SHEARING PINX, King Thief, Botfly, and drive your plow over the bones of the dead
SHEARING PINX - VALENTINE
SHEARING PINX are an important act in the noise-punk, experimental, art-punk landscape. Approaching two decades as a band, their influence on the Canadian music landscape cannot be understated. They came up in a city with no venues for local music so they are part of a group of Vancouver music scene champions that had to play by their own rules if they ever wanted to play. This meant illegal venues, heck, the famed Emergency Room started in a parking garage! It’s so satisfying to see a new album from this iconic band emerge in October, their first in ten years. VALENTINE features trance-inducing rhythmic escapades with feedback soaked moments and hard right turns at unexpected times. The back half of the album is particularly strong as the songs flow together and the band changes tempo and melodies at will with an attention to detail that is astonishing. This record is everything art-punk should be and is a welcome surprise from this legendary Canadian band.
King Thief - Self-Titled
There’s something great happening in Edmonton right now with the older generation of the city’s music community. Acts like Home Front or The Bobby Tenderloin Universe are making waves, these acts are composed of people that have been playing in Edmonton bands forever and are now hitting it out of the park as seasoned veterans of the music scene. Next in line is King Thief, a straight-ahead hard-rocking punk band that is composed of members from past Edmonton acts like Teenage Bottlerocket, Choke, This is a Standoff and more. These five friends have finalized a vision that is the collective culmination of hard fought years of doing what they love and it couldn’t sound better. It’s pedal-to-the-metal, melodic, punk music that is as perfectly seasoned as the people making it.
Botfly - Open Letters
Halifax’ Botfly return with a four song EP that pulls sounds from multiple sub-genres that fall under the heading I like to call “Heavy-as-Hell.” Hardcore vocal delivery is front and centre and one of the hallmarks of Botfly (although there’s some cleaner, emo-styled vocals in track two as well). The music crunches between hardcore, sludge, hard-rock, and post-hardcore. It’s been three years since they unleashed their debut album Lower Than Love, and this fantastic fifteen minutes of loud music is a great reminder that this band is one that the best loud acts from the East Coast.
drive your plow over the bones of the dead - tragedy as catharsis
Vancouver three piece, drive your plow over the bones of the dead have delivered an incredible debut for those who can handle it. This record is about as aggressive as you can imagine music to be, with the genre descriptor being “emoviolence”. That’s a new one for me but it’s an apt name to call this. Without knowing the subgenres of the emo world, I would have described this as screamo mixed with mathcore. The band plays at a ferocious speed with drumfire percussion and intricate guitar shredding that punctuates the caustic, vocal cord severing screams.
- Jeff MacCallum