Manitoba artists sweep music awards show
Manitoba’s music and arts scene can feel like a well-kept secret — our province’s reputation for fierce cold and trouble sometimes skirts the vibrant community…
Kaelen Bell
A little bit of Nashville in the Prairies
Were it not for the crystalline float of their harmonies, you’d be hard-pressed to believe opera was what first brought Allison Phipps and Geneva Halverson…
Mise en Scene — ‘Winnipeg, California,’ 4.5/5
The space between Manitoba and California is less a literal distance and more an imagined one. They couldn’t occupy more disparate places in the public…
November Underground — ‘November Underground,’ 4/5
There are generally two modes when it comes to decade-specific revivalism: those artists who embody a particular aesthetic ideal without committing fully to the sound…
Rich Aucoin – ‘United States,’ 3.5/5
Like just about every record from Halifax, N.S., pop-maximalist Rich Aucoin’s latest multi-coloured dispatch arrives on the back of a concept. Even so, the sparkling…
Figure Walking — ‘Vertical/Horizontal,’ 4/5
Figure Walking’s 2017 debut, The Big Other, was lean and thrilling post-punk, a seedy dash through crowded city streets and purple alleyways, all steam and…
Silver Clouds — ‘Silver Clouds,’ 4/5
The artwork for the debut record from Silver Clouds — with its splattered psychedelia and tossed-off lemon slice — recalls immediately the cover of the…
The Prairie Joggers — ‘The Prairie Joggers,’ 4/5
The Prairie Joggers make simple songs with complicated hearts. The Winnipeg duo’s chipper, dust-blown sound is reliant on dense lyricism and memorable melodies rather than…
Ada Lea — ‘Woman, Here,’ 3.5/5
Ada Lea’s debut record, 2019’s What We Say in Private, was a prickly and elastic rock composition, built from bent folk guitars and an itching…
Music in the age of coronavirus
Cody Goertzen and Adam Hill are keeping busy while the world burns outside, attempting to make the most of this collective isolation. “We’re doing okay,”…