From the not-so-bad vibrations of James Goddard:
Sometimes I imagine a future where everyone has forgotten what a guitar actually sounds like; Children brought up on a steady diet of French pop and Swedish 8-bit. Eventually, current trends like lo-fi would become ailments listed in the DSM VII with prescriptions like: 2 hours of Kumbaya orchestrated by battery-operated MicroKorgs (twice daily, with food). Things would be bad. Luckily former Dog Day drummer KC Spidle has strapped on a six string and stepped to the foreground to ensure such a future will never happen. Bad Vibrations play guitar music. They play the kind of three piece power-pop that begs for adjectives like dark or gloomy; and they play it well. Eschewing any kind of overt studio trickery, the members of Bad Vibrations (KC, Evan and Meg) have put together a crisp sounding record that subtly recalls that classic 90s Halifax sound. Nothing could be further from an all-electro dystopia.
[Levin's Note: James forgot the positive side of an all-electro dystopia: Gino Soccio all day 'ere day.]
Bad Vibrations – We’re Dead
Bad Vibrations – Think About Life

Since transplanting themselves from the sunshine state of Florida to the frosty French Canadian north, pizza-lovin’ brothers Andy and Edwin White have been recording and releasing tunes at an almost nonsensical pace. On top of sparking up psych burners and daffy rappin’ trip-outs with their best-known band, Tonstartssbandht, the bros maintain a plethora of side projects/aliases (High Rise II, NASA, Superbud, Bladestoner, etc.) while also running the boutique labels Does Are and Black Cheeks. For this Weird Canada exclusive, they’ve remixed our interview with wonky vocal FX, answers read by Jason Harvey™ and what sounds like a chopped and screwed version of their posi-vibes anthem “Andy Summers.”

Weird Canada Exclusive :: Tonstartssbandht – Inferred Views

Jesse Locke
Texture Magazine / Weird Canada
texturemagazine.ca / weirdcanada.com

From the pocketed mesh-back of Aaron Levin:
It’s our future babylon: yuppies and junkies coagulating to celebrate their mutant post-human hedonism. And in some grande irony, the lounge-garage stylings of Makeout Videotape will part every velvet curtain to entertain the new world’s last taste of love; vocalist Mac DeMarco’s million-dollar smile and soaring croons calming their insatiable desires. Eating Like a Kid is a mesmerizing departure from Makeout Videotape’s onslaught of red-line garage-punk; the hooks are intelligently buried while its melodies leave traces and flashbacks to Mac’s ageless smile. If there is love in the future it’s the sudden realization that they are speaking to us and as we turn around from our slot-machines, cocaine, sex, pizza, and peep shows – as we turn from our epicurean lives – we will see Mac smiling and know: death is all right so long as someone is singing. Mac’s golden voice is floating atop rivers of reverberating guitars, sailing Makeout Videotape into this new future America and we’re all on board.
Makeout Videotape – Gigi Bungsu
Makeout Videotape – Blondie
Makeout Videotape – Eating Like a Kid

From the ghostly bedding of Aaron Levin:
Vancouver’s synthetic underground is bubbling for the second time since the 80s when labels and artists were populating basements, clubs, cassette racks, and ideas with bleak drum machines and coarse synthesizers. COSMETICS, magneticring, N.213, Twin Crystals, MYTHS, Von Bingen, Haunted Beard, [insert band I'm forgetting] and now the industrial gothic Mode Moderne project Vancouver as a city on the brink of a synth-adjective explosion. Ghosts Emerging live centre-stage in the unassuming minimal-synth-pop arena with secret conviction and harmonic prowess, drifting listeners on their currents of nostalgic woe. Vocalist Phillip Intile’s non-chalant industrial modulations makes the whole trip strangely manipulative as you wake up mid-album unaware of your new musical surroundings: pulsing drum machines, swathy synthesizers, ethereal guitar leads, and blankets of ambient-satin. Let’s welcome the new age.
Mode Moderne – Les Neuf Soeurs
Mode Moderne – Radio Heartbeat

From the post-pubescent sludge of Jesse Locke:
From The Cramps (radical) to Mates of State (barf) to the Plastic Ono Band (radical barfing), musical married couples are nothing new. However, what sets thee Grown-Ups’ Sara and Josiah Hughes apart is that they’re cuter than a pair of bulldogs on snowboards that know how to turn up the rock and turn down the suck. Joined by third member/producer Darrell on “dad guitar” (nice Conchords reference, guys), they’ve now teamed with the almighty Bart for tape release number two. Eight songs of angry punk sludge that sound just as pitted as their debut but now with more Crazy Horse guitar solos (see: opener “Meat”) and Art Brut-esque motivational meta-songs (see: “Start A Band!”). This is the soundtrack for the skateboarding video game you invented in your brain. The musical equivalent of a cherry-coke slurpee with a stolen chocolate bar tucked in the cup. The creepy-lovable cover photo rules too, but I really just wish it was a drawing of Odie crossed with Jughead.
Grown-Ups – Meat
Grown-Ups – Start A Band!

From the colic cleanse of Aaron Levin:
Colic resides as my favorite left-field discovery of 2009, splintering my identity with an onslaught of pop-sprinkled atonal adjective-everything. Best to Your Family reads like a distasteful Japanese stereotype: hyperactive occult meanderings, bent reflections from unknown metals, and piercing waves of inter-dimensional origin. Imagine Big Mac handed you his demo tape after a weird inter-terrestrial mind-meld; it’s addicting, unearthly, and completely fringe. Yet, it’s greatest strength is making the whole rite-of-passage engaging by burying the subtle popyness within layers of instrumental shreddery. A certified unique listening experience. Genuinely strange artifacts of this ilk are rare. File-under ??????
Colic – Keys
Colic – Cold Time
Colic – At 30,000 ft.

From the synthetic moons of Aaron Levin:
Bernardino continues to peel wigs and sublimate minds with his vicarious cosmic voyage through swaths of electroacoustic winds and perilous Ace Tone waters. This time we are lead by a transplanted Odysseus, bravely steering Bernardino’s vast synthesizer vessel through mysterious wires and serene circuitry. La Montaña del Capricornio is a continuation from Las Enamoradas‘ granular synthesia, diving deep into the dilemmic waves of warm ambience and dark druid-age. Hobo Cult cleverly realized Bernardino’s brilliance as a double-sided cassette, focusing your energies on the immaculate details emanating through tape hiss and Dolby warmth, adding comfort to the brooding sounds beneath its alluring orphic cover. A++++++.
Bernardino Femminielli – La Montaña del Capricornio – Side A
Bernardino Femminielli – La Montaña del Capricornio – Side B

From the perilous necklace of Aaron Levin:
I want to live Precious Necklace. I want tight sweaters. VIP access to the clurb. Double martinis. False love. Teen soundtracks blasting. I want the whole world in a song and I want to dance; pulsing drum machines, echoey vocals and exaggerated pop-harmonies. Let the music take you back in time. Nintendo, cocaine, plastic people, and radio hits. Sex in bathrooms and parental neglect. Stereotypes. We’ve lost our youth. We can take it back. The Silly Kissers, in a futuristic act of heroism, are our only hope. Their fourth and most realized effort to-date showcases their perfected 80s-pop ventriloquism. Precious Necklace is a re-imagining that only nostalgia can deliver; glossing over the weaknesses of an era we will never truly understand and manipulating the pearls of its bounty to deliver every genre’s saving grace: synthetic pop perfection. Precious Necklace, released as a limited-edition 10″ on Montreal’s Arbutus Records, is a 10/10 major-scale heart-melt. The world has never needed so much. They will deliver. GRIP. IT. NOW.
Silly Kissers – You Could Even Like Me
Silly Kissers – Treat Me Like You Do
Silly Kissers – Precious Necklace