Tag: calgary

New Canadiana :: Telstar Drugs – Telstar Drugs

Telstar Drugs - Telstar Drugs
While Calgary’s scene seems to be a melting pot of garage and grimy punk, Telstar Drugs keeps the funk alive, visiting the fucked ends of the musical spectrum while still staying accessible. The eerie, crackling guitar lines are as puzzled together as those of their predecessors: so complicated, so little time. But even then, the indefinable pop prowess lurking behind the darkness of the songs is unmistakable. This release is only seeing the light of day after being recorded and stored for the past year, so folks better start praying for a new batch of tunes, and I mean pray to Telstar, your new gods.

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Telstar Drugs – Bowling

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Telstar Drugs – Fake Plants

New Canadiana :: The Hot Nasties – The Invasion of the Tribbles EP

Hot Nasties - 1980 - Invasion of the Tribbles EP
Before Warren Kinsella peacocked into a full-blown Liberal svengali he was creating hot messes at the Calgarian Hotel — one of the nation’s formative punk dives — with the Hot Nasties. Like a divergent australopithecine strain, The Invasion shares many tendencies with its descendants, while dabbling in different musical genera entirely: On its A-side, it establishes its ’77-proof DNA with “I am a Confused Teenager” before deteriorating into guttural discord and pre-hardcoric throat-shredding in “Invasion of the Tribbles.” B-sider “The Secret of Immortality” is yet another permutation, pairing open-air drive-thru pop with pensive ruminations on morality, life, death and Catholic guilt — foreshadowing, perhaps, Kinsella’s future sociopolitical explorations. True Grit, indeed.

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The Hot Nasties – The Secret of Immortality

Festivities :: Sled Island 2012 Micro-Guide

Sled Island Micro-Guide
As Western-Canada’s premier festival quickly approaches (or, rather, starts today), we thought we’d prepare the world’s smallest guide to the Canadian underground. Below is a printable and foldable PDF to help you make your way through Sled Islands vast program of emerging Canadiana. The guide aims to highlight emerging sounds from our northern zone and may cause geographic fanaticism. Use at own risk.

Download: Weird Canada’s Micro-Guide to Sled Island 2012

New Canadiana :: The Cable-Knits – Twins

The Cable-Knits - Twins
Calgary’s Cable-knits play summery skate jams for when you got dumped by your brace-faced teenage girlfriend and just want to bust a boneless into the pool. Knotty threads of guitar drive the duo’s junk-fi pop into a swift set of sugar rush head-boppers. Turns out Stalwart Sons plus Hunter Gatherer equals hook city.

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The Cable-Knits – Eyelash Got You Down

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The Cable-Knits – Leejay’s Peejays

New Canadiana :: Burro – Burnt Monument

Burro - Burnt Monument
The scorched ferocity barely tethers Burnt Monument‘s searing atonal bliss to our malignant reality. Revelling within the distorted chaos of a guitar-driven daily dance, Burro decimate every squalid soundscape in their pursuit of tautolic wretchery. It’s the ultimate display of damaged purity; a cacophony of annihilation; a treatise on the fundamental nature of obliteration. Ultimate Shred™.

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Burro – Burnt Sonic Toast

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Burro – Red Eye

New Canadiana :: Solange – The Sweet Fondling Of Darkness, Too Pretty To Breathe

This time-warped transmission from the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society drifts the listener deep into transoceanic distress. Sampledelic hydro vibes drenched in tape-warbled basement prog make for heavy loner moves in a cf. 2011 artifact of modern fringe. Solange’s radiophonic workshop spins skyward as a cast of disembodied voices spin the wheels of confusion. Grip?

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Solange – murder nutured by the brittle, cold teat of death

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Solange – let weeping corpses cry

New Canadiana :: Bitter Fictions – Looper Pedal Blues

Revelling in the unabashed pleasures of record collection rock, alt-weekly barnstormer and vinyl slinging stalwart Devin Friesen has hit a stride with his effects-laden solo flight. Looper Pedal Blues is one of two new cassettes from Friesen’s own Gerogerigegege-inspired imprint, pairing epic instrumental fuzz-outs and guitar-damaged confessionals abuzz with post-SY hookery. We love the jams and the jams run free.

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Bitter Fictions – Nervous Stranger

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Bitter Fictions – The Aquarium

Festivities :: Jennifer Castle [Western Tour]

Standing by our never-ending infatuation with all things Jennifer Castle, Weird Canada is proud to partner with Flemish Eye, Beatroute Magazine, and Sled Island in presenting three evenings of ethereal reverberations. For the lucky druidics mingling around Vancouver, Edmonton, and Calgary, we welcome your participatory magik while this otherworldly hippie goddess from the east conjures her delicate, finger-picked minimalism. Please, join us.

## Vancouver, BC

- Date: Thursday, September 29, 2011:
- Location: Electric Owl Social Club (928 Main St.)
- With: The Ruffled Feathers, David Vertesi
- Price: $10 / $12
- Link: facebook
- Presented By: Beatroute Magazine & Weird Canada

## Edmonton, AB

- Date: Friday, September 30, 2011:
- Location: ARTery (9535 Jasper Ave.)
- With: Kris Ellestad, Smoke+Band, Mark Templeton
- Price: $10
- Link: facebook
- Presented By: Weird Canada & Flemish Eye

## Calgary, AB

- Date: Saturday, October 1, 2011:
- Location: Cantos Music Foundation
- With: Kris Ellestad
- Price: $10
- Link: facebook
- Presented By: Sled Island

New Canadiana :: Monroeville Music Center – Les Défauts de Fabrication

Monroeville Music Center’s Les Défauts de Fabrication plays like a soundtrack to both a great black and white film and 8-bit, pixeled Nintendo RGB vibes. Starring none other than an all-star cast of historical freaks, Craig Storm conducts eerie, playful synth bleeps to assemble and move to the rhythm of his own mysterious, freeform narratives. A short four-song tape, but a deeper glimpse into this Calgary dude’s beautifully puzzling creativity.

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Monroeville Music Center – Lee Redmond’s Slow Motion Fender Bender

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Monroeville Music Center – Last Rites for Maria Capovilla

New Canadiana :: The Shrapnelles – Asscalibur

This three-song debut EP by four gloriously greasy Calgarian trashwomen will remind you of all things dirty, bad for you and therefore irresistible: the burn in your throat after a shot of SoCo; the oily bartender with prison tats who pours your pint in a way that loosens your knees; your friend’s mom who wears too-short shorts, makes jokes about anal sex and always shares her menthols. Opener “My Mom is Hot” is a bristly beast, off and running with nary a word, but out of nowhere comes “Desert Furs”, which begins as a swooning ballad and suddenly lurches into a galloping, howling expression of hot-blood love (or maybe it’s hate). This record rips with a snarling beauty. Please mummies, I want some more.

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The Shrapnelles – Desert Furs

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The Shrapnelles – My Mom Is Hot