.jpg)
Jake Russell
-
Fringe ArtsConcert Review: Coeur de Pirate Answered Our Prayers
Montreal pop musician, Coeur de Pirate, put on a spectacular spectacle in her hometown this month. Here’s our review on it!
-
Coeur de Pirate Finds Her Way Back Home
With a sold-out show at Metropolis on Wednesday night, it seemed Montrealers were happy to welcome back their very own Coeur de Pirate — the pop star born and raised in the Plateau.
-
-
CORE CHRONICLES: Coming Down with The Amity Affliction In a Converted Cathedral
It was a typical blisteringly cold February night when The Amity Affliction came to Montreal, and the howling gales were relentless during the journey out west of Verdun to the Paradox Theatre. While the weather was brutal, it was only half as brutal as the show to come—I looked forward to getting toasty in the human furnace of the moshpit.
-
Fringe ArtsBruins, Beers and Body Modifications
To survive being in a metal band requires serious endurance: no one knows this better than Ahren Stringer, 29-year-old bassist and vocalist for The Amity Affliction, who has simulated drowning, been lit on fire, and has remained on the open road doing nonstop touring over the last year, all in the name of the band.
-
_600_375_90_s_c1.jpg)
Fringe ArtsAve Mario: An 8-bit Orchestra
Songs from video games are the unsung heroes of the audiovisual world. Film scores are considered “high art,” with their own esteemed dedicated categories at the Oscars, and Top 40 radio pop songs sweep the Grammys every year. Video game music has yet to break free from its confines to the console.
-
The Unbreakable Allure of Emmure
In the metal and hardcore music community, Emmure is a band that inevitably ignites furious debate. Their six-album career is breakdown after breakdown, unrelenting brutality—some call them talentless thugs, others, blunt and brazen geniuses.
-
Fringe ArtsSkate and Create
Skateboarding: a throwaway pastime of potheads and punks, or a creative craft of athletes and outcasts? Ask any skater you see on the street, hucking themselves down stair sets or waxing up ledges for the perfect slide, and you’ll ultimately hear the latter.
-
Fringe Arts
Baroque-Back Mountain
Like a Justin Timberlake-Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart hybrid, Montreal classical musician and interdisciplinary artist Aleks Schürmer wants to bring sexy opera back.
-
POP Montreal Diary: Sax Sells with Saxsyndrum
Saxsyndrum’s bombastic style of jazz-meets-electro-meets-funk usually sounds like it’s being pumped out by a full six-piece band—you’d never guess it’s just two guys with a saxophone and an arsenal of mixers and synthesizers at their fingertips.
-
POP Montreal Diary: Feeling the Transgender Dysphoria Blues with Against Me!
The first time I saw Floridian punk rockers Against Me! live was at Warped Tour 2008, drenched in a writhing sea of sweaty teenagers, screaming along the lyrics to their folk anthem “Sink, Florida, Sink.”
-
Fringe ArtsFolk Master Flex
The carefree acoustic melodies and whimsical chords of Seattle indie-folk band The Head and the Heart are an ideal soundtrack to the warm spring breezes now kissing the Montreal city streets, teasing the glowing summer nights to come.
-
Special IssueSealing Off the Friend Zone
Men who use this childish term seem to think that women owe them something, that friendship is just a regrettable stepping-stone to an inevitable romp in the hay.
-
Fringe ArtsAnatomy of a Strike
For American illustrator Sophie Yanow, being in Montreal during the Quebec student strike was pure happenstance.
-
Fringe ArtsAnalog & Ironic
In the Internet age of whiny memes and re-posts galore, it can be hard to find fresh and original content. Enter the Found Footage Festival—a celebration of the weird, forgotten VHS tapes of a past era and home to some of the strangest footage on Earth.
-
-
Fringe ArtsPhantom Rhythms
A “phantogram” is an optical illusion in which a two-dimensional image appears to enter our realm in the third. It should come as little surprise, then, that a band by the same name creates experimental genre-blending music that reaches far beyond the sum of its parts.
-
Special IssueGet Ready for Action
The greenhouse, the People’s Potato, Le Frigo Vert, the list goes on—just about anywhere you turn on Concordia’s campuses, sustainable hotspots are waiting for you to peruse. They don’t run on biofuel, however—even these green projects and others yet to be initiated need money to get started.
-
_600_375_90_s_c1.jpg)
Fringe ArtsSkate, Drink, Slam, Repeat
Nestled in a nook along St. Laurent Blvd.’s main strip, with a bulky metal door adorned with a wreath of shattered Maplewood skateboard decks, the thrash-hold to TRH-Bar is pretty discrete from the outside.
-
Fringe ArtsTo Drink and Sing on the Breadline
A creaky wooden hall in the middle of nowhere with the bitter cold creeping in through every crack sounds better suited for the setting of a horror movie than a place to make a record.
