Music

Prior to this album, Todd Terje released Spiral, a two-track EP whose songs were a little too ambitious, and while being well produced, I couldn’t sit myself down to enjoy it as much as his previous work. The news of a debut album had me a little weary of what he could offer but I was delighted to hear my reservations be crushed by the sonic force of Terje.

Experimenting with sound is a tricky business. Sometimes it leads to brilliant new means of expression, and sometimes it’s a distraction from the music. Avey Tare’s Enter The Slasher House falls into the second category.

New Gods sounds like overcast California, or perhaps that's sunny Edinburgh. Dan Willson, the Caledonian transplant behind Withered Hand, seems to have been touched by the West Coast. Throughout the album, chiming electric guitars, organs, horns, mandolin, and gently cooed backup vocals envelope his central acoustic guitar.

Diane Cluck plays music she describes as “intuitive folk” while others put her music under umbrella terms like “freak folk” or “anti-folk”, but I’m pretty sure that as she releases her seventh album, Boneset, she plays exactly what you think of when you hear “folk music”.

ION favourites, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart are returning with a new full length, and to kick things off, they've released the BANGS-directed video for "Simple and Sure".

Although he's perhaps better known as seventies fuzz-rock pioneer, this not-quite-self-titled reissue by Michael Yonkers highlights another aspect of the musician's talent: simple cowboy country songs. Originally recorded in the early seventies on tube-type reel-to-reel machines, the 13 tracks feature echoing vocals, spoken word passages and sing-along choruses in Yonker's unique baritone, often made spooky by the spaciousness of the no-fi home recording techniques.

Vancouver’s ACTORS are rising in stature almost weekly. With frontman Jason Corbett becoming a lead character in the city’s production scene, producing many of the acts in town, and his remixes of acts like Arts & Crafts’ Gold & Youth, what should not be lost in the hustle is the band that all of that work satellites around.