Montreal Rocks

An exercise tape counts off at the top of Move Like You Do, some brisk anonymous voice, and then the bassline shows up and does that rubbery Jungle thing where the groove leans a fraction ahead of the drums and dares you to keep still. Four bars and you know whose record this is. Twelve years of that now, since Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland...

For years the best songwriter in Seattle was pouring drinks. Dean Johnson worked the bar at Al’s Tavern in the Wallingford neighbourhood, where the regulars passed a rumour around like a secret worth keeping. There’s the best songwriter in town. He was local lore, a long-held family secret, until his debut Nothing For Me Please arrived in 2023, w...

I haven’t seen the Odyssey yet. Is it good? If it’s anything like the plot I lived through in Bell Centre’s new security setup for media then it was a heartbreaking slog for 7 years until a triumphant final moment where the hero, in this case a sort of old white guy leaves his kid and wife at home to traverse the hinterlands and garage at 1225 whatever street that ...

I’d been looking forward to seeing a full Cat Power show for years. I’ve been a fan of Chan Marshall’s music for a long time and own almost all of her albums on CD. I’d previously seen her open for Mumford & Sons in Montreal, but the setting couldn’t have been less appropriate. The crowd talked through much of her set, and the quiet beauty of her songs wa...

Love, in Body Type‘s world, lives in the small stuff. The unglamorous, easily overlooked gestures that quietly hold a relationship together, or quietly give it away. That is the territory Sophie McComish mines on “Sick Bag,” the darkly comic track trailing the band’s new album. “This song is kinda the culmination of several relationships that ended up the...