by Sean-Paul Boynton
Choice Cut
It’s very easy to complain about how bands never come to Canada. When an artist announces a “North American tour,” it’s usually a full tour of the United States with stops in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver (if they’re lucky). For the most part, the rest of our great country gets overlooked, to [...]

Choice Cut
by Sean-Paul Boynton
It takes some serious guts, or maybe just a missing inner sense of concision,
to put out a triple album as a studio recording of new material. The two most famous examples – The Clash’s Sandinista! and George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass – represent the two ends of the spectrum that could [...]

Choice Cut
By Sean-Paul Boynton
When the Pet Shop Boys released their album Behaviour at the dawn of the 1990s, it was clear that the preeminent disco kings were no longer content on making us feel happy on the dancefloor. Not that the group made necessarily happy music – singer Neil Tennant was already one of the gloomiest [...]

Noise 101
Choice Cut
By Sean-Paul Boynton     Arts Editor

People always say, “Never judge a book by its cover.” But when it comes to albums, sometimes looking at the cover and thinking about the title can be an appropriate jumping-off point for exploring the record’s depths. Obviously, something like a Britney Spears’ album is easy to analyze, considering [...]

Choice Cut
God bless the nerds who make beauti­ful music. From Buddy Holly to Brian Wilson to David Byrne, the musical world has always appreciated educated, uptight bookworms who are also able to lay into a beat as if their lives depended on it.
Vampire Weekend are a different sort of entity, however, in that they deliber­ately [...]

Choice Cut
By Sean-Paul Boynton
Depending on when you’re reading this over the course of the holiday season, you’re either about to be bombarded by familiar Christmas standards being blasted out of every retail store’s sound system, or have just escaped that non-stop glee-fest. Either way, you’re undoubtedly familiar with this musical tradition, and unless you’ve been [...]

Choice Cut
Them Crooked Vultures
by Sean-Paul Boynton

The past few years has seen the gap shrink to the point that it’s practically non-existent. Besides younger audiophiles thumbing through their parents’ record collections and spearheading the emergence of vinyl as a new market force, older artists have given up their superiority to play with their musical offspring, [...]

Choice Cut
Tegan and Sara   Sainthood  Sire
It has been exactly one year and three months since Tegan and Sara released The Con, and in the time between then and the recent debut of their sixth studio album, Sainthood, this duo has managed to solidify their signature sound, but they have also grown as songwriters.
In their 29 [...]

Choice Cut: The Flaming Lips      Embryonic       Warner Bros.
Back in the days of vinyl, when rock bands were becoming more and more ambitious, the idea of a double album was exciting and intrigu­ing. With four sides of plastic to fill, musi­cians were able to dump in everything they were trying at the time, or finally execute [...]

Iron Maiden
Flight 666
EMI
4.5/5 Stars
Metal-heads Unite!!  If you lived through the ’80s and witnessed the genesis of the speed metal genre, then this collection is made for you.  What better way to relive the ass-kicking, rockin’ metal mania of Iron Maiden.
The CD release precedes the release of the Flight 666 movie reliving the Iron Maiden World [...]