Goddamnit, I love this! New Lanois project, appearing at this year's Montreal Jazz Festival but sounding so fresh, so beautiful. And who in the hell is Trixie Whitley?! She's wonderful. And I think 22?!

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The Canadian 2009 Juno Award winner for best electronic/house group was Deadmau5 (pronounced "deadmouse"), and I just have to give them a shout-out here because they've provided some very funky, bassy soundtracks to my workouts lately and I've been totally loving it. It's very techno, but heavy on the bass and several tracks have some really ( Read more... )

I've just heard about this NY-based producer and rapper named Theophilus London. He seems to be unsigned at the moment, just spreading the word by word of mouth. I just downloaded his mixtape last week and have been enjoying several of the tracks quite a bit ( Read more... )

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Dinuk Wijeratne is a local treasure in Halifax, and we're lucky to have him here. I've just recently made his acquaintance in the past year or so, and I've found that nearly everything he touches turns to gold. He's a wonderful pianist, composer, director, and producer; he does all kinds of fascinating and creative work in the musical arena and ( Read more... )

I just read that Drake won the 2010 Juno Award for Best Rap Recording of the Year and Best New Artist. And... I don't get it. I find his most recent album, like most of his stuff, to be nearly unlistenable. Shitty, boring beats; overly breathy, pretentious vocals; nothing much of any value artistically or musically at all. I don't follow hip-hop ( Read more... )

I just got tickets to the Simon and Garfunkel show in Halifax on the floor, 4th row, right in front of the stage! I was hammering the Ticket Atlantic site starting at 8:58, and that's what I got.

Woo-hoo!!!

This first is a music video of his tune, Hang Up Your Hang-Ups, which features fantastic film footage of New York City in the 70s:

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The next one is one of my favourite tracks from one of my favourite albums of his, 1978's Sunlight. This track is called I Thought It Was You, which deploys his use of the Vocoder, a synthesizer voice patch. From the ( Read more... )

I first heard of Son House when I watched the recent documentary, It Might Get Loud, an excellent film featuring interviews and archival footage of Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. Son House is Jack White's favourite musician ever, hands-down, period, and when you hear how beautiful this is, how much soul he has, it's not hard to understand ( Read more... )

Okay, I'm sorry, but WHAT the hell is all the hype about for this album? Has anybody here heard it? It has been hyped as Lil Wayne's best album and as one of 2009's greatest rap albums, but really, I think it's mostly crap. By my rating system, out of 25 tracks in total, I've got seven 3-star tracks (which means it's listenable, but not very good) ( Read more... )

For practice, I wrote a review of the Snoop Dogg concert I saw with my wife in Halifax the other night. I say "for practice" because one day soon I hope to be writing reviews or articles for the paper or the radio.

I put it on my own writing website here, but will copy the text into this blog as well, under the cut.
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