ever on Vital
Quebec trio Big|Brave have always been great at drawing things out. Most of their songs pass the ten-minute mark, and they’ve made a hallmark of deftly adding heady layers of emotion to minimal, glacial drone rock. On the brand-new Vital (Southern Lord), though, the band lean further into doom metal—and this dramatically less minimal sound […]
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Leanne Betasamosake Simpson fuels resistance with poetry and song on Theory of Ice
In 1876, the Canadian parliament passed the Indian Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that still dictates how the government interacts with the First Nations bands indigenous to the country and legally defines Indian status and band membership. Though heavily amended over the years, the Indian Act initially included policies that disenfranchised Indigenous women who […]
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Yves Jarvis creates gently disintegrating folk music
Songs don’t so much rise out of Yves Jarvis’s Sundry Rock Song Stock (Anti-) as they swim around, fray, and dissolve. In that sense, the most characteristic track on the Canadian producer and multi-instrumentalist’s new album, the woozily liquid “Ambrosia,” is one of the oddest. Anxiously percolating keyboard and an echoing, violinlike noise wander past […]
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Vile Creature embrace resistance and power amid despair on Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm!
The new third full-length from Canadian doom duo Vile Creature, Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm!, is everything I hoped it would be. The queer vegan band, formed in 2014, draw their fierce, efficient, and elegant rage from their experiences of oppression and resistance, and they use it to build strong support structures for their bursts […]
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Lido Pimienta’s Miss Colombia is a luminous anthem to resilience
Contemporary music informed by cultural traditions that have withstood the test of centuries uplifts my spirits like nothing else; in these times, it seems to hold a magic that can help us all withstand adversity. Lido Pimienta’s new third album, Miss Colombia, is the highly anticipated follow-up to her Polaris Prize–winning La Papessa. The Barranquilla-born, […]
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U.S. Girls shares some welcome sunshine in dark times on Heavy Light
Well, look at that. The world is ending. Suddenly we’re all cooped up, we can’t see friends or loved ones, we can’t go out for pizza, and we can’t grab a beer at the bar. I don’t know about you, but even if people weren’t suffering and dying from coronavirus, I’d be starting to feel […]
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Caribou makes intimate dance music that’s irresistibly personal
Update: To help slow the spread of COVID-19, this show has been postponed until further notice. Ticket holders should contact point of purchase for refund or exchange information. Canadian artist Dan Snaith, who performs as Caribou, crafts mesmerizing explorations of dance music that are alluring, catchy, and intimate. He distills various strains of house music […]
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Canadian producer Jacques Greene celebrates the complexities of dance on Dawn Chorus
Canadian dance producer Jacques Greene (born Philippe Aubin-Dionne) broke out in the early 2010s by twisting R&B vocals into stuttering, waterlogged samples that brought complex shades of sadness to energetic club tracks. He’s since relied less on a sample-based approach, which has opened him up stylistically and helped him arrive at the free-flowing aesthetic of […]
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Down a cofounder, fearless fusion quartet BadBadNotGood close 2019 in Chicago with lineup 2.0
Over the past decade, Toronto instrumental quartet BadBadNotGood have evolved into convincing musical chameleons. Shifting through postbop, funk, rock, jazz fusion, and soulful hip-hop, the four-piece group employ a timbral palette as diverse as their influences, accenting their retro jazz-rock setup with keys, synths, a digital sampler, and a bevy of guest vocalists. Similar to […]
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Songwriter Cat Clyde journeys beyond the blues on Hunter’s Trance
Stratford, Ontario, is famous for its long-running annual theater festival, which leans heavily on productions of Shakespeare. Singer-songwriter Cat Clyde has spent most of her life in and around Stratford, but you’d be hard-pressed to call her rootsy music theatrical, despite her poet’s knack for enveloping listeners in her stories—her primary influences belong on the […]
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Christine Fellows illuminates the liminal on Roses on the Vine
It’d be a mistake to call Christine Fellows’s two previous albums “concept albums,” but each has a singular point of inspiration: Femmes de Chez Nous (2011) was born out of the Canadian singer-songwriter and poet’s research into the history of women in Winnipeg (conducted during her residency at Le Musée de Saint-Boniface, a Franco-Manitoban culture […]
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Tegan and Sara mine the past for Hey, I’m Just Like You
The last time Canadian twin-sister duo Tegan and Sara came through Chicago, they were on the road celebrating the tenth anniversary of 2007’s The Con. At the time, it seemed like a fairly standard move—lately it seems like practically every long-running band has dusted off a fan-favorite album for a special show or tour. But […]
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Masked country crooner Orville Peck channels Wild West fantasy—and something deeper
The first thing to know about Orville Peck is that the Canadian country-pop crooner always wears a mask. Its top half is made of leather, and from the bottom hangs a row of long fringe, which he sometimes braids to each side to reveal his scruffy chin—his memorable look is something like a cross between […]