Jason Cruz - Wolves - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Recorded in summer of 1994 at S.H.P studios (frontman Graham Lambkin's parents' home), the group's sophomore record Put the Music in It's Coffin is a more sinister, saturnine affair than their debut City Lights. From the get-go, the record has a menacing, vile ambience. It's opening track InchHorse-Meat Cakes,Inch inspired by an anecdote by pulp author Philip K. Dick about how he and his wife subsisted off low-grade pet food when he first arrived in San Francisco, sets the tone lyrically and sonically. Subsequent tracks are filled with Rabelaisian body horror and sinewy, haptic diction. InchI try to pass out vital organs, convinced that they are waste,Inch intones Lambkin in InchHeart, Liver & Lungs,Inch before a chorus of detuned guitars kicks in, nearly drowning out the speaker's account of consuming chevaline intestines. Later songs similarly detail vernacular cooking (InchCaribbean Porridge,Inch about a cornmeal hangover cure), bodily processes (InchNocturnal Middle Rumbles,Inch about nighttime defecation), and creaturely conflict (InchCrystal TearsInch and InchSpin The Animal DialInch).

2015 . Poison Season opens with Vancouver native Dan Bejar swathed in Hunky Dory strings. He’s a dashboard Bowie surveying four wracked characters—Jesus, Jacob, Judy, Jack—simultaneously Biblical and musical theatre. This bittersweet, Times Square-set fanfare is reprised twice more on the record—first as swaying, saxophone-stoked “street-rock” and then finally as a curtain-closing reverie. “The first and last songs are actually one song tracked live with quintet,” explains their author. “I even sang with the band. That song always swung between super austere and super mid-’70s Springsteen/Bowie street-rock. In the end, I decided I wanted both. Couldn’t really figure out a way to sequence the orchestral version within the record, so I decided to carve it up as a book-ending motif, with the rock version squarely in the middle.”

Another folk-reggae epic from award-winning Canadian artist that surveys 400 years of Toronto history.Sumach Roots (album and live play replete with stage actors) takes audiences on a bold and innovative exploration of Toronto's evolution over the past four hundred years. The brainchild of two-time JUNO nominee and best-selling historian Jason Wilson, Sumach Roots draws from a deep well of sounds from traditional British folk to bebop jazz and classic reggae in order to tell the stories of those who built Toronto, both literally and culturally. Wilson delves into the late eighteenth century diaries of Elizabeth Simcoe, the great Toronto fires of 1902 and 1904, the building of the CN Tower and other crucial moments that illuminate the host/immigrant experience in Toronto. The album follows Wilson's acclaimed 2016 album Perennials as the second part of his Valley Road Trilogy, a celebration of InchplaceInch and an invitation to bridge the various enclaves and ethnic borders that demarcate the city. One half of the Wilson & Swarbrick duo with the late Dave Swarbrick, Jason Wilson has performed and recorded with Jackie Mittoo, Martin Carthy, Pee Wee Ellis, Sly & Robbie, UB40, Ernest Ranglin and Alanis Morrissette.We / Posthuma / Lads Of Lombard Hall / KHAQQ / Lynx Canadensis / The Tall Tales Of Lester Stuard / The Night We Won The War / Prelude In C# Minor, Op.3, No. 2 / Happy Little Sisyphus / Fort Rouille / Eugene