The last time I found myself at the Cabaret du Mile End, I was watching a devoted-but-small crowd politely enjoy Jolie Holland, and wondered if it was a place the talented go to not get enough appreciation. Not so; a sizeable crowd had turned up for the first-ever Montreal performance by Wild Beasts, a UK quartet (with the occasional extra percussive...
If you're ever bored, try to find somewhere on the Internet where conventional hip-hop heads try to make sense of the semi-mysterious Sacramento act Death Grips (might I suggest this?). Despite the confusion and occasional antipathy, their Exmilitary mixtape has garnered them a solid following among the sonically adventurous, thanks in no small part to their Bomb Squad-on-mescaline approach (complete with classic punk references and...
In the music world, consistency's a bitch. Sure, it helps you build a solid fan base and stack up a repertoire of tunes, but no one wants to write about how your ninth album is just as solid as the eight that preceded it. Such is the curse of many career singer-songwriters, including Jolie Holland, formerly of the Be Good Tanyas, who released her fifth solo album Pint of Blood just last week to unanimously polite reviews.
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The cool kids get all the credit. Soundtracks for the Blind, Swans' "final" record from 1994, seemed to create a new sonic universe just in time for the band to implode - over two hours, it employed 15-minute epics (particularly "Helpless Child," a song that may or may not have helped invent vocal post-rock), ambient pieces, and experimental works often driven by distressing bits of found sound. It changed the listening habits of many who heard it, yours truly included, but the band are often thought of as simply 1980s goth industrialists. Yes, their work...
