Arts
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What the poets are doing
Despite just forming in February 2013, Winnipeg indie rock quartet Hearing Trees has already played around 14 shows and is in pre-production for its debut EP, which will be produced by Les Jupes frontman and Head in the Sand record label head Michael Petkau Falk.
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Kick in the PANTS
In the spring of 2013, guitarist/vocalist Bill Perehinec, bassist Ryan McPherson and drummer Nyala Ali settled on the name PANTS. Thankfully, they also decided to take the band’s music a little more seriously.
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Making Records
As recording technology becomes more accessible, there are many options available to a new artist seeking to get their songs out there.
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See songs
To get your band noticed amongst the sea of sounds, you need eye-catching music videos, album art and merchandise, even in the iTunes age.
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We want the airwaves
CKUW 95.9 FM, the University of Winnipeg’s campus and community radio station, is the place to volunteer if you adore radio.
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Whatever happened to that one band?
Every January since 2009, the Uniter has been putting the spotlight on local artists to watch (2008 profiled Canadians to watch, but included late locals the Liptonians). We thought we’d take a look back at the past picks and see what they’re up to.
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Another fiver
Having not even compiled a proper 2013 mix (yet), this music nerd is now quickly thrust into anticipating what is coming out in 2014. Here’s a look at five artists with releases slated for the first few months of the year, as well as a short list of artists who have planned releases.
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The Pack A.D.
This Vancouver duo has delivered a shocking, heavy and full sound on its fifth proper LP and though it’s not a far cry from the sounds made on 2010’s We Kill Computers or 2011’s Unpersons, it is slightly different and continues the trend of this great band getting better with each release.
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Dustin Bentall & The Smokes
This is a big sounding country popper with guts, hooks and back up vocals to burn in all the right ways.
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Personal punk
Winnipeg technical punk rock band Asado digitally released Equipped to Fail in May 2013, followed by a physical release in December, after spending two years putting the album together.
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The Belle Comedians
This five song EP from Fredericton quintet The Belle Comedians hosts some melancholy pop (“Rosy”), sparse baroque drones (“Margaret”) and dainty acoustic ditties (“Louise” - the disc’s true standout) and at only 19 minutes, it’s a nice taste of what this tightly warbled outfit has to offer.
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Re-Animator
After releasing Animator in 2012 through Paper Bag Records and seeing it long-listed for the Polaris Music Prize the following year, Montreal experimental indie band The Luyas is starting to think about taking its next step.
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The diary of a young girl (and her monster)
On its Kickstarter page, the project Anne Frank-N-Stein is introduced to potential readers with panning shots of beautiful, twisted and grotesque imagery, all cheekily set to Frank Sinatra’s “The Tender Trap”. Local writer Ezra Nickel certainly knows how to get peoples’ attention.
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Was it something I said?
Director Alan Zweig (Vinyl) has made a career out of being eccentric and inserting himself in with his documentary subjects, so it’s curious that in his latest film, When Jews Were Funny, he chooses to stay planted behind the camera in this talking head interview feature, despite being part of the conversation.
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The man behind the music
In 1969, three friends turned an early 1900s Winnipeg movie theatre into an art house cinema called Cinema 3.
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Smooth shifting
A city under the harsh, repressive blanket of a winter that saw New Year’s Eve colder than both the surface of the North Pole and the planet Mars is the ideal locale to mount a theatre production of Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic classic Jane Eyre.
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The Uniter Top 10 lists 2013
The Uniter Top 10 lists 2013
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Rusty and Savanna
Christmas records are hit and miss - classics from Vince Guaraldi and Phi Spector beat out contemporary attempts from The Flaming Lips and Meaghan Smith (who, by removing the "ba-rum-pa-bum-bums" from "The Little Drummer Boy" is now dead to me) but if you can somehow embrace the campiness of Christmas classics while making the songs your own and doing it all with complete sincerity and a pop sensibility that can't be denied, then you must be Rusty Matyas of Imaginary Cities.
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Blackie and the Rodeo Kings
Where these gentlemen (Stephen Fearing, Colin Linden and Tom Wilson) find the time to make all the music they do, I will never know.
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Magnolia
This six-track EP from Halifax duo Magnolia is all kinds of cute (think July Talk without the high energy sex appeal) and not just because singer Leanne Hoffman is a dead ringer for Partridge Family-era Susan Dey.