Instrumental trio launches first full-length album
In August of 2006, French horn player Pietro Amato, drummer Julien Poissant and Wurlitzer/synth practitioner Mathieu Charbonneau spent a month in the Eastern Townships drinking whisky, playing ping pong and making music in a renovated barn. Known collectively as Torngat, the three indoor sportsmen used the period of rural isolation to cultivate their creative energies and musical versatility, not to mention their hand-eye coordination.
Maybe it's because its arrival coincides so availably with the emergence of so-called "teen culture" that some of the best rock music has been marked ineradicably by the geist of youthful exuberance. When the freight train of rhythm and blues collided with the ever-puckish spirit of electricity in one stately sonic boom, the adolescent unruliness invited to the party set the stage for the unqualified rebelliousness of the 60s and 70s: long hair, civil rights, sexual liberation et al.
Across the Universe flies high
Following the precedent set by the more self-respecting movies of the 1960s, Julie Taymore's newest creation, Across the Universe, is comprised of some truly psychedelic scenes involving bleeding strawberries, dancing priests, giant puppets and immense stone carvings seen working in a corn field.
A pleasant trip but more waves needed
Surface of Atlantic is yet another Montreal based band that aims to blow its audience away with prettiness, relying on atmosphere and grace to captivate the crowd. But despite a sound that is often too familiar and a plethora of emotion conveyed more by the scene than by the songs themselves, they are still a good band that definitely has the talent to pull a few tricks.
DVD. Death Proof, Sept. 18. Quentin Tarantino's latest exercise of fan-boy worship and excessively referential cinematic verbosity is sublimated into a tale of a psychotic stuntman (Kurt Russell) who stalks buxom co-eds in his tricked out 1970 Chevy Nova. Sadly, the other and better half of last year's Grindhouse double-feature, Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, will not hit video store shelves until next month.
School Schmool and the art of sedition
If the official SSMU handbook, with its corporate-subsidized tabs for easy browsing and cover chock-full of tacky McGill memorabilia really sticks in your radical craw, then chin up, comrade, for there's another type of student handbook on the bloc(k). Published by the Quebec Public Interest Research Group at McGill, School Schmool, the self-lauded "agenda with an agenda," provides an alternative guide to McGill and its surrounding metropolis, aimed at those with a little less starch in their collars.
Memory & the man upstairs
Written by Governor General Award winning playwright Daniel Danis (In the Eyes of Stone Dogs, e [un roman dit]), That Woman is a story that explores the tenuous relations between a mother (Sarah Stanley), a son (Marcelo Arroyo) and an old man (Guy Sprung).
Wintersleep. Welcome to the Night Sky. Laced with anxious pacing and dramatic pauses, Wintersleep's attempt to build intensity on Welcome to the Nigh Sky has a severing effect, destroying fluidity and cohesion. Wintersleep seem to lack that effortless sound which marks a great band.