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Recent Reviews
The Crew-Cuts
Sh-Boom / I Spoke Too Soon - 7"
The Crew-Cuts owe their success in part to an obscure legal decision in a California court in 1950.
Supreme Records, a short-lived label based in Los Angeles had issued a record, 'A Little Bird Told Me' by Paula Watson, that was a sizeable chart success in 1948. That same year, Evelyn Knight issued a nearly identical version for the Decca label that topped the Billboard pop chart for seven weeks. Supreme sued Decca claiming that their arrangement of the song, which th...more
The Four Lads
Istanbul (Not Constantinople) / I Should Have Told You Long Ago - 7"
There are no doubt some aging GenXers who remember They Might Be Giants' perky cover of 'Istanbul (Not Constantinople)', but probably fewer who realize that the Four Lads' original was a US top-ten hit in 1953. Actually, that novelty record traces its history back another 25 years to a group called Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. Whiteman, who at the time led one of the more popular dance bands of the '20s and '30s, issued a little-known slab of shellac call...more
Ian and Sylvia
Four Strong Winds / C.C. Rider - 7"
'Four Strong Winds' was once voted the greatest Canadian song of the twentieth century by CBC listeners. It has been covered by dozens of performers over the years - the Second Hand Songs site lists an astounding 136 - including by folk heavyweights Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins and John Denver, as well as up here in Canuckistan by Neil Young, Sarah McLachlan and Blue Rodeo. Ian Tyson reportedly wrote the song in about thirty minutes while he and his singing partner, Sylvia Fricker, were...more
MEGGO
eavesdropper ;; death stories EP
"[This] EP is for Izzy, Bousi, Laika, Elizabeth, Jerry, Jo-Ann, Benson and Dani, who have all passed away in the last few years."
With such a fraught description introducing eavesdropper ;; death stories, the debut EP by Megan Ennenberg, the Montreal musician who performs as MEGGO, you'd be forgiven for thinking this is a dive into the darker crevices of the human condition. Though the record is intimate, and comes on the heels of such immense personal loss - Laika, b...more
Movieland
Then & Now
Jonathan Simkin, the founder of Vancouver's 604 label, has of late been getting "weirdly sentimental" about the fertile music scene there back in the 90s and 00s. "It's when I first started working in the music business," he writes. "I was just a lawyer then; I didn't even have the label - that wasn't even something I thought of doing! I just worked with a lot of bands, and a lot of them were really fucking great."
One of those groups was the little-known shoegaze band Moviel...more
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