Interview: Bleak Life 2

Bleak Life 2 will be launching on April 30th, bringing three days of ear-scorching punk and metal to one of Ontario’s best local music scenes. True to the community-based spirit of DIY, the festival will feature local & regional bands, as well as touring acts, and will be taking place at an eclectic mix of venues around the city. Audio Reckoning recently got together with Matt Hargrove, one of the founders of Bleak Life, to talk about the challenges of putting on an indie festival, the inclusiveness of punk culture, and the magic of doing it yourself.

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Buddy Black & The Ghost Umbrellas: “The Story on the Road to Waterloo”

Buddy Black and the Ghost Umbrellas will guide you down dusty roads. Their ragged music, a guided tour through the history of folk, country, and punk, will lead you from the country down to the sea, to the place where we all come together.

The Goatbox Rebel: “(S/T)”

The Goatbox Rebel has constructed a thoroughly post-modern take on the blues. Transplanted into the 21st century, the music fuses analog crunch and buzz with digital thrum to create a compelling and fascinating re-casting of one of the foundational sources of rock and roll, given a new electrical tension from the fusion of man and machine.

Ain’t No Grave: “Enter: The Grave”

Ain’t No Grave: “Enter: The Grave”

Ain’t No Grave are a band that gives a fuck.

Craig Mainprize: “Positively Falling Apart”

Craig Mainprize, “Positively Falling Apart” (LP, 2014)

If falling apart is a necessary part of the process of self-discovery, then the key is to let the pieces fall into some kind of recognizable pattern. On his latest release “Positively Falling Apart”, Craig Mainprize is deconstructing his previous identity as an indie/folk-rocker and recreating himself as a kind of neo-soul electronic poet.

Dave Marsh & The True Love Rules: “The Cause Of Many Troubles”

“The Cause of Many Troubles” by Dave Marsh & The True Love Rules is a diverse, exciting album about love in all its forms. Presented as a fragmented narrative of all of the phases of love and attachment, it is simultaneously sweet, sentimental, bitter, angry, subtle, lusty, romantic, funny, sarcastic and sincere.

High School Sweetheart: “There I Was”

“There I Was” (EP) by London, ON band High School Sweetheart

High School Sweetheart. A name that evokes innocence and infatuation. A label for the earliest and most vulnerable explorations of love. An ideal that is constantly sought and never really attained, circling back onto itself like a lost wanderer. A memory that haunts. An impassioned cry from a pained soul, wailing into a void just to hear the echo.

Interview: The Huaraches

Behold, The Huaraches (L to R): Chris “Cuz” Wood, Steve Sottile, Adam Weaver, Dylan Carquez

A little while back, I reviewed the debut album from Canada’s finest instrumental band, The Huaraches. The record is excellent, but I wanted to dig into their story a bit more. Their bassist Steve Sottile and I chatted over email about the genesis of the group, tobogganing into recording sessions, how the president of Queen’s University reacted to their bizarre video shoot, and the dangers of playing guitar with a sausage.

Page Tuner: “Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove”

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson likes music criticism. A lot. Throughout the length of his impressively arch, anti-formulaic pseudo-autobiography, he nearly spends more words on the subject of music criticism than the art form itself. As a kid, he grew up worshipping not just records, but the reviews of those records. Basically, he was part of the first generation of omnivorous music nerds, the kind of which now rule the insanely divergent cultural mass that we call the internet. As a musician, writer, and curator, he was made for these times.

Lee Ranaldo & The Dust- “Last Night On Earth”

I find it fascinating how Sonic Youth has split up so neatly into its constituent parts. Kim Gordon is exploring abstraction and noise with Body/Head, Thurston Moore is riffing his way through the history of punk and metal with Chelsea Light Moving, and Lee Ranaldo is making arguably the biggest gains by marrying his extensive range of guitar techniques and tones to what might be called traditional rock song craft.