Artists In Residence

It’s loud, obnoxious and a disease to some people’s ears, but it’s also artistic, melodic and highly structured. I asked Chloe Lum to explain her attraction to noise rock; about being the ultimate teenage fangirl and about AIDS Wolf‘s latest decision to tour their new album and not play a single song from it. 

In most major cities across the world there’s a small community of noise rock enthusiasts, exploring the avant-garde, rebellious, boundless extremes of performance art. Even in a city the size of Montreal the scene is still very niche, but like all good communities everyone supports, respects and applauds each other’s artistic differences. Now seven years old, AIDS Wolf are among the older, wiser and well travelled members of the Montreal noise scene, and their involvement with an emerging younger group of musicians is helping to keep them inspired.

“Most of the people who are playing music in Montreal who are around our age are doing more pop orientated stuff, or like, post-Godspeed kind of things. We tend to hang out with the younger kids who are more scrappy, noisy and loud.”

For Chloe the formula is simple, it’s not about resisting adulthood or trying to maintain some rebellious teenage sensitivity, simply put, she describes AIDS Wolf’s music as “the kind of music that I’ve been listening to for over half my life now… for the three of us it’s the genre of music that we like.” Her partner Yannick Desranleau is also in the band, playing drums, and like Chloe is an avid noise rock fan. “Yannick and I are usually listening to noise rock all day long. We drive around in our van listening to Harry Pussy and US Maple.”

“we’re all kind of misanthropes and we don’t really like most people”

As well as being in a band, Chloe and Yannick also work together, under the name Seripop. For the past few months they have been artists in residence in a small town north-east of Montreal called Baie-St-Paul, which she says quite seriously “smells like shit. Like literal shit.” While the town may have been quite isolating, it did have some benefits, one being the sale of art to wealthy foreigners. “There’s kind of a constant stream of tourists coming through and we bought a big display of all our posters and for some reason all these grandmas are buying our fucked up posters.”

The venue for the residency happened to be at an old hockey rink and their band mate/guitarist Alex Moskos joined them towards the end of their time there to rehearse and prepare for their current North American tour. “We’re going to be rehearsing in the hockey rink after hours, it’s going to be really weird.”

The tour is in support of their latest album March To The Sea, but an unusual twist is going to greet fans because AIDS Wolf will not be playing any songs from the album live. “Most people would probably consider that as some kind of career suicide,” laughs Chloe, but there’s a very good reason. March To The Sea was recorded when AIDS Wolf was a four-piece band, right before guitarist Miles Broscoe moved to England. The three remaining members chose not to replace him, Chloe’s reasoning being that “we’re all kind of misanthropes and we don’t really like most people.” “It just seemed like a more practical solution to spend a year in a practice space writing a new set. It meant changing a lot of equipment and adding analogue synths on to my voice and on to the guitar, and basically building our own PA. It was kind of like a science experiment in sound that took several months to figure out how we wanted it to work. We test drove it for a few gigs in February… then we rebuilt it some more, reworked out our rig so that we would be totally brutalising everyone on tour.”

So if you’re a fan expecting to see some of AIDS Wolf’s newest record played live you’ll be disappointed. However Chloe’s hoping that fans will understand the band’s reasoning. “We’re kind of hoping that people who are into our band are going to be adventurous enough to come along with us and hear the new shit and hopefully be into it. Our audience base is so small that a lot of our friends who are in more popular bands think that we’re totally insane to take this risk to alienate everybody, but you know, we just didn’t want to be playing our material half-way, that was really really important to us. We didn’t want to compromise on how it was written and recorded and then play what could potentially be a shittier version live.”

“Contrary to what people who may be a little bit less initiated with noise rock may think, we actually really do care about how our music sounds. Performing songs is like presenting a body of work artistically and it just feels wrong doing it without all the elements there. Getting another guitarist just was not an option.”

 ”he totally remembered me being this dorky teenager mailing him fanzines and homemade comics”

Turning a page back to the recording of March To The Sea, it now seems like a different chapter in the life of AIDS Wolf, and one that was particularly frustrating to conclude. On hearing the first single from the album, ‘Teaching To Suffer’, many fans and critics noted a difference in production, referring to the new album as having a much cleaner, more defined sound. The production of the record is something that has also bugged Chloe, only now is she “starting to feel happy with it.” March To The Sea was recorded with a different engineer who had never worked with the band before, and to some degree Chloe feels his lack of knowledge regarding AIDS Wolf’s music had an effect on the end result.

“We recorded in Montreal at The Pines with this guy Dave Bryant, who is most well known for being the guitarist in the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor, who are not exactly a super gnarly sounding band. It was a cool experience but we were doing everything analogue so we couldn’t put stuff into the red the way we usually do. Like when we did Cities of Glass we were just fucking jamming stuff as loud as it could go, and like, really relying on a lot of feedback to add this intense crunchy sound. At first I was like, it doesn’t sound heavy enough, but now I’m kind of getting into a bit more of the subtleties. There’s definitely a different production style, we worked with someone who had never even heard our band before we went into the studio.”

Since 2005 AIDS Wolf has been working closely with Skin Graft Records, a label who has long been an influence on Chloe’s own musical tastes. As a teenager she was the ultimate label fangirl, and consequently when label owner Mark Fischer offered to release one of AIDS Wolf’s early demos she thought her friends were playing a prank on her. “It’s funny because when I was sixteen/seventeen years old and bands like US Maple and Lake of Dracula were kind of coming out I would send fan letters to the label, and then when Mark contacted me, like thirteen or fourteen years later he totally remembered me being this dorky teenager mailing him fanzines and homemade comics. I would end up getting all these free posters and shit from Skin Graft because I was such an obsessive mail order fan. So when he initially contacted us about distributing our demo and putting out our album I thought it was one of my friends playing a prank on me, I didn’t think it was real, because why would they care about us.”

And it seems now like the influence has gone full-circle. A number of bands that Chloe has become personal friends with have ended up on the label. “It was a label that had such a big influence on the music that I was into and ended up playing. Since then we’ve turned Skin Graft onto bands we’re friends with like PRE and Gay Beast.” In 2007 AIDS Wolf and PRE released a split 7″ via Skin Graft, but it’s somewhat clouded in legal rhetoric making it a bit of a mysterious release. The 7″ is a live recording of a show the two bands played together in Brighton, England, that was supposedly bootlegged by a Russian man named Kostya Drobik and distributed under the name SINRAFT Records. Chloe declined to comment on the release saying only “our lawyers have told me I’m not allowed to talk about that until the issue is settled.” She did however talk about the show and the naked photos shot for the cover of the 7″.

“We were on the last show of our UK tour, I think we were in Brighton. It was the worst show ever, there was no one there, it fucking sucked, the promoter didn’t pay us, it was just a total shit situation. So basically we were like, well, everything sucks here so lets just party amongst ourselves and have a good time, even though there’s like ten people in the room. It kind of degenerated into people taking their shirts off and there being a sing-a-long to, I think ‘Free Bird’. It was basically just us and PRE having some fun on our last night together on tour and trying to bring some wackiness into a pretty lame gig.”

March To The Sea is officially released today on Skin Graft Records. Click here to purchase the new album on either coloured vinyl or CD.

AIDS Wolf- Teaching To Suffer: MP3

AIDS Wolf- Myspace

Posted by Nick Fulton under Canada, Montreal
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Inner Blizzard

Women is a band whose sound is rooted in precision, but it’s their experimental focus that gives them their edge. The lead single off their sophomore album Public Strain, ‘Eyesore’, is a multi-part pop opus that sticks in your head long after you’ve heard it. Driving through sparkling stark riffs into foggier dusky territory, Pat Flegel’s scratchy voice and jangly guitar settle in with his brother Matt Flegel’s bass, Chris Reimer’s guitar and Michael Wallace‘s drums so cohesively yet all parts manage to sound diverse and tremblingly talented. Truly the most striking song they’ve produced yet, it is quite surprising in its lush fullness compared to the simpler, noisier jams and the rustling field recordings they pepper their albums with. It’s more focused and song-like, akin to the plodding pace of acclaimed ‘Black Rice’ from their debut, but much more adventurous. Circular riffs binding around each other have become their trademark, along with an aggressively experimental tendency. But in talking to Pat I find a lot of their sound comes from restraint.

“Usually while we’re writing… you don’t have anything in mind, you just kind of do it and then you judge it after, figure out what you like about it, what you’d like to change.” He says their intentions are to engage and challenge both the listener and themselves. “You don’t need everyone to be walking all over the song.” Often there’s an emphasis on a certain instrument or the sound or production of a track.

“It’s a combination of this very haphazard approach and then also this very meticulous approach.”

Women are known for only recording to tape, using eight-track recorders or ghetto blasters with the help of engineer/ Flemish Eye label mate/ musician Chad VanGaalen. “Even just being around Chad in the first place puts a kind of pressure on you in a way, like a good pressure. He’s just so productive, prolific, in every department. You’ll come over to his house and you haven’t seen him for a couple of weeks and there’ll be like two hours of post-apocalyptic future synth stacks with beats, he’s got like this huge poly synth set up. And then he’ll have some kind of psychedelic animations on. So yeah it’s just nice to be around someone like that, and like I said you’ll be like ‘Ok, well what am I doing?’ – It makes you just wanna make things.”

The band recorded both albums with Chad at his home. While their 2008 released debut self-titled album hones in on a ’60s nostalgia in aesthetic, it frequently veered off into more psychedelic territory. Public Strain, their follow up released at the end of this month, takes this style and applies a poppier strain. While old songs like ‘Black Rice’ and ‘Shaking Hand’ definitely encompass that jittery pop, songs like ‘Narrow With The Hall’ and ‘Eyesore’ grasp that old pop style and run with it, through a thick of distortion. In essence the two albums are mostly alike, but you get the feeling they were trying to push themselves further this time with Chad. “The last one we recorded in his basement, and then he actually moved into a bigger house, very close to his old house. And he’s got a two-storey garage set up. Upstairs there’s sort of like a sauna in there and then downstairs it’s just this giant concrete room. And then there’s another smaller room that we did some of the vocals in and stuff.”

With Public Strain they seem to have focused their vision more on producing skew pop songs with a psychedelic mask. When asked if Chad was as prolific with ideas with Women as he seems to be with his own material, Pat says, “I feel like he goes crazier with our stuff. We usually push things in a certain direction and he’s up for anything. He’s extremely patient, he’s very open minded… it’s pretty rare that he puts his foot down in any department if we have an idea. It’s very rare that he’ll say ‘No!’, it’ll always be like ‘Oh, so you guys wanna sound like shit?’, and we’ll be like ‘Yeah!’” Pat laughs. “And then we’ll proceed to do something silly. But yeah, he’s great. Sometimes he’ll just do things in the background while we’re recording solo pieces, some subliminal buzz or humming or drumming or clapping or drumming. So yeah he’s very much involved. Enthusiastic.”

The rather haphazard approach they’ve taken to recording their meticulously crafted songs is vital to the end result of the sound. There’s an edginess to it, perhaps coming from their love of ’80s post punk but also from the feeling that things may not go according to plan. “I feel like for the most part we’re considering with the recording looking at that as an art form and working within these restrictions and the eight track… And just trying to get certain sounds, I think that’s something we’re most concerned with.”

Recording Public Strain was a very “serious” process that “took forever”. “We all live slow, and we have no idea what we’re doing most of the time, so, yeah, things moved along very slowly. And we’d get together a day here and a day there and then not see each other for a week, and then we’d get together and rehearse a song that maybe I had a sketch for and no one had heard… It’s weird, I think it took about eight months but I feel like it sounds like it was recorded in a week, like it sounds very off the cuff almost.” And they retained that mood while not practising every night or being particularly close; “Everyone is living their lives, trying to pay their rent and just going about their business.”

They attain their skewed sound largely from Pat’s two guitars, “one in standard tuning and one that’s all C#, like every string”, and the fact that Matt uses “12 or 14 pedals; all these things to make his guitar not sound like a guitar,” laughs Pat. “That’s where a lot of the drone comes from. We’re also getting some customised instruments from our friend. And then we’re trying to manipulate things with effects on the vocals and on the drums and stuff.”

“When I was in my teens I got really into Minor Threat and Converge and Slayer, so I started playing these really fast, complicated songs.”

They have little confidence in their live show, despite being together three years and being on a large tour of Europe right now, with Canada and America later in the month. “I think when we toured on the first album we didn’t really worry about that too much. We just wanted to play as a rock band, but things are getting a little more complicated.” Their strength lies not in their confident prowess on stage, although they are trying to “make it better and more engaging and more fun”. It seems their strength is in their abilities as musicians and songwriters first and foremost, and Pat was trained from an early age.

“My dad actually cut the cable, he said to save some money, and then he signed me up for guitar lessons and said if I played for a year he would get me a nice guitar. This was in 1995, so I was 10. So I played for a year and didn’t watch so much TV, and then he got me a guitar. And actually I still play the same guitar, it’s incredibly old, I love it. So that was pretty cool of him. And he played guitar as well, he was obsessed with this French guitar player, his name is Django Reinhardt. He’s just a ridiculous guitar player and my dad was completely obsessed with him to the point where you’d want to slap him and hide the CDs ’cause it’d just be on all the time. So he took me to this jazz festival and then he found these books on how to play that way and it transcribes some of the songs. I can’t read music, I’m really bad at reading tablature actually, but I took lessons until I could figure songs out myself. I’d be figuring out radio grunge songs. Then eventually I moved onto what I guess they call ‘gypsy jazz’, which I think is actually a racial slur in some places! But anyways, that’s what the book was called,” he laughs. “And that is pretty demanding technically, so I got into that, and then when I was in my teens I got really into Minor Threat and Converge and Slayer, so I started playing these really fast, complicated songs.”

“Tonal quality” and “simple songs” are cited by Pat as positive influences. “Just the simplicity of things is really appealing to me, and this raw kind of thing, more about the vibe. Like a band like The Fire Engines who can’t even play their instruments I enjoy.” They’re not trying to “maintain some sort of ‘lo-fi’ aesthetic”, Pat argues in response to the press, “as if they know what they’re talking about. But yeah we just want it to sound good, records that sound good to us for the most part were recorded in the late ‘70s and that was all done in professional studios, most of it. I mean you listen to Pink Flag, it sounds amazing! It’s a crystal clear, huge, beautiful recording. But we just like the way they produced everything, like the drums, the guitars, they just sound amazing. Entertainment, that Gang of Four album, is just crystal clear production. Those are some of the bands that spur us on sometimes. So yeah, I don’t feel like we’re shooting for some blown out, trashy recording, we just want it to sound good, whatever that means to us.”

Women are currently on tour in Europe, then Canada and the United States, including dates with DD/MM/YYYY and Manchild. Check their myspace for details.

Public Strain is out September 28 on Flemish Eye/Jagjaguwar,
pre-order vinyl/CD now here.

Women- Eyesore: MP3

Women- Narrow With The Hall: MP3

Women- Myspace

Posted by Sarah Gooding under Calgary, Canada
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Let’s Get Cold Together

Dreamy duo Memoryhouse from Ontario, Canada creates fairytales with Denise Nouvion’s pristine vocals and Evan Abeele’s ethereal instrumentation. The swirling atmospherics envelope splicing drums and foggy guitar. ‘To The Lighthouse’ is immeasurably beautiful, with perfectly formed instrumentation and haunting lyrics with a sleepy haze drawn over top. Denise’s voice is gentle but strong, sometimes wordless but always with the same forthright crooning ability of Beach House‘s Victoria Legrand or Glasser‘s Cameron Mesirow. She keeps her dulcet voice near while retaining a weightless presence over Evan’s guitar and soundscapes. Memoryhouse’s songs sound very structural and rhythmic but the melodies are definitely forefront. ‘Lately (Deuxième)’ is a strikingly beautiful, delicate artefact from a gentler time, and ‘Bonfire’ shows the band’s dynamism as they enter starker territory.  The strength of the songs is further shown in their ability to be transformed into rad club bangers, with MillionYoung’s version of ‘To The Lighthouse’ sounding like a lesson in remixes. They also do a dazzlingly beautiful cover of Grizzly Bear‘s ‘Foreground’. Currently on their Everyone Hears The Voice tour of America with Twin Sister, they’ve made their EP The Years available for free download from their myspace. The first pressing of the ‘Lately’ 7″ (backed with a Teen Girl Fantasy remix) sold out but another is available for purchase from Inflated Records.

Memoryhouse- To The Lighthouse: MP3

Memoryhouse- Bonfire: MP3

Memoryhouse- Lately (Deuxième): MP3

Memoryhouse- To The Lighthouse (Millionyoung remix): MP3

Memoryhouse- Website

Memoryhouse- Blog

Memoryhouse- Myspace

Posted by Sarah Gooding under Canada, Ontario
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Vegan Toothache

Like the sound of a dental drill chipping teeth and bleeding gums; AIDS WOLF has a new single. Titled ‘Teaching To Suffer’, the song is taken from their latest LP March To The Sea, again being released by one the world’s most potent noise labels, Skin Graft Records. Since forming in 2003, AIDS WOLF has always been at the forefront of the North American post-no wave, noise scene, pulling writhing rhythms and cretin-like vocals into a heavily distorted but perfectly sensible mess. Their songs are driven by destruction; awkward during the birthing stage with shredding guitars and chaotic drum rolls sounding like a live abortion, and then bleeding internally through to the end with flames smoldering in the amplifiers creating the sound of a million masturbating embers.

‘Teaching To Suffer’ starts with swirling guitars and devilish female vocals before digressing into clattering drums and razor sharp shreds of warped noise. By the end everything sounds dead, splattered across the pavement like a wanted criminal shot at point blank range. Only Grace from Foot Village can fake death like Chloe Lum, whose squelchy vocals are at the heart of AIDS WOLF’s catastrophic sound.

March To The Sea will be available this coming Spring (US Fall), check Skin Graft Records‘ website for more details. AIDS WOLF is touring the US in September/October, more details can be found on the band’s Myspace page.

 AIDS WOLF- Teaching To Suffer: MP3

AIDS WOLF- Myspace

Posted by Nick Fulton under Canada, Montreal
[7] Comments

Asleep In Noah’s Ark

From the freshly sparse, clangy sounds we know and love from Canadian psychedelic heroes Women, comes their own drummer Mike Wallace’s other band, Friendo. The trio, with Wallace (also of Azeda Booth and Monkey) on guitar, Nicole Brunel (Puberty, Hunter-Gatherer, Topless Mongos, also a really great artist) on guitar and Henry Hsieh (Beija Flor, Monkey) on drums, has gained their slightly ramshackle sound by switching instruments from what they normally play to get a foreign feel. This unlearning gives an uncertain edge, a distinct unprofessionalism that keeps you guessing.

The band self-released their home recorded debut album Cold Toads on cassette and it was then released on vinyl and digital in May on St. Ives Records, a subsidiary of Secretly Canadian. The songs alternate between sleepy, hazy and slowed-down on the Panda Bear influenced ‘Callers’, to gritty Sonic Youth-esque jams like ‘Young Fellows’ channeling the hollow guitar sound made popular in 90s post grunge. ‘Oversees’ has a metronomic drum rhythm that propels the clumsily shrill guitar and deadpan, monotone vocals. Gauzy guitars sound like they’re played with eyes half closed in a sedate style that fits the sloshy rain of Winter.

A roommate of members of the band, David Giancarlo, did an interview on their behalf with Reviewsic. He explained the meaning behind the name Cold Toads. “Toads are too dumb to notice a gradual increase in temperature. If you put a toad in a boiling hot bathtub, it will jump out. But if you put it in a cold bathtub, then gradually increase the heat, it will stay there ’til it boils. Cold Toads refers to how the human race is oblivious to the fact that we are slowly marching toward extinction. Many of Friendo’s lyrical themes are influenced by bands like Earth Crisis, Amebix, and World Burns To Death.”

Friendo- Oversees: MP3

Friendo- Myspace

Buy Cold Toads MP3 from St. Ives Records

Buy Cold Toads cassette from Bart Records and Revolution Winter

Posted by Sarah Gooding under Alberta, Calgary, Canada
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Like Sand Through An Hour Glass

From time to time it’s nice to discover an artist whom you’d previously let slip by. Knots is one of those peculiar artists. Neal, a solo musician from Calgary, Canada released his debut album The Blistering Sun, The Pale Moon, Hahahaha last year. Drawn to my attention now, his music possesses a radiant energy that threatens to explode at any moment but never does. His voice has a high pitch echo, crooned like a tin soldier trapped inside a tiny capsule. There’s so much life, yet so much sadness, all bundled into simplistic songs with voice and guitar as the only bearers of noise. His guitar has an old blues sound, similarly mastered by the likes of Angelo Spencer and Ray Raposa, while his voice sounds a lot like Seth Frightening. Under faded red lights and candle lit curtains Knots’ music reveals itself as a stark reminder of how simple music can have such timeless beauty. There’s no doubt this album would have been one of my favourites of 2009, had I only heard it sooner.

You can purchase The Blistering Sun, The Pale Moon, Hahahaha direct from the artist for $10. The album art folds out into a poster.

Knots- Happiness: MP3

Knots- Satiated: MP3

Knots- Myspace

Posted by Nick Fulton under Calgary, Canada
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///////TRUST///\\\US\\\\\\\

Further news of Crystal Castles’ sophomore album hit the web a couple of days ago and already a bunch of new tracks (apparently from a demo copy of the album) have hit the blogs. You can stream about half the album on Hype Machine, linked from a number of different sources. From listening to the few songs made public it sounds like Crystal Castles has evolved into a more pop friendly macabre-esque villain, ditching their glitch-y circuit bent keyboards for some shiny new tools to make themselves sound more accessible, but still moderately alienating themselves from the asserted disco audience. In a way it sort of contradicts their image and reported personalities, which portrays them as eccentric trouble makers, slightly psychotic and highly unpredictable. One would have expected Ethan Kath and Alice Glass to become even more messed up and further displaced from the mainstream with their second full-length album, but it sounds like they have done the opposite. ‘Doe Deer’ is the only track showing any obnoxious intent, Glass’ vocals warp and distort in a kind of dirty, heavily compressed lo-fi wave. The album’s first official single ‘Celestica’ is very clean, and is definitely a step away from their grimy past. It contains more of a disco vibe, rolling with a smooth keyboard melody and Glass shows off her luscious singing voice.

On April 17 (Record Store Day) ‘Doe Deer’ was released as a limited edition 12″ vinyl (500 copies), backed by three tracks the band recorded in 2004 that had previously been unreleased. There was no digital or CD release and as expected it sold out pretty quickly.

The fourteen track album is due out on June 7th in Europe, June 8th in the US via Fiction Records and June 14 in New Zealand via Shock records. It is apparently going to be self-titled, again.

 Crystal Castles- Celestica: MP3

Crystal Castles- Myspace

Posted by Nick Fulton under Canada, Ontario
[3] Comments

Academy ’94

Are Canadian kids really leading a ’90s alternative pop revival? Oh No! Yoko definitely seem to be attempting it, as do a bunch of other young bands in the Vancouver area. Maybe it’s the fact that they sound a little like Tokyo Police Club that has me on that train of thought, but hey, I’m no expert on the subject, you’ll have to make up your own mind.

At just sixteen years of age Everett Morris, Nic Denis and Liam Hamilton are all still in High School. However that hasn’t stopped them from recording a bunch of songs that sound cleaner than most other bedroom pop projects. They’ve been lining up and gradually winning fans in Vancouver for the past four years and their song ‘Courtyard! Bankrupt!’ has had extensive airtime on Canada’s CBS Radio. They even performed live during the recent winter Olympics, on the same bill as Tokyo Police Club.

But like a lot of young bands they’re still experimenting with different techniques. Liam and Everett once played in a metal band together and if you listen to the three tracks they have on their Myspace page you can hear multiple influences. ‘Courtyard! Bankrupt!’ is bouncy and synth heavy, with a TV themed sense of humour reminiscent of a late ’90s after-school teen drama. ‘Deer In Japan’ takes on Death Cab For Cutie, all electronic clicks and clouded in shy romanticism. While ‘Yellow Babies’ is the band’s attempt at writing a guitar, bass and drums song, focusing on sound over aesthetic.

Oh No! Yoko has also benefited from an emerging support base in Vancouver, fed by local religious groups. Even though the band has no church affiliation they’ve become involved with For Ones Coming After, an organisation dedicated to putting on live shows in churches and amphitheatres across the city, with a focus on being all-ages and unlicensed. FOCA has also helped the band make t-shirts, via American Apparel.

They’re currently writing and recording a debut album which they hope to release in 2011.

 Oh No! Yoko- Courtyard! Bankrupt!: MP3

 Oh No! Yoko- Myspace

Posted by Nick Fulton under Canada, Vancouver
[2] Comments

Suspense; Without A Violin String

They’ve been compared to the Arcade Fire but The Rest has a more auspicious sound, delicately sweeping over a swindled layer of percussion and wandering whimsical guitars. The Ontario band released their debut album in 2009 and it received glowing reviews across the world. The band declare that not a single negative review can be found, quite a fine achievement.

The seven piece band is a very creative, ambitious bunch, and since forming the band has had many diversions into other art forms, musical side projects and running a record label. Their latest journey into the art world fuses with their music, releasing an EP and a book side by side. Cried Wolf tells the story of an adult whose falsified accusations one day come back to haunt him, twisting the fable of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ into a darker, grown-up version. The book is beautifully illustrated by MLXNDRSC and the EP contains three new tracks and a cover of pop singer Robyn’s ‘With Every Heartbeat’. It can be downloaded for free, in exchange for your email address.

The band’s debut album Everyone All At Once (which collected all the positive reviews when it was released in North America last year), will be released world-wide on March 15th. Check out the video for ‘The Lady Vanishes’ (one of the albums’ stand out tracks) which uses a montage of film segments from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film of the same name.

 The Rest- With Every Heartbeat: MP3

The Rest- Myspace

Posted by Nick Fulton under Canada
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The Art Of Confusion

After gushing over Dandi Wind for a very long time I’m only just getting into Fan Death, Dandilion Wind Opaine’s other notable musical project in collaboration with Marta Jaciubek- McKeever. The duo has just released their debut EP titled A Coin For The Well and hearing the track ‘Soon’ has me hooked. Going back and listening to songs from their first two 12″ records Veronica’s Veil and Cannibal has me wondering why I never got into them sooner.

They have been labelled nu-disco by some critics and in some ways they are definitely crafting a new path for the genre. With ghostly beats and short, sharp stabs of pop synths, their timing and fluid rhythms are in tune with the genres changing guard. In step with Opaine’s creative thinking (she’s a photographer, video producer, sculptor and digital animator), Fan Death has a large visual element to their sound, sparking images of flamboyance and grand costumes, something that has perhaps been associated with disco music since the beginning. But this is obviously a new era and the band’s style is most certainly cutting edge.

Opaine wrote and directed a music video for their song ‘Reunited’ which appears on the new EP. Throughout February Fan Death is on tour with Vampire Weekend, a strange combination but one that will hopefully work to their advantage. A Coin For The Well is currently available in the UK via The Pharmacy Recording Company and will be available in the US on February 23 through Last Gang Records. Fan Death’s debut album Womb Of Dreams is also set for release in 2010, due out some time in May.

 Fan Death- Soon: MP3

Fan Death- Myspace

Posted by Nick Fulton under Canada, Vancouver
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