Motley Crue ‘not worthy’ to open for Alice Cooper
If Motley Crue truly plans to retire for good at the end of their 2014 tour, they sure went out with a flash-bang during their nearly two hour set Tuesday night at Rexall Place. The excess of your average ’80s hair metal show was exceeded with such ease – MORE dry ice, MORE pyrotechnics, MORE […]
Foo Fighters bring Sonic Highways to Edmonton
It has been said that the Foo Fighters are the ultimate cover band. They don’t cover songs. They don’t tribute specific bands. They cover entire decades! If this is a complaint (and it was, from the New York Times, no less), it’s a lame one because who wouldn’t want one’s formative decades brought to vivid […]
Colin James comes back to say hello in March
Colin James may be famous for the line where he just came back to say goodbye – but Canada’s blues-rock poster child has never said goodbye even once and he still keeps coming back at least once a year. This time it’s at the Winspear Centre on Monday, March 30, 2015, on tour to support […]
REVIEW: Fleetwood Mac plays to its strengths
For a band so relentlessly intent in telling us to forget yesterday – as in their 1977 hit Don’t Stop, Fleetwood Mac sure makes a lot of money keeping the past alive, as evidenced by the full house at Rexall Place Saturday night on their current “On With the Show” Tour. In the years before […]
Street camera gang fights the good fight
“We are out there to fight crime,” says Hugh Lee, co-founder of Hobos With Nikons, a group of Edmonton photography enthusiasts some may mistake for a homeless camera club. “That crime, of course, being people taking bad photographs.” Lee, a Edmonton apartment building manager, talks about the time he gave unsolicited tips to tourists in […]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Resurrection Weekend
The smalls promised they’d never ever tour again, goodbye forever even when hell freezes over and maybe not even then, but is anyone really mad that they lied … er, changed their minds? Musician’s prerogative. Hey, we’re glad they’re back. The resurrection of one of Edmonton’s favourite alternative rock bands of the 1990s is of […]
Sam Roberts on the Cult of Montreal
Montreal has become such a fount for all that is cool in Canadian rock that it’s hard to imagine it ever wasn’t. Westerners imagine this ancient, exotic city teeming with culture and sophistication, a place where Leonard Cohen hang outs at the bilingual open-mic poetry night, and where every original band that draws more than […]
DARKROOM: The eight lives of Jim Gray
In the pantheon of rock musicians who by normal logic of consequences shouldn’t even be alive is Jim Gray. Call him the Keith Richards of Edmonton. Still alive. Still playing music. Didn’t see that coming, did ya? Gray himself is the source of most of the dark jokes about the unlikelihood of his continued existence, […]
Remember who gave us freedom to be artists
In Flanders Fields The Poppies blow Between the Crosses, Row on Row In 1933, one of the first political moves Adolf Hitler took to solidify his control over the population of Germany was to control the media. He nationalized newspapers so that he could sow propaganda , then begin a pogrom against the Jewish community, […]
EDMONTON RADIO: Clayton in the driver’s seat
Clayton Bellamy says he feels weird when he hears his own song on the radio – especially when he’s the DJ on the air at the time. Who would’ve guessed it would turn out to be CISN Country that takes one of the biggest risks in Edmonton radio history? They’ve put a recording artist with […]
