EDMONTON CONCERT PREVIEW
The city’s 2020 major concert schedule was looking a little sad for a while there – a desert punctuated by an April oasis, with Alice Cooper at the Jube on April 15, (he just gets better with age), James Taylor with Bonnie Raitt (April 17), a Celine Dion double-header (April 21-22), and then nothing. After […]
LISTEN HERE: Rocking On Mental Health
Lazy bum, good-for-nothing, failure, lacks motivation, can’t even be bothered to get out of bed … these are just some of the invalidations hurled at grown men struggling with mental health. Most come from themselves. It’s quite the pickle. Men are supposed to be strong, it may be hard-wired, and some have trouble getting in […]
Rage Against the Machine is ENTITLED – to Charge a Lot for Concert Tickets
There’s been a lot of raging against Rage Against the Machine lately because tickets to their May 3 show at Rogers Place are so expensive. The cheapest seats were $170. Note tense. They’re all gone now. The nerve! Now quit complaining because it’s as simple as this: You stole their music from the Internet – […]
LISTEN HERE: Derina Harvey Pining for the Fjords
Do they even have fjords in Labrador? No matter. This rugged, wild, unspoiled slab of Canadian shield is topped by amazing Northern Lights in the winter, according to Derina Harvey, who was born and raised in Wabush, Labrador, pop. 1,906. She hasn’t been back there since the moving to Edmonton 18 years ago, to forge […]
LISTEN HERE: The Confusionaires Put Bourbon Into Friend Zone
On first rush, The Confusionaires’ new song Sour Mash comes off like a celebration of whiskey. Man, these rockabilly guys sure like to drink. But no, there’s a twist (of lime): The whole song turns out to be an anthem for moderation, using “Sour Mash” – a type of bourbon perhaps best known in the […]
Mile Zero Dance Goes Punk in SNFU Tribute Show
To mash together punk rock with modern dance seems like an insane idea. You know how punks “dance” – they mosh, crowd surf, stage dive, slam together, elbows akimbo, mohawks flailing, running madly in a circle (always counter-clockwise. Why? Short answer: The right foot goes a little further. Long answer in this highly scientific study). […]
LISTEN HERE: Is it worth feeling sad and sorry all the time? Yikes!
“I care a lot more about the song than I do about her.” Whoa, man. That’s a dark burn from Edmonton songwriter Scott Deshane, frontman of a band called Yikes. He’s talking about his melancholy new song Tighter – about a personal and once-painful break-up. He says he wrote song several years ago with his […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Alexisonfire, not broken up after all, returns to Edmonton
There are few things that can boost a band’s popularity more than breaking up. You do the tearful farewell tour, a lot of your fans show up to see you off, you make some retirement money, and everyone’s happy. Yet still a bit sad – until of course said band gets back together again. Behold […]
LISTEN HERE: Nebular Wave wipes out the dinosaurs
The trick with creating instrumental music is how to name it. Composers of yore didn’t sweat it. Beethoven got to No. 5 and named it his Fifth. Boom. Done. Ever since, instrumental nomenclature has been a struggle. Like bands themselves, music without lyrics resists being named. For the guys in the Edmonton experimental acoustic-electronic trio […]
NYE LIVE MUSIC PREVIEW: Which whine pairs well with giddy desperation?
Working musicians look forward to New Year’s Eve as the best payday of the year – yet the gig is fraught with annoyances. First, you’re playing second fiddle to the event itself; you’re expected to play Auld Lang Syne at midnight; and everything after is a drunken depressing anticlimax. Audience members can be distracted, giddy, […]
ESO to use FORCE in Music of Star Wars
It can be argued that John Williams’ brilliant scores for the Star Wars movies will one day be remembered as widely as Beethoven’s Fifth, The Magic Flute, or even Adagio in G Minor – if they aren’t already. There is a great disturbance in the Force over the impending concerts by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, […]
Trevor Noah to bring TRUTH to Edmonton
Trevor Noah is one of these rarefied figures in show business who always tries to tell you the truth. Weird, isn’t it? We’re constantly being lied to: by politicians, advertising, the media, our teenagers – and so it falls to the damned comedians we have to trust to be honest. In fact, the latest host […]
