Category: Music

I've been listening a lot to Sally Shapiro's recent album Ready to Live a Lie.

Coffee shop writers amaze me. I fear I’m too distractible to concentrate in a setting with clinking spoons, bursts of laughter, a growling espresso machine, and chair legs scraping the floor. Give me silence.

If The Sisters of Mercy and Joy Division eloped to Turkey, She Past Away would be their lovechild. For those of us who came of age in Montreal’s dimly lit sanctuaries like Passeport and Saphir, this band is muscle memory, equal parts black eyeliner and existential dread, and it brings us back to nights under red lights, wrapped in fog, where the bassline thrummed like a pulse beneath the skin, and the dance floor was the only place we belonged. Those nights are long behind me now, but hearing She Past Away’s post-punk sounds in my father tongue feels like a homecoming.

If you haven’t discovered Matador yet, then it’s time. Lori Yates is an artist (singer and songwriter) who hales from Oshawa-Toronto-Nashville-Hamilton and recently Toronto again. According to her website, she is a “pioneer of Alternative-Country.” And Matador, her much-anticipated new release, is replete with songs reflecting on a life of experiences -- love, friendship, struggle, survival and mortality. 

Anjimile’s Giver Taker would do well to be filed under: a sovereign sibling to tUnE-yArDs and Sufjan; songs that make you feel possible; songs that make queerness feel possible; what I wish I had at-hand when I was coming out; the embodied voice of a late August day when the space between ending and beginning is dead-leaf-thin; for fans of a heart-breaking track one and a foot-shuffling track two; an ode and a promise, in track four’s 1978, to a lover, a god, or oneself; an album closer that gently lifts away towards bluer skies; forgiveness music; survival music;  hollering h

Leonard Cohen almost always ends up on my Spotify Wrapped. His gritty, sensual, laconic, husky voice resonates with my melancholic spirit. His music is enduring—sardonic, philosophical, and rhetorical. It’s his refusal to be boxed in that draws me in: his waltzing numbers, pacing and bringing in the unconventional—accordion and string quartets, diverse cultural influences, the dark comedy, and, of course, a relentless inquiry. I’m also a sucker for a good synthesizer.     

My first shazam was a Stromae banger, Alors On Danse. I was at a red light hoping Shazam would find the tune before I had to drop my phone and drive. Success! Great beat, gorgeous voice, and content that made me feel something – all the more as I translated from the French. Someone on Youtube wrote, “Guy writes one of the most genius cynical takes about the false relief of clubbing. Ironically becomes one of the biggest club hits.” Exactly.