The Vancouver music-scene veterans best known for poking fun at randiness and whimsically wondering if you’d eat their brains is now taking lyrical cues from actual murders and suicide attempts.

The East Vancouver girl group's sombre debut CD explores the immigrant experience, gender politics, family, friendship, and sisterhood. Singer and pianist Marta Jaciubek-McKeever shares the story behind their music.

The local roots veteran hasn’t lost his passion for the guitar-based music that caught his ear in Grade 10, and is now focusing on laid-back folk-pop and country-roots stylings.

Outlaw Social was conceived one evening four years ago at the Lucky Bar in Victoria, when Oliver Swain was made an offer he couldn’t refuse by a pair of young women with good times on their minds.

In Canadian Tuxedo, the Vancouver-based band draws upon the musical ingenuity of past decades to formulate enchanting upbeat melodies of their own.

For someone who named his band after a Jerzy Kosi?ski book and penned a song called “East of Eden”, inspired by the John Steinbeck novel of the same title, Dominique Fricot has a surprising admission. “I wouldn’t call myself a big reader,” the Painted Birds singer-guitarist-keyboardist says, reached in Toronto in the middle of a cross-Canada tour.

Turning heartbreak into art is standard operating procedure for songwriters. But when it comes to specifics, a lot of lyricists just don’t want to discuss it. “It’s all there in the music,” they’ll say, or, more bluntly, “That’s none of your business.”

“We’re still a bunch of guys who can’t hold steady jobs and who fucking play rock ’n’ roll," says Jolt's Joey Blitzkrieg. "That’s what punk was, right?”

It appears that Mormon season has begun. Outside Falconetti’s East Side Grill on Commercial Drive, pizza-faced missionaries barely out of high school slouch by in the cold rain, followed a few minutes later by more of their brethren. Inside, Swank vocalist Spencer McKinnon and guitarist Doug Liddle have joined the Straight to talk about their own inimitable take on American-fried religious dementia, as laid out on the band’s newest album, Campfire Psalms.

Don’t mistake the sentiment behind “There’s Good People in the City”, the title track of Hawaiian Bibles’ debut, for irony or sarcasm. The drum-and-bass rock duo means just what the title implies.

The indie-rock scene in Vancouver can sometimes seem like an insular little world, constantly cannibalizing its bands to make new ones. Lord Beginner is a classic example of this. Though you might not have heard of it (the group has played just three official shows), you’ve almost certainly heard of some other projects the band’s members have been involved in.

The band has had more drummers than Spinal Tap, but Santa Fe Stalker suggests it was all worth it

One style was born under the karst crags of the Yangtze River valley, the other in the shadow of the Appalachian Mountains in the southern United States. Superficially, few sounds are more dissimilar than Chinese music and American bluegrass, but two bands of bold adventurers have just set out to prove that they can, in fact, coexist.

When it came time to write her debut album, Adaline decided to get away from it all. So she went on a cruise. By herself. “With couples, and old people,” says the singer over a glass of Pinot Noir on Commercial Drive. “It was kind of…” And here she lets loose with a big, self-deprecating laugh. “Well, it was depressing at first.

Those who remember Sons of Freedom—the Vancouver postpunk band of the 1980s and early 1990s, not the lumpy, nude Doukhobor protesters of the Wacky Bennett era—probably retain a clear mental image of singer Jim Newton.