March 10, 2009

Photographer and Toronto resident JESS BAUMUNG takes us behind the scenes of PROTEST THE HERO‘s video for "Spoils" off their 2008 full-length, Fortress. "I was asked if I could take photos behind the scenes on the shoot by the video producer, Geoff McLean. Filming took place on Sunday, February 22 and was mostly...

Saint Alvia Between The Lines [3.5/5] Burlington, Ontario’s Saint Alvia were going by the easier-to-misspell “the Saint Alvia Cartel” when they started turning heads with some MySpace demos two years ago. One well-received self-titled debut later, the band are back with the ambitious Between The Lines, an unabashed homage to old-school hip-hop, ’50s doo-wop and...

Rudimentary Peni No More Pain EP [3.5/5] More than 25 years have passed since outsider artist/anarcho frontman Nick Blinko first declared war on music with his crusty goth-punk trio, Rudimentary Peni. No More Pain, the band’s latest EP, finds the band’s original snarl and buzz well intact (see 1995’s Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric for a...

Olehole Holemole [4/5] Journeyman Brian Moss (the Wunder Years, Hanalei), along with members of various acts (Burial Year, Takaru), resurrects the jagged post-hardcore of his short-lived Chicago-via-Oakland act the Ghost, in Olehole. The sure debt owed to Fugazi’s more aggressive shades matters little when the absolutely fierce, dynamic holler of Holemole’s opening salvo “Gatekeeper” and...

Jackson United Harmony And Dissidence [2/5] Before he was Dave Grohl’s right-hand guitarist in Foo Fighters, Chris Shiflett played lead for skate-punk lifers No Use For A Name so it’s no surprise that his side project, Jackson United, offer up arena-sized hooks alongside roaring attitude. But given Shiflett’s penchant for letting others have the spotlight,...

Tom Gabel Heart Burns EP [3/5] The bearded, deodorant-free corners of the internet rejoiced in September when Against Me! frontman Tom Gabel revealed via his blog that he recorded an EP’s worth of solo tracks. Given that AM! started as Gabel and an acoustic guitar, hopes were high these seven songs would recall the band’s...

Dead To Me Little Brother EP [4/5] Dead To Me’s 2006 debut, Cuban Ballerina, was just deviant enough to satisfy longtime fans of vocalist/guitarist Jack Dalrymple’s work with seminal ’90s punks One Man Army. This makes Little Brother, a too-short collection of five near-perfect rock ’n’ roll songs, the ideal follow-up. It further distances Dalrymple...

Totally Michael Totally Michael [1.5/5] Totally Michael melds electronic sequences with pop-punk sensibilities a la Atom And His Package. But unlike Atom (and contemporaries like Japanther and Math The Band), Totally Michael lacks the cleverness and variety that make this kind of music enjoyable on disc. The songs and production rarely vary in structure, piling...

The Streets everything is borrowed [4/5] The last time we heard from Mike Skinner, the English MC known as the Streets, he was moaning about fame on 2006’s The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living. In contrast, everything is borrowed is full of Zen-like positivity. This is Skinner’s big-issue record: Forget praising greasy junk...