Crystal Shawanda
By Will McGuirk
“It’s about watching someone grieve and being in awe of their ability to keep going, despite being in a lot of pain.” - Bells Larsen
“a track about “getting stuck with yourself, forever, like an assigned middle name, or DNA. Some of it’s already built in, but mostly you’ll be walking around as you, doing dishes, meeting people, untangling what it means, being busy being busy.” - Sam Sarty, Living Hour
PUP, photo by Vanessa Heins
By Will McGuirk
"Back in 2018, when I was on the road with Alessia Cara, we went to Austin, Texas, and my dad recommended we go to this barbecue spot he had been to when he was touring there. We had a day or two off to explore, so we went. I thought of my dad while I was there, and often when I was on the road, because he's also a touring musician - we’re very similar and we're very close. I wrote this song to articulate the significance and importance of our relationship, how much I love and admire him, and our many parallels." - Georgia Harmer
“Although my Dad was a very complex human, he was very compassionate towards me, especially when I explained how the kids would tease me for being Ojibway. He’d always let me stay home with him and oftentimes we’d go to the Rez store for chips and pop; I’d get Cherry Coke or Vanilla Coke. The lyrics and song title are inspired by these memories of my childhood and of my father." - Daniel Monkman, OMBIIGIZI
“It’s a lot of me trying to articulate my own coping with existential dread, hopelessness, and what I’ve called ‘Grim Reaping’—which is to me, the idea that we are all reaping what we sow, and right now we’re sowing some pretty fucked up shit.” - Stefan Babcock, PUP
“We tried to write vertically instead of horizontally,” - Mathieu Blanchard, Sunglaciers
By Will McGuirk
At the core of what Brandon Williams, aka Chastity, does is community. He is a dissolver of differences and a gatherer of commonalities. From his days as a hometown Dungeon kid to his present release ‘Suffer Summer’ his intentions seem to be, more than seems to be, to be honest, to bring the disparate and perhaps the desperate together.
His notorious DIY barn shows in north Whitby (his hometown) were icons of that idea. Those gigs were country backyard shenanigans with Metz, K-Os, as well as local Durham Region bands Mary + Adelaide and Wooly. At a gig in TO I saw him perform, he brought on Alexisonfire for the encore and they carried him on their shoulders, a happier kid I don’t think I have ever seen. Heroes as pals, does it get any better.
He also once took over the Whitby Courthouse Theatre for a gig with Dizzy, and once again it was an intimate collection of folks who became friends by the end. He has the knack. His songs too have that knack.
The new album ‘Suffer Summer’ on Dine Alone, also is a gathering; Williams welcomes in. He has co-writes with Stefan Babcock of PUP on a couple of tracks , David Mitchell from Gulfer plays bass, and Dallas Green of City & Colour duets with him on “Vicious Circle,” a co-write with his wife Linnea Siggelkow, aka Ellis.
Chastity’s desire to reach-out, work with, blend, blur, applies to the sounds too. It’s hard to pigeonhole this kat in a rock ‘n roll genre. Even if one could it says more about the reviewer than the review but either way here goes, showing my age - Williams is adventurous an artist as Robert Smith of the Cure, an act I would lean into for Chastity on the basis of a previous track, “The Girls I Know Don’t Think So” from the album ‘Home Made Satan. Williams is as willing to play around with expectations and challenge his audience, to challenge himself, but, although Chastity has the melodic sensibility of Smith he also has 30 years of something else; and what that is is bands he has seen in-person, in dark clubs, small clubs, within the camaraderie of the audience, in the sweaty connections of the mosh-pit, and that is what Chastity is at his core and somehow within all the noise, all of the punk, all of the pummelling, all of the thrash, all of the suburban angst, all the orchestrations, all the righteous rage that there is on ‘Suffer Summer’, it is the innate empathy for others that carries this album. There’s a humanity in this music that, again, showing my age, I can only recall feeling in the Clash and Fugazi, and Broken Social Scene, and even BSS is two decades ago so what do I know, but I know it when I hear it and I hear it in Chastity.
By Will McGuirk
Don’t you just love how a song can grab you and swirl you ‘round the dance floor and you’re not even moving but still on the couch. We love all things slow here but we love love Slow Leaves. Just when you think you are a jaded old coot, a song still holds the power to awaken the youth within, willing to be thrilled so thrill me Slow Leaves thrill me.
“In a sense, I’m preoccupied with the past, perhaps at the detriment of the present. I’m not great at looking ahead. Naturally, I miss certain things and certain people. I guess that’s life.” - Grant Davidson
Emily Rockarts, photo by Jen Squires
“I think we can become preoccupied with trying to do someone else's work for them as a means of avoiding our own self-reflection." - Cayley Thomas
By Will McGuirk
We are slowcity.ca, we are slow for a reason, we pause, we wait, we give voice when we give voice and if what is said is worth saying it will always be worth saying no matter when it is said and if what is heard is worth hearing it will be worth hearing no matter when it is heard.
“This song is for the people who are working hard to make the world a better place than the one they were left with. This is for the fighters and the defenders. Part of being strong is also taking the time to stop, let go and release. Our DNA is of earth and sky.” - Bear Witness, ATCR
"It imagines someone looking back on their own life and walking into their old house, reliving some pivotal moments of their life and re-engaging with who they are as a person and where they're at now. I read Winter, the novel by Ali Smith, and it really inspired me to want to write songs specifically about Winter. I think it's an incredibly inspiring time of year and it was a really fun and collaborative process for Kev and I to work on these songs, flesh them out, and bring them to life: embracing piano ideas and more acoustic elements whilst still exploring electronic textures behind the more reflective lyrics and sparse arrangements. - Andrew Davie.
“If social media has taught us anything, it’s that there are a lot of unhappy people out there who are trying to find a way out. They are looking for meaning and something to believe in… or nothing to believe in… We all want the same thing, but are trying to achieve it in different ways.” - Elephant Stone
“I’m trying to say that good things and bad things will happen, but not because they’re good or bad, but because they’re true, and the truth always comes out in the end. No matter how tragic or joyous.” - Sam Weber
Photo by Matt Barnes
By Will McGuirk
Fields and forests and festivals beckon - including soon, Mariposa Festival, where the multi-faceted Tom Wilson will perform. Looking forward to this one. A few years back Wilson didn’t have a mid-life crisis so much as had one thrust upon him. As an artist he met it all head on, sharing his journey in his new album ‘Mohawk’ and a autobiography, ‘Beautiful Scars’.
“It’s a story of adoption, of growing up thinking you’re a big, sweaty, Irish guy, and finding out at the age of 53 that you’re a Mohawk.,” he says in a press release.
Check out Lee Harvey Osmond as well as The Building, Pram, Pup, Leaf Rapids, Ada Lea, Dan Moxon and The Contortionist.
