Music

It’s been a couple years since Tough Age released their last album, I Get The Feeling Central, and in that time the band has gone through a lot of changes. Jarrett Samson and Penny Clark packed their bags and moved across the country from Vancouver to Toronto and the band itself has scaled back from a four-piece to a power trio with the addition of drummer Jesse Locke and Clark taking over bass duties. What hasn’t changed for Tough Age is their ability to write perfect songs.

The music of Glasgow’s Belle and Sebastian is very easily suited to a Saturday morning. They are an almost perfect soundtrack to putting on a pot of coffee, still draped in your bedspread while avoiding an Autumn morning’s chill. It seems as if this is something the band themselves have realized and brought to fruition with the new video for the recently released single, “We Were Beautiful”. Directed by Blair Young, of UK based film collective The Forest Of Black, the clip details the rituals of the early weekend risers throughout the bands beautiful city.

In the wake of the perpetual "choke on all the money they can make off nostalgia" Hollywood cycle, Kathleen Kennedy and LucasGoFuckYourselfArts have green lit a remake of the much loved (by only William Friedkin) film, Cruising. In this steamy updated version Al Pacino returns as detective Steve Burns and is once again thrust - repeatedly - into the seedy underworld of the NYC underground S&M scene.

The 2017 edition of Red Bull Music Academy in Montreal kicks off today. This year, an educational layer entitled Red Bull Music Academy Bass Camp has been added to the mix, where 19 musicians will meet, create and collaborate with musical luminaries in intimate lectures and workships at the Phi Centre.

Brooklyn’s The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart have just released their stellar new album, The Echo Of Pleasure, and today have dropped the video for the new single, “So True.” The band has taken many forms since they put out their debut record in 2009 and songwriter/spearhead Kip Berman has seen his life completely change since that time as well. “A band I started when I was younger that has mirrored my own life in its many transformations,” Berman says.

“Live fast and die young, too late for that, too late for that,” chants Sparks’ vocalist Russell Mael on the methodically catchy “Edith Piaf (Said It Better Than Me)”, one of the cornerstone tracks on Hippopotamus, the group’s 23rd studio album. We should consider ourselves lucky the Mael brothers never fell victim to the rock and roll pratfalls of Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, et al.