Articles of Section 'Music Features'.

Music Features

Fucked Up designed to make you squirm

By Mike Usinger

The Toronto band is now on the mainstream radar, with its taboo lyrics concerning the deeds of Canada’s most notorious pig-farming serial killer and prog-punk epics.

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Music Features

Backstreet Boys back, for good

By Deena Cox

The best-selling boy band has dusted off the cobwebs and re-emerged as a fully fledged man band, bearing the battle scars of climbing the charts and then fending for themselves when suddenly no one gave a shit.

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Music Features

Outsider status is okay with Oxford Collapse

By Mike Usinger

Although it’s seldom name-checked by the New York hipster cognoscenti, the Williamsburg trio has nonetheless established itself as one of the city’s A-list outfits.

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Music Features

The New Pornographers' adult entertainer

By Adrian Mack

Vancouver native and New Pornos vocalist Carl Newman discusses the daring, grownup sound that characterizes the band's latest album, Challengers.

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Music Features

Man Man stays off the grass

By Mike Usinger

The 5-piece band isn’t exactly in danger of knocking the Killers, Metallica, or U2 out of rock ’n’ roll’s elite club, but it's slowly building a reputation as one of the most thrillingly anarchic acts currently operating in North America.

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Music Features

Estelle speaks her soul sister mind

By Sarah Rowland

The rising hip-hop star's new album boasts "American Boy", a catchy disco hit featuring Kanye West, as well as collaborations with the best of nu-R & B and neo soul.

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Music Features

Bodies of Water floats its heavenly hitting freak folk

By Mike Usinger

The group's sophomore album, the undeniably original A Certain Feeling, drags gospel music out of the churches and into the American indie-rock underground.

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Music Features

Walkmen slow their rocker Brooklyn selves to a waltz

By Gregory Adams

Singer Hamilton Leithauser discusses the gruelling, two-year creative process behind the band's fourth disc, You & Me. Rather than trying to re-create their high-octane, organ-driven hit "The Rat," they went with slower jams and softer sounds.

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Music Features

Anti-Flag shines light on hot-button social issues

By Deena Cox

The punk rockers' latest release, The Bright Lights of America, is a hodgepodge of steel-toed moshers, arena-ready scorchers, and unpunky pop diversions. Musical eccentricities aside, the band’s focus on political and social activism hasn’t changed.

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Music Features

Sound and Fury raises holy hell across Canada

By Steve Newton

“It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll.” Bon Scott said it first, but Luke Metcalf can definitely relate. The frontman for Toronto’s Sound and Fury has had to persevere through some tough times during his 27 years on Earth. He wasn’t the type of privileged kid whose high-school graduation gift was a sunburst Les Paul and a Marshall stack.

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Music Features

Howlin Rain’s sonic scientists revisit the roach-clip years

By Mike Usinger

Having been in the rock ’n’ roll game long enough that the novelty of touring has worn off, Howlin Rain frontman Ethan Miller knows where he’d rather be these days. If he’s given the choice of hitting the highways of North America or sweating the little stuff in a recording studio, the latter wins every time.

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Music Features

!!! claims funky, fresh spot on the dance-punk floor

By Jenny Charlesworth

Ask any musician what the most challenging part of being in a band is and chances are they’ll tell you that it’s finding a time to practice. Now just imagine how difficult it is when a group is based out of New York but two of its members live on the other side of the country. This is the reality for the energetic dance-punk band !!! .

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Music Features

Guitar hero Bonamassa in a blues-rock fusion mood

By Steve Newton

In their recent autobiographies, famed British rockers Ronnie Wood and Eric Clapton hazily recall how one of their main pastimes while on tour—apart from getting wasted and rattling groupies—was cruising pawnshops and secondhand stores for cool guitars. When blues-rock virtuoso Joe Bonamassa calls from a tour stop in Youngstown, Ohio, with a day off between gigs, I wonder if he’s gonna follow the guitar-hero route and do a little Strat shopping himself.

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Music Features

Staind trades sluggish sensitivity for chiming choruses and gospel choirs

By Adrian Mack

Staind vocalist Aaron Lewis seemed to be in a particularly bleak mood during an MTV interview back in 2006. “I think nobody cares anymore.…We’re not the hip flavour of the moment…we’re not what’s cool right now,” he moaned.

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Music Features

Whitechapel takes caffeine-powered trip to the boundaries of deathcore

By John Lucas

One of the best-known exponents of the genre has made a deliberate departure from the everything-louder-than-everything-else blueprint and mind-numbing blast beats of death metal.

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Music Features

Green-thinking Neil Halstead hits oil-stained highway

By Jenny Charlesworth

The gentle spirit who penned the delicate folk melodies on the recently released Oh! Mighty Engine is excited to be back on tour and well accustomed to nondescript rest stops along the way.

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Music Features

Into Eternity mines heavy music from family tragedy

By Lucas Aykroyd

The bleak theme of the Regina-based death-metal quintet's latest CD emerged from the huge personal losses to cancer of Tim Roth, its principal guitarist and songwriter.

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Music Features

Meet Vancouver's leaders of the Pack

By Sarah Rowland

Becky Black and Maya Miller look set to become the queens of the man-music jungle. The blues-punk duo's second album has a God-given swagger, proving that they can sweat, suffer, and strut with the best of them.

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Music Features

Roxy nightclub rocks Granville rebirth

By Charlie Smith

The bar celebrates its 20th birthday and the efforts of its owner, Blaine Culling, to transform what was once a rough neighbourhood into an entertainment district and the hub of Vancouver's nightlife scene.

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Music Features

The Faint take their time in search of perfection

By Gregory Adams

If the Faint took a long time to make Fasciinatiion, it’s because the band wanted to get every detail exactly right

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Music Features

Film School’s new disc gets its beats from My Bloody Valentine drummer

By John Lucas

It’s hard to remain casual when one of your idols is in the room. Now imagine said idol happens to be a member of one of your all-time favourite musical acts, and that he’s recording tracks for your album.

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Music Features

Grouper’s Liz Harris trades her Wurlitzer for a guitar and loops

By Gregory Adams

As much as it can also be a grind, going on tour is also a highlight for musicians. There’s something liberating about shucking responsibility for a couple of weeks to get on the road and play for a different audience every night. Portland solo artist Grouper, aka Liz Harris, however, just doesn’t get the appeal of driving for hours in a van from one club to the next. She’d rather stay at home.

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Music Features

Crooked Still serves up bluegrass with a twist

By Alexander Varty

Crooked Still bills itself as “an alternative bluegrass band”, but according to singer-guitarist Aoife O’Donovan, that’s not quite the whole story.

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Music Features

Pemberton organizer Shane Bourbonnais plenty pleased

By Adrian Mack

Despite glitches such as traffic problems, overflowing porta-potties, and disgruntled dance fans who couldn’t make it into the Bacardi B-Live tent, the man behind Pemberton Festival (which took place July 25 to 27) couldn’t be happier.

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Music Features

Pemberton's revival

By Charlie Smith

The biggest concert bash in B.C. history is helping to bring economic revival to the little town north of Whistler and let it reclaim some of its former glory.

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