It’s been a long haul south but we’re feeling alive with “Alabama People”, which comes out today!

Get into the southern state of mind with latest song from The Dead South‘s new album, Sugar & Joy. Listen here.

And for those of you in NYC, you can catch a FREE performance September 24 at their Rough Trade NYC in-store. Click here for more info.

OUT 9/6/19 VIA SIX SHOOTER RECORDS.

SEE ALBUM COVER TAKE SHAPE IN TIMELAPSE VIDEO FOR TITLE TRACK.

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Ever bound for ragged glory, Rheostatics occupy a unique place in the Canadian music landscape, pulled together and apart for nearly forty years. Finding grace in the reality of endurance, Rheostatics show us a special type of longevity, through upheaval, personal (and personnel) change, and a basic refusal to play the game in any way, shape or form, stretched over decades. Now, Rheostatics return with Here Come The Wolves, their first new album in 15 years.

On Here Come The Wolves, you’ll find Rheostatics trusting their complicated formula, a signature multiplicity of songwriters, artistic instincts and concerns. Produced by Chris Stringer with mixing contributions by Chris Walla, Michael Phillip Wojewoda and Gus Van Go, over twelve songs Here Come The Wolves unfurls like a cross-section of the band’s cumulative experience, individual and collective.

The title track, a “gear shifting, vocal stacking, wild riffing, sh*t kicking,” testament to finding balance in discord, exemplifies this spirit literally (everybody gets a solo) and figuratively (it’s a complex but catchy tune). This ‘single,’ a funny term for a song of three distinct parts, is a metonymic microdose of stacking wholes: the album, the band in 2019, the Rheostatics’ very way of being since 1980.

Today, Six Shooter Records fires “Here Come The Wolves,” with a Martin Tielli arrow, a thesis on time and its abstractions via a revelatory glimpse into the making of the album art. Come for the behind-the-scenes snoop into Tielli’s painting studio, stay for the free tutorial on the Renaissance technique of egg tempera grassa (“cannot vouch for reptilian egg”). The video, a rollercoaster ride through a painstaking and deliberate process, does with video what Here Come The Wolves does with music: it leaves its trace.

With Tim Vesely’s canola yellow pop melodies, Dave Clark’s galloping beats and Bidini’s rousing stories and frontline provocations, the exquisite triangulation of Hugh Marsh on violin, Kevin Hearn on keys, and Tielli’s ventriloquism on guitar come into high relief. From the opening feathered flutter of “Vancouver,” to the sparkle and shimmer throughout “Music Is The Message,” Here Come The Wolves contains powerful, panoramic beauty. With protest and panache, the yelps and squalls and klangs and riffs on songs like “AC/DC on the Stereo,” and “It’s the Super Controller!” also make space for the strange, the obtuse, the earnest and the wild.

Here Come The Wolves will be released by Six Shooter Records on September 6, 2019.

TRACK LISTING
Vancouver
AC/DC on the Stereo
Rearview
Here Come the Wolves
It’s the Super Controller!
Music is the Message
Diamonds on Our Toes
I Wanna Be Your Robot
The Beautiful Night
Goodbye Sister Butterfly
Albatross
Mountains and the Sea

TOUR DATES
CALGARY, AB: Calgary Folk Festival, July 26
EDMONTON, AB: Interstellar Rodeo, July 27

A BRIEF HISTORY
Etobicoke, 1980. Four punk kids string together their first chords on guitars like laces on shoes bound for overhead wires. A marker: I was there.

Toronto, 1993. With three albums up on the wire —Greatest Hits (1987), Melville (1991) and Whale Music (1992) — Rheostatics hold a special place in the city’s heart. The music is fresh, urgent, alive. At an impressive pace, Rheostatics explore ideas that would become the soundtrack to the film Whale Music and the band’s fourth studio album, major label debut, Introducing Happiness (1994).

Somewhere in Ontario, 1996. From the National Gallery of Canada (Music Inspired by The Group of 7) to a national tour of Canada’s legions, bars and concert halls, a newly configured Rheostatics set out with The Tragically Hip, unleashing anthems like “Bad Time To Be Poor” (Blue Hysteria, 1996).

From 2001 to 2067: Rheostatics cross Canada with ten albums over 20 years, searching for new ways to grow. They release Night of the Shooting Stars in 2001. Tight knit and insatiable, the band plays 12 nights in a row in Toronto. They tunnel down into the new sound of 2067 before they fan out, each on their own odyssey.

2007-2016: RIP? Rheostatics say goodbye with a sold out “Good. Gone. Dead.” performance at Massey Hall in 2007. Band vital signs flatline for nearly a decade. Rheostatics reemerge in 2015 to play three nights at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and later make their reunion official with a return to Massey Hall in 2016.

Here Come the Wolves, 2019. After fifteen years, The Rheostatics return as their original 1980 four, Dave Bidini, Dave Clark, Martin Tielli and Tim Vesely, now also with Hugh Marsh and Kevin Hearn.

THE KEY OF X: ENSIGN BRODERICK JOINS SARAH SLEAN AND ERIN COSTELO FOR PIANO-FOCUSED SHOWS IN TORONTO AND NYC. 

“A reclusive, romantic, tear-stained baritone and unabashed opus bringer.” – Globe and Mail

“Broderick makes old-school glam sound urgent, gritty, and absolutely vital.” – Uncut

A condemnation disguised as a benediction, Ensign Broderick’s BloodMyth speaks out against hate, pernicious nationalism and vainglorious self-destruction through characters that embody these, the very worst, ways of being. The album is an inverse/reverse/perverse excavation of 2018’s BloodCrush, a meditation on frailty and fallibility that edged ever closer to the brink. With BloodMyth, more a finale than a companion to its partner album, Ensign Broderick pushes things over the edge, where concepts of personal and political extremism come to swirling, chaotic conclusions.

“Swept Away,” a 5-minute melodrama, explores the oceanic disorientation of being over one’s head. With a classic backbeat, horns and pedal steel, the song channels late 60s FAME Studios rock, the overall aesthetic somewhere between bedazzled Manuel contrition and glam dandy swagger, the twin pillars of Ensign Broderick’s sound and style. 

Appalachian folk meets California pop in “Our Angel of Morphine,” a sweetly celestial treatment of a truly dark and nasty tale. Ethereal, soft-focus brokenness is also present in “Love Died Here,” an atmospheric opiated half-time reworking of a song from BloodCrush. Pain, of whatever sort, and the treatment thereof is a major theme in the album, in both lyrical and visual form. The vinyl package contains a collage built around a main image of a spinal-fusion operating table, its sleek chrome more Ducati than OR supply.

The inescapable disintegration reaches its apex with “The Telling Part,” the last and oldest song on the album (c. 1970), a tale of alienation and abandonment. Over twelve minutes, anger boils and bubbles over. ‘Tell me about starvation and sustenance,’ it goes, which in its way encapsulates the poisonous imbalance of give and take found at every turn. BloodMyth’s villains – anonymous caricatured embodiments of the deadly sins – trade only in damages.

In contrast to the desert glitter of BloodCrush, BloodMyth’s physical form – a vinyl-first release for Record Store Day Canada (a move true to form for an artist with such a deep connection to music’s physical places and pieces) – unravels in similar fashion. From jarring hi-def patent leather to the scribbles and edits on the lyrics, the vinyl edition echoes the devolution and deconstruction of music and narrative in art.

With six albums out in just over a year, Ensign Broderick’s story and experience of launching his solo career at age 59, has little precedent. Each album conveys a fully realized and distinct dimension of the artist and persona, yet a complete picture of the inner life and creative ambition of the artist is only just starting to take form. “You’re getting a different Ensign Broderick with each project,” says the artist. “The progression from the childlike perspective of Ranger to the totally superficial, fully realized glam of Feast of Panthers, to the very personal depth-plumbing of BloodCrush/BloodMyth is a maturation and a devolution. These are all puzzle pieces.”

Listen to Ensign Broderick in conversation with Danko Jones here. 

TOUR DATES:

TORONTO, ON: The Key of X, The Mod Club, June 18 w/ Sarah Slean, Erin Costelo

NEW YORK, NY: The Key of X, Public Arts, June 19 w/ Sarah Slean, Erin Costelo

Ensign Broderick’s THE KEY OF X series brings classical, contemporary and experimental artists together to celebrate piano-based composition and performance. 

The inaugural Key of X took place at Winnipeg New Music Festival in 2018 with Ensign Broderick and Jónas Sen (Björk).

How will The Dead South top­ their Glastonbury debut this summer? By becoming the first bluegrass band to headline London’s Brixton Academy, Feb 27, 2020. 

The Dead South tease third album in new Sheffield, Alabama-filmed trailer. 

The wait for The Dead South’s third full-length album is nearly over. Today, the band announces extensive SERVED COLD tour dates in Canada, Ireland and the UK along with a clip that hints at the direction of the forthcoming album, due this fall via Six Shooter Records.

The Canadian leg of the SERVED COLD tour, a true cross-Canada jaunt, will take the band from Vancouver to Halifax. USA dates will be announced in coming months. Tickets for shows announced today will be on sale May 3, 2019, with the exception of Edmonton (on sale May 10). Pre-sale bundles to all shows will be available as of May 1, 2019 here.

The Dead South are poised to become one of Canada’s most successful independent musical exports. For real. While the band flies under the radar of industry and media, who have some catching up to do, they have built a worldwide fan base show by show. With their first new album since 2016 on the horizon, The Dead South will bring their best work yet to the world.

TOUR DATES:

SUMMER CRAWL 2019

EAU CLAIRE, WI: Blue Ox Music Festival, June 15

PERRANPORTH, UK: Bands in the Sands, June 21

TUNBRIDGE WELLS, UK: Black Deer Festival, June 22-23

OXFORD, UK: O2 Academy Oxford, June 25  

NORTHAMPTON, UK: Roadmender, June 26

BATH, UK: Komedia Bath, June 27

GLASTONBURY, UK: Glastonbury Festival, June 29-30

CALGARY, AB: Big Rock Brewery, July 6

NORTH PLAINS, OR: Northwest String Summit, July 18- 21 

JACKSONVILLE, OR: Britt Pavilion, July 21  

RENO, NV: Virginia Street Brewhouse, July 22  

MORRISON, CO: Red Rocks Amphitheatre, July 24 w/ Trampled By Turtles

SANTA FE, NM: Santa Fe Brewing Company, July 29

DALLAS, TX: Gas Monkey Live, July 30

TULSA, OK: Cain’s Ballroom, July 31

ST LOUIS, MO: Atomic Cowboy Pavilion, August 1

ST. CHARLES, IA: Hinterland Music Festival, August 2-4

REGINA, SK: Regina Folk Festival, Aug 9-11

*NEW* CANADA SERVED COLD TOUR 2019 (tickets on sale May 3)

VANCOUVER, BC: Commodore Ballroom, Oct 19 

EDMONTON, AB: details coming soon.

CALGARY, AB: MacEwan Hall, Oct 24

SASKATOON, SK: TCU Place, Oct 25

WINNIPEG, MB: Burton Cummings Theatre, Oct 26

OTTAWA, ON: TD Place Arena, Oct 29

TORONTO, ON: The Phoenix, Oct 31

MONTREAL, QC: Telus, Nov 1

QUEBEC CITY, QC: Imperial, Nov 2

HALIFAX, NS: The Marquee, Nov 4

*NEW* IRELAND AND UK SERVED COLD TOUR 2020 (tickets on sale May 3)

DUBLIN, IE: Vicar Street, Feb 18

BELFAST, UK: Ulster Hall, Feb 19

GLASGOW, UK: O2 Academy, Feb 21

NEWCASTLE, UK: O2 Academy, Feb 22

MANCHESTER, UK: Academy, Feb 23

BIRMINGHAM, UK: O2 Academy, Feb 25

PORTSMOUTH, UK: Guildhall, Feb 26

LONDON, UK: Brixton Academy, Feb 27

NOTTINGHAM, UK: Rock City, Feb 28

EXETER, UK: Great Hall, Feb 29

Six Shooter Records, Weber Shandwick and West End Phoenix present the second edition of the New Voices Scholarship for young music writers. Any individual 18 and under living in Toronto is encouraged to submit a short personal essay (no more than 400 words) on the question:

“What song lyric most closely mirrors your life, and why?”

Five winners will receive $100 each and will have their story published in an issue of the West End Phoenix community newspaper.

** Deadline is 5pm EST on May 22, 2019. **

All entrants are invited to May 27 event at Melody Bar, Gladstone Hotel 5-7 pm for winners announcement + open mic reading.

Submit your entry here.

LISTEN TO NEW SONG QAUMAJUAPIK HERE.

“A sound that builds like a zipper being pulled upward into the sky.” – FASHION

Photo credit to Jen Squires

From the land that never melts comes a sound that radiates life, youth and promise. Riit, from majestic Panniqtuuq, Nunavut, Canada, is a new artist making space for herself in the electropop world with deep rhythmic throat singing layered over gemological synth cuts and sticky, staticky electronic textures. With field recordings with sounds of the north, from brassy ravens circling overhead to the silvery glint of knife sharpening, Riit’s music emerges from very distinct circumstances of place, language and experience.

With throat singing, Riit performs a unique and extraordinary art form and creates a sound all her own. Inuttitut lyrics weave in and out of the deep rumbling rhythmic strata of breath, each element in constant interplay with the other, collapsing the distance between the unknown and the familiar. Riit sings about the clarity of forgiveness, the imprint of the past on the present, and personal disconnection. Most of the songs are about family, life and love, and explore unimaginably heavy topics such as intergenerational trauma, residential schools, sexual abuse and isolation.

The monoamine-fueled flush of “Qaumajuapik,” the first song shared from Riit’s debut full-length album, expresses how intense attraction messes with your sense of time, where a single blink contains a universe. Heart races, clock stops. Produced by Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck), the song sweeps in on a buzzy gust before the Tangerine Dream-esque modulations kick in. Teardrop bleeps fall over Riit’s clear voice like a sunshower. The song title means ‘you are shining.’

On the strength of a 3-song EP released in 2017 by Aakuluk Music, Nunavut’s first record label, Riit received nominations for Best Radio Single and Indigenous Artist of the Year. As the host of a groundbreaking Inuttitut-language children’s show, Anaana’s Tent, and soon-to-be recipient of an Emerging Talent Award of Excellence for her broadcast work, at age 23 Riit is one of the faces of a Nunavut youth movement, a group of remarkable, driven and increasingly high-profile individuals who are making mainstream waves through art. For an artist who has performed only a handful of shows, a performance in London for The Duke and Duchess of Sussex (Harry & Meghan) and a sold out show in Paris are highlights of a young career.

With “Qaumajuapik,” Riit also makes official the news of her signing to Toronto-based indie label Six Shooter Records.

RIYL: Rosalia, Miya Folick, Troye Sivan