MUSIC PREVIEW: Tanya Tagaq to Perform New Music With ESO
Tanya Tagaq, the eminently lauded composer and throat singer, is in town this weekend performing a pair of shows with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. The featured work is her newest and epic effort Qiksaaktuq. Translated as “grief,” it is an emotion-laden and driven work paying testament to the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women. […]
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). […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Bedouin Soundclash reformed, renewed, returning to Edmonton
Next Tuesday the venerable Starlite Room hosts the almighty Bedouin Soundclash. This reggae-ska-pop band out of Kingston, Ontario, recently returned from a nine-year hiatus with a monstrous creation of an album, 2019’s Mass. It’s the fifth album in their catalog, and the return was anything but assured, with lead singer Jay Malinowski writing a novel […]
CONCERT REVIEW: Renewed Alexisonfire Rocks Edmonton
The pit was packed for Alexisonfire in Edmonton – but keep your hats to yourself! That was just one of the messages from this very accessible Canadian post-hardcore band, which played Rogers Place Wednesday night – just two months after its singer Dallas Green was in same building with City and Colour. While their initial […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Colditus Winterruption
The biggest gigs this weekend are all part of the inaugural Winterruption festival, which stretches from Thursday all the way through Sunday, with some pretty big names in some common, and some not so common, venues. Opening night – Thursday – sees Toronto’s Weaves (above) headline a monster lineup at the Starlite Room. The indie […]
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 […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Don’t hand me no lines and keep your hands to yourself!
Best known for Keep Your Hands To Yourself, the Georgia Satellites land in Edmonton Saturday night to play a gig at the River Cree Resort & Casino. Since that hit, off the band’s 1986 eponymous release, the band has seen three of its four members move on, with only Rick Richards remaining from the roster […]
