Archive

Photo by Jayme Javier

BY GREGORY ADAMS

Madness Cartel photo c/o the band.

Hello! We've hit the end of 2022, and per tradition I've invited Spectres / Madness Cartel member Adam Mitchell onto the podcast to get into some of his favourite records of the year — this time including music from The Beths, Long Knife, High Vis, and more.

The latest Gut Feeling Podcast is an interview with Hot Hot Heat/Fur Trade's Steve Bays!

Steve gets into the early history of Hot Hot Heat, whom just celebrated the 20th anniversary of their pop-tastic Make Up the Breakdown with a a deluxe, remastered re-release through Sub Pop Records.

He also dives into the jingling holiday spirit of Fur Trade's recent "Christmas in a Cage" single, which marks the first new music from the project in nearly a decade, and teases an upcoming full-length through Light Organ Records.

BY GREGORY ADAMS

Wowsers, today (December 4) marks a whole 40 years since the premiere episode of Inspector Gadget. Titled “Winter Olympics,” the pilot found the titular cartoon character in somewhat of an embryonic stage (he has a moustache for this one episode; it looks pretty weird), but it also hits the beats that count: Gadget is a cyborg lawman sent around the globe to foil the evil schemes of the M.A.D. organization. He’s kind of a bumbler, though. Most missions succeed through a mix of dumb luck and some behind-the-scenes gumshoeing from Gadget’s niece, Penny, and her pet pup, Brain.

Also in place from the jump was Inspector Gadget’s iconic, earworm theme music. Written by composer Shuki Levy, the intro works a choppy synth bass along a playfully eerie motif, which is ultimately resolved by a gleeful chorus of “Go Gadget, Go!”

BY GREGORY ADAMS

If you’ve been following Gut Feeling for a while, you might’ve noticed that I can’t get enough of Vancouver hardcore force Punitive Damage. They were the newsletter’s first published interview, while other posts have seen me gushing over hammer-down tracks from 2021’s Strike Back EP and this fall’s positively crushing debut full-length, This Is the Blackout. The latter is bonafide album-of-the-year material (Revolver would back that up), and is at the very least a must-listen if you like getting your ears mangled by an impressive cross-section of hardcore styles.

One thing I hadn’t hit on before, though, was exactly how the band has gnarled things out in the studio — most recently with Taylor Young (Drain, Regional Justice Center) at his The Pit facility in Van Nuys, CA.

The latest Gut Feeling Podcast is an interview with Lyndsay Sung, a longtime music-maker currently playing bass in Vancouver punk trio Kcar. Over the past 25 years, she's also played in The Sob Story, Le Petit Mort, Radio Berlin, Pink Mountaintops, Ice Palace, and more. She's also the owner/baker extraordinaire at Coco Cake Land.

Throughout our talk, Lyndsay gets into: becoming a "gorilla on 'roids" while drumming for her first band; queer vampire films; fantasy-based synth-metal; finding goths across America on lengthy Radio Berlin tours; upcoming cookbooks; and more.

The Gut Feeling Podcast is currently streaming through Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Sounder.

BY GREGORY ADAMS

There are a good chunk of spooky cartoons spinning through my brain around Halloween, but one that stands out in particular is 1978’s The Devil and Daniel Mouse. Who doesn’t love a good, Satanic story this time of year, right?

Released in 1978 through Canadian studio Nelvana, The Devil and Daniel Mouse is a creeper that centres on a floundering rodent folk duo who get fired from their house band gig after a club owner deems that people these days only want to “rock 'n' roll, and disco dance.” Rough! When the pair get separated that night, the singer, Jan, stumbles into a Faustian bargain that sees her quickly skyrocketing to fame after literally “selling her soul for some rock ‘n’ roll.”

Hey folks!

Gut Feeling has just crossed the two-year mark, and to celebrate I'm taking things all the way back to my first-ever interview! This talk was with Milwaukee power pop/emo group the Promise Ring back in the fall of 1998, which I'd done with my friend Zoë Verkuylen Blilie for her 'zine, Evil Beavers.

The Promise Ring were a definite favourite. They'd played downtown eastside all ages spot Crosstown Traffic the previous fall while touring their excellent sophomore LP, Nothing Feels Good (on the eve of my seventeenth birthday, no less). The next year they were set to play a bar show, though, so a few underage friends and I drove down to Seattle so we could actually see them play (we nevertheless managed to sneak into the show at Vancouver's Starfish Room the next night).

BY GREGORY ADAMS

Unless you’re a year-round horror fan, odds are good you up your slasher and monster movie quota once October kicks in. I know I do!

As we've officially entered the spooky season, I'm shaking up the Gut Feeling mini-guide template. Instead of a record label, this time I'm taking a look at the shredding music behind a handful of heavy metal horror flicks from the '80s.

Hella at the Ché Café. La Jolla, CA. 2004. Photo by Gregory Adams

BY GREGORY ADAMS

Sometimes I forget what's in the archive. A while back I was looking at an old interview with Hella — the experimental rock duo of Spencer Seim and future Death Grips drummer/producer Zach Hill — that I'd done for an issue of Skyscraper magazine back in 2004. I was thinking that could be a cool piece to reprint as a rewind post...but then I remembered I actually had an unpublished interview hiding on a hard drive somewhere, too.

Peter Matthew Bauer has entered his guitar hero phase. For proof, take the onetime Walkmen bassist/organist’s upcoming third solo album, Flowers, which finds him embracing the freeing, fleet-fingered approach of Tuareg blues players like Mdou Moctar. The move even surprised Pete, who hadn’t previously considered getting this expressively extravagant on a project.

“Somewhere along the way, I realized I had never really taken a guitar solo in all the years I’ve played music,” Peter had previously said in a press statement. “I became obsessed with figuring out a way to do so while also still moving the songs along. Now that I’ve started, I’m not sure how I’ll stop.”

It’s fair to say, then, that Flowers is overflowing with a previously unheard fluidity. Tracks like “Knife Fighter,” “Flowers,” and “East” are fit with hypnotically billowing hammer-on leads, but “Skulls,” in particular, goes hard with a pair of minute-plus solos. Blessedly, those extended sections come across as overjoyed, not overdone.

Photo by Adam Cedillo

BY GREGORY ADAMS

BY GREGORY ADAMS

It has been a long while since the last label guide. This time we’re looking at some hardcore deep cuts from the Kill Rock Stars catalogue.

Olympia, WA’s Kill Rock Stars was founded in 1991 by Slim Moon and Tinuviel Sampson, the former explaining to Hit Quarters in 2009: “I just wanted to put out my friends’ records, because nobody was putting out my friends’ records.” He did just that, starting with a spoken word split 7-inch between himself and Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna (her side, fittingly enough: “Rock Star”).

Photo by Beatrice Scharf-Pierzchala

BY GREGORY ADAMS

While the gearhounds obsessively refreshing the front page of Reverb.com would disagree, Heaven for Real’s new video for “Do Your Worst” posits that a good guitar is rarely hard to find.

Photo by Pretty Matty

BY GREGORY ADAMS

Photo by Geoffo Reith

BY GREGORY ADAMS

It's not too often an album is responsible for the birth of a music genre, but Vancouver outfit Big Rig's self-titled debut is, in fact, the first project to define the burgeoning twangmo movement.

The latest Gut Feeling Podcast is an interview with Kyle De Ville, a British Columbia-born, Portland, Oregon-based guitarist with Enact, whom just released their self-titled debut album through War Records.

Throughout the talk, Kyle gets into: plotting hardcore songs in the shower; Enact fighting against political apathy; what happens when the Youth Crew ages into parenthood; growing up a pre-teen suburban death metal head; lessons learned at a Metallica show; and more.

On the throwback side of things, Kyle and I also played in our first bands together in the mid ’90s, so we touch on our failed skate-punk band, Rugburn, and our more emo-styled The Self Esteem Project, whose 1997 demo tape I just posted up on Bandcamp.

The latest Gut Feeling Podcast is an interview with Stephen McBean, a prolific, Vancouver Island-born, Los Angeles-based musician currently making music with Black Mountain and Pink Mountaintops. Back in the mid '90s, though, Steve was briefly a vocalist/co-guitarist in Ex Dead Teenager, a Vancouver quartet whose 1997 demo, It's OK to Laugh at People Wearing Gas Masks, flirted with full-bore hardcore, sludge nihilism, tattered-psyche post-punk melancholia, and impressionistic, synth-skit weirdness.

Throughout the talk, Steve gets into: hardcore mêlées at East Vancouver's legendary New York Theatre; writing and recording as a roommates-only project in the basement of the Frances Street punk house; the on-tour implosion of his previous project, Gus; dumpster diving for keyboards; reconnecting with members of Converge and Saviours decades after first meeting them on tour with Ex Dead Teenager; and more.

BY GREGORY ADAMS

Earlier this year, I had a chance to speak with Deaf Club guitarists Brian Amalfitano and Tommy Meehan about mangling all sorts of pedal-squelching sounds into the post-grind wonderwall that is the band’s new Bad Songs Forever EP. The artwork for the release is just as a deconstructionist, and is from one of my favourite active artists, Paul Rentler.

Paul's a collagist based out of Columbus, Ohio. He's big on recontextualizing cartoon, comics, and pop culture figures— think Mickey Mouse, Dr. Doom, or the Rolling Stones' tongue logo— into absurdist, stylized hybrids. For Bad Songs Forever, he's grafted Kiss bassist Gene Simmons' tongue-wagging mug atop a sagging, blood-strewn corpse, a gang of red-eyed football ghouls flanking him on each side.

The latest Gut Feeling Podcast is an interview with Lucas McFadden, a Vancouver based musician currently drumming with Madness Cartel and Tilted, and formerly of blisteringly fast hardcore unit Reserve 34.

Throughout the talk, Lucas gets into the life of Reserve 34, from the mid '90s through to their final show in 2002. Lucas also touches on: realizing that in a guitarists world, he needed to become a drummer; teen vandalism; punk mansions; fortuitous parking spots. It's a story that also manages to connect Reserve 34 with members of Trooper, the Pointed Sticks, SoCal straight edge group Carry On, and more!

Nothing from the Reserve 34 discography is streaming officially, but the episode features some samples of unreleased demos, radio show performances, live sets, and studio recordings.

Photo by Vanessa Heins

BY GREGORY ADAMS

Few jilted love songs are primed to hit a guitarist where it hurts as much as PUP's "Matilda." The bittersweet, pop-punk jolt from the Toronto quartet's new The Unraveling of PUPTheBand full-length is sung from the perspective of a once-treasured six-string rusting away in a closet, its owner now focused on a newer model ("You pick up your other and you strum away"). Once, their relationship had been symbiotic—full-flesh fingers constantly caressing Matilda's rosewood fretboard. Now, the instrument laments, "I hardly make a sound."

The latest Gut Feeling Podcast is an interview with Larissa Loyva, a Vancouver based singer-songwriter currently releasing experimental electronic pop as Kellarissa.

The talk gets into the making of Kellarissa's new Voice Leading album, but also: hands-on career changes; Anne Garréta’s 1986 Oulipan nightclub novel Sphinx; high school choirs; her first band's show at a mall photography exhibit; playing in bands like P:ano, Boring, the Choir Practice, and A Luna Red; and finding harmony in life, not just music.

Kellarissa's Voice Leading sees release April 1 via Mint Records.

Year Future at Modified Arts. Phoenix, AZ. Photos by Gregory Adams

BY GREGORY ADAMS

Photo by Drew Doggett

BY GREGORY ADAMS

Earlier this month I had the chance to speak with Los Angeles artist SASAMI for Northern Transmissions. The talk centres on the complex metal, folk, and dream pop qualities of her new album, Squeeze, but also on the way various parts of horror lore impacted the aesthetic. It’s a wild record where tap-crazy guitar solos exist over gain-charged Daniel Johnston covers, but it’s just as likely to pivot from nu metal stomps towards gloom-infused classical arrangements and back porch folk bops. It’s a serious head trip!

Photo by Oliver Halfin

BY GREGORY ADAMS

Earlier this year I had a chance to speak with Spoon guitarist-vocalist Britt Daniel for Guitar World, with the talk centering on the long-running Austin, TX outfit’s new album, Lucifer on the Sofa. Long story short, the record cooks, but during the talk, Britt got into everything from his evocatively rhythmic right hand, to bandmate Gerardo Larios’ “fuckin’ ferocious” guitar solo on the “The Hardest Cut”. You can check out that piece here.

While I had Britt on the phone, I quickly asked him about the band’s Get Nice!, a niche bonus EP that came packaged together with 2007’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. The release has fascinated me for years.

Spoon have often been praised for a taut and considered approach to rock. Get Nice!, meanwhile, is a 23-minute head trip of loose song ideas where Spoon wander from guttural graveyard blues (“I Got Mine”) towards astral projected synth-scapes (“Be Still My Servant”, “Love Makes You Feel”), folky character portraits (“Mean Mad Margaret”), vampy, possibly pitch-shifted funk (“Dracula’s Cigarette”), and psych-smeared proto punk (“1975”). Rarely does a song reach completion, making Get Nice! more of a transitory free-for-all. Nowhere is that more clear than on “I Can Feel It Fade Like An AM Single,” an all-time heartwrecker that wildly dips in-and-out of time.

Photo c/o Bratboy

BY GREGORY ADAMS

While Bratboy singer-guitarist Bella Bébê describes the band's new "Dream Rope" single as "a pop song about...bondage," it's fair to say that the Vancouver trio's forthcoming debut album has been strung up by other means. Membership swaps, a name change, and a global pandemic have all contributed to the delay, but over two years after tracking the as-yet-untitled release at Gabriola Island, BC's The Noise Floor Recording Studio, the band are finally rounding the corner on an official release.

Though the record arrives sometime in 2022, there have been a pair of recent previews. "Blue Eyes" mixes its grunge-punk parabola of an intro riff with a hook-heavy chorus; "Dream Rope" entwines Bella and bassist Megan Magdelena's vocal harmonies before the guitarist waggles out a series of swagger-heavy hammer-ons in her guitar solo. Both songs from the band's 2019 7-inch have also been re-recorded with their current bpm-pushing percussionist, Tony Dallas.

Speaking with Gut Feeling, Bella and Tony got into evolving guitar tones, un-Googleable band names, and what to expect from the upcoming Bratboy album.

Photo by Vin Romero

BY GREGORY ADAMS

Earlier this month I had the chance to speak with Cloakroom bassist Bobby Markos for Northern Transmissions. In that piece, Bobby got into the sci-fi origins of the Indiana outfit’s new Dissolution Wave, which finds an asteroid miner filling a culture-eating cosmic void with songs to keep the Earth from spinning off its axis. Heady stuff!

Hello! It's just about the end of the year, and once again I've invited Spectres guitarist Adam Mitchell onto the podcast to get into some of our favourite records of the year—hitting on some contemporary Oi (The Chisel, Boss), sax-smooched synth-pop (Riki), arguably adult-geared post-hardcore (Quicksand), and more.

We also get into Spectres recent Hindsight collection, which traces the Vancouver band's career from their earlier, shoutier, greyer days towards the synth-spangled pop of new tunes like "Tell Me".

I think I'm going to take the next couple of weeks off, but I'll catch you in 2022!

The latest Gut Feeling Podcast is an interview with Ashley Webber, a Vancouver based singer-songwriter whom just released her second solo album, Only The End, as Ashley Shadow.

The talk gets into making the album, her first in five years, with collaborators including Will Oldham (a.k.a. Bonnie "Prince" Billy), Josh Wells (Lightning Dust), Ryan Beattie (Himalayan Bear) and more, but it also gets into growing up in Maple Ridge, B.C.; sharing the stage with Donny Osmond in her youth; performing with early '00s post-punks the Organ, as well as Lightning Dust and Pink Mountaintops; knowing your limits; and more!

Ashley Shadow's Only The End is out now via Felte Records.

I must admit, that mini-guide to Global Symphonic from a few weeks back has still got me nostalgic for some turn-of-the-century Vancouver punk rock, which got me thinking about another of the label's bands: S.T.R.E.E.T.S.

S.T.R.E.E.T.S. (or, more formally, Skateboarding Totally Rules Everything Else Totally Sucks) were a full-on adrenaline rush—successors to early '80s skate culture punk crews like J.F.A., while also bombing through something like a hyper-speed, War and Pain-period Voivod thrash influence. Their name was no joke either, with the quartet of Arjan Miranda (guitar, vocals), James Farwell (guitar, vocals), Mike Payette (bass), and Cory Gagnes (drums) McTwisting their way through countless skate-centric anthems like "Too Fast to Powerslide," "Freebird to Revert," and eternal rally-cry "Come On Everybody Grab Your Skate Let's Go."

This is an interview that took place December 14, 2002, at Pat's Pub in Vancouver, shortly after they'd tracked their second album (and first for Global Symphonic), BoBoGnarGnar. S.T.R.E.E.T.S. played alongside the Organ, but according to my notes A Luna Red dropped off the bill that night. The piece was written during a practicum I'd been on with long-gone Vancouver magazine The Nerve, who had also hosted the show as part of their Festival of Guns, which they'd billed as "Vancouver's New Outlaw Rock 'n' Roll Festival." Fun!

There's a matter-of-fact efficiency to the title of Chance Lovett's latest single, "7 Years". The soul song first took shape in reaction to Michael Brown's murder by police in 2014, with Chance picking it back up again following the 2020 murder of George Floyd; ultimately, it was tracked earlier this year at Vancouver's Rain City Recorders, with a last-minute verse added in-studio.

In both sound and subject matter, things get more complex. A waterfall's rush of soul guitar ripples past a lean, walking bass; echo chamber drums get hard-panned to the left for the headphone trip. Chance had previously explained in an Instagram post that the song contemplates "the agony black parents face pleading with a racist system to simply give their kids a chance to grow up".

"7 Years" also marks the first official single from Chance as a solo artist, with the musician currently putting together more new music with multi-instrumentalist Mike Flintoff (Rempel and the Rousers, Tranzmitors) and producer Jesse Gander (Japandroids, Brutus). If Chance's "7 Years" is guided by her years of experience making full-band soul music (The Chantrelles, Chance Lovett and the Broken Hearted), she hints in her talk with Gut Feeling that other parts of the album could take things down a few notches from the track's booming vocal finale. Think acoustic arrangements, though the singer has also been exploring a subtler, raspier side of her voice.

Hi, hello!

No interview this week, but I'm excited about the talks I can share a little later on in the month. While I'm here, though, I thought I'd shine a light on a pair of recent pieces of mine that were published outside the newsletter. I've also got quick hits at the bottom on some music I've been feeling that I haven't really had a chance to talk about elsewhere.

Maybe this kind of a round-up will be a semi-regular side-series within Gut Feeling? Either way, please give the links a click...and sincere apologies to Raekwon on the pun.

Even under the best circumstances, heading out on tour can be a total gamble of faith. Toronto noise-rock veterans METZ took the plunge this month, though, for their first tour in over a year-and-a-half—likewise their first since the release of last year’s excellently circuits-surged Atlas Vending. Just a few days into the trip, the act woke up in Santa Clarita, CA, to find that their trailer full of guitar pedals, amps, and drums— not to mention band merchandise—had been unhitched from their van and stolen.

It was a crushing, burdensome blow, but METZ were determined to keep the tour going however they could. Their fans felt just the same.

As METZ set out for San Francisco, friends set up a GoFundMe page that quickly found many looking to chip in to help the trio—vocalist-guitarist Alex Edkins, bassist Chris Slorach, and drummer Hayden Menzies—recoup. Fans have also been coming to shows with extra pedals and handmade effects boxes in-hand so METZ can power through as (mostly) planned. The support has been overwhelming.

You don’t have to be a total gearhead to know good tone. Sometimes all you need is volume and a lil bit of intuition. That just may be the case for Hotline TNT’s Will Anderson.

Coming off the recent release of the project’s Nineteen in Love—performed on-record entirely by Will—the currently New York-based musician has been upgrading his live rig so he can blast through sweet-yet-sludgy, gain-crushed pieces like “Leave Of Absence” and “Had 2 Try”. When it came to picking out a new amp, tech specs weren’t much of a concern, so long as he could crank up some kind of distortion. In light of the fuzzed-out majesty of Nineteen in Love, it pays to keep things simple.

Shortly after picking up his new rig—and just ahead of hitting a New York Knicks game with a freshly-inked Knicks tattoo—Will got into sick nu-metal riffs, neck-snapping guitar techniques, and building up his current live band (including Vancouver-based musician, newsletter interviewee, and Will's Mr. Dusty bandmate, Katayoon Yousefbigloo).

Hey everyone!

Shortly after posting last week's mini-guide to Global Symphonic, I remembered an old interview I'd done with A Luna Red's Jack Duckworth about their then new album, SLMZK! This was ahead of a record release party that took place November 9, 2002, at the Piccadilly Pub in Vancouver—a notoriously narrow room where I'd seen (and occasionally played) a number of wreckers before it shuttered in the mid '00s.

This week I thought it'd be fun to revisit the piece, which ran in my college newspaper, the Kwantlen Chronicle. Up above is the original headline, along with a photo illustration Jack had sent us, based on the cover art of SLMZK! On the off-chance you, uh, hadn't picked up the paper on-campus 19 years ago, please find the original piece (with a few minor tweaks), down below.

Earlier this fall, Wolf Parade’s Spencer Krug announced he's set to issue the first-ever vinyl pressing of his Sunset Rubdown project’s sophomore album, Shut Up I Am Dreaming, through his own Pronounced Kroog imprint. That’s great! I’d caught the announcement over at Exclaim!, which had noted that the album had originally been issued on CD through California-based imprint Absolutely Kosher— which is true, though the CD was also printed up domestically in 2006 by Vancouver’s Global Symphonic. For that matter, they’d also released CDs of Sunset Rubdown’s earlier Snake’s Got A Leg album and self-titled EP. In light of that smidge of CanCon erasure, this week we’re getting into some of the other records from the perhaps looked-over Global Symphonic stable.

Founded by Sean Keane and Carlos Williams, Global Symphonic was an oddly esoteric hub. Around the turn of the century, Sean was both the throaty, powerhouse vocalist for Vancouver’s NYHC-styled Dissent, and the effects-coursing guitarist for moody, melancholy post-punkers the Automovement. Fittingly, the label roster reflected that same kind of fluidity, whether showcasing cello-driven goth (Certain Breeds), shred-heavy skate punk (S.T.R.E.E.T.S.), Maiden-inspired instru-metal (Mercury the Winged Messenger), or knotty indie-folk (Happy Kreter).

Though the reach of some of the label’s artists stretched across the globe (particularly Sunset Rubdown and Vancouver’s The Organ), outside of outliers like California’s Ghost Orchids or Toronto’s Hacksaw, Global Symphonic was generally a B.C.-centred arts experiment.

Released earlier this year, Matthew Sweet’s newest solo album, Catspaw, features the power pop great's most feral guitar playing yet. While in the past he had turned to Television's Richard Lloyd, or Richard Hell and the Voidoids members Robert Quine and Ivan Julian to handle the leads on some of his biggest songs, the new album forges forward with Sweet laying down unhinged vibrato ("Blown Away") or slip-slidin', back-masked sustain ("Parade of Lights").

Well before snarling through his Catspaw with raw abandon, though, Sweet and Co. praised the world's doofiest Great Dane with a playful reworking of the iconic theme to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! His band's tribute was part of 1995's Saturday Morning: Cartoon's Greatest Hits compilation. Having been a major fan of the cowardly mutt and the cartoon's uniquely gothic presentation, Sweet was quick to single out the Scooby theme when album producer Ralph Sall came calling for a cover.

“It’s kind of funny, because I’m really known as more of a cat person— I’m a cat maniac! But when I was a kid, I actually watched Scooby-Doo regularly. I really liked ghosts and monsters, all that spooky stuff. Even if, as I remember it, it was pretty much always Old Man Withers that was really causing the haunting, I really dug the spooky vibe that Scooby-Doo had."

"Fine musical products for the socially unaccepted"

I’ve been trying to find a hard copy of this tagline/mission statement from Gern Blandsten Records I saw on Discogs, but even within the broader context of the American underground’s varying bands of misfits, it's fair to say the New Jersey imprint’s eclectic run from the early ‘90s through to the mid ‘00s was an especially out of step affair.

Founded by Charles Maggio at the dawn of the ‘90s, Gern Blandsten took it's name, strangely, from an old Steve Martin stand-up routine. While the label didn’t quite dip its toes into the world of comedy, the net was cast wide enough to capture bone-chilling, thrash-indebted hardcore (Maggio’s own Rorschach); literati emo (Native Nod, The Van Pelt); sugary, synth-fried shoegaze (All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors); esoteric underground hip-hop (Dälek); drawl-heavy Americana (Canyon); and a mix of out-of-time mod (Chisel) and spy rock (The Impossible Five). It’s a wild ride, to say the least.

Of the many great scenes in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat —his 1996 semi-fictionalized biopic on painter and friend Jean-Michel Basquiat— one that’s often stuck in my head is of this wealthy couple being given a tour of Basquiat’s New York studio space while they’re looking to make a purchase. After questioning the artist’s practice of constantly scratching out words across his many canvases, Basquiat’s art dealer, Annina Nosei, quips dryly: “well, they are more meaningful in their absence, no?” Hitting the nexus between creativity and commercialism, the line is equal parts poignant, cynical, and hilarious.

How does this relate to Vancouver’s ACTORS, you ask? Well, for the past several years band leader Jason Corbett has gone for a less-is-more approach with his guitar lines. Though his choices are lean—skeletal, even—this minimalism is an effective accent to the otherwise rich backdrop of Shannon Hemmett’s ‘80s-gauzy synth palette, drummer Adam Fink’s motorik drive, and new bassist Kendall Wooding’s steadfast, yet slinky lock-groove picking. With their latest album, Acts of Worship, the foursome are primed to make converts of many.

Speaking with Gut Feeling, Jason and Kendall got into gear specs, trem bar-armed Charvels, and the often in-the-box bombast of their Acts of Worship.

This month's Gut Feeling Podcast is an interview with Supercrush vocalist/guitarist Mark Palm. While currently based in Seattle, Mark grew up in Vancouver, so we got into some of his earliest experiences in the Lower Mainland punk and hardcore scene.

Throughout the talk, Mark gets into: playing shows with his first proper band, Look Inside; joining the great Reserve 34; the time he tried his hand at stand up comedy; the time he modeled for Wrangler Jeans; somewhat hesitantly joining a joke band about competitive swimming; the impact of Expo 86 mascot Expo Ernie on the world of Supercrush; and a couple of other things, too!

Mark was the first person I'd interviewed for Gut Feeling last October (just a couple of hours ahead of a call with Steph from Punitive Damage), so this is something of an anniversary party. Enjoy!

You could look at Ken Olden's personal discography as an exercise in working in extremes. On the one hand, he's helped handcraft high velocity positivity as part of Youth Crew-styled hardcore bands Battery and Better Than A Thousand. On the other side of the spectrum, there's the devastatingly detuned gloom he's chunked out for over a quarter century as the lead guitarist of Damnation A.D.

While initially formed as a studio project between multi-instrumentalist Olden and vocalist Mike McTernan, by the time they tracked the towering doom of 1995's No More Dreams of Happy Endings, the group had swelled to include guitarist Hillel Halloway, bassist Alex Merchlinsky, and drummer Dave Ward. The debut album went big with psyche-fracking moshes ("No More Dreams") and panicked post-hardcore attacks ("No Way Out"), with McTernan's fraught howls homing in on abject feelings of hopelessness. Unlike most mosh-centered hardcore bands of the era, Olden and co. also threw listeners for a loop with an eerily calm and elegiac take on 19th century composer Frédéric Chopin's iconic “Funeral March” (from the third movement of his Piano Sonata No. 2). Again, working in extremes.

Shortly after thinking about the heavier side of Jade Tree Records for a recent newsletter, I reached out to Ken to get more details on the creation of Damnation's first full-length, and his overall approach to tone. It's a whopper of a gear talk, with Ken getting into the album's drum-forward arrangements, the title track's surprisingly grungy roots, and more.

BY GREGORY ADAMS

For my money, one of the ‘90s best compilations was Saturday Morning: Cartoon’s Greatest Hits. Described at the time as “a truly altoonative collection of cartoon classics,” the comp found a bunch of Gen X-aged acts getting playfully nostalgic with punk, power-pop, and bubblegum tributes to vintage kids programming from Hanna-Barbera (i.e. Matthew Sweet’s “Scooby-Doo Where Are You?"), Sid and Marty Krofft (The Murmurs’ “H.R. Pufnstuf”), Filmation (Juliana Hatfield and Tanya Donnelly’s “Josie and the Pussycats”), and more.

One of the more memorably aggro offerings on the record is face to face’s SoCal punk take on “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man.” It’s a suitably speedy, spinach-and-Marshall-stack-powered cover that goes for the gusto with a seafaring intro, searing octave solos, and vocalist/guitarist Trever Keith’s commitment to the bit as he rifles out the tough-talkin’ colloquialisms of the world’s squintiest sailor (sample lyric: “I'm one tough Gazookus, which hates all Palookas wot ain't on the up and square”).

The guitarist often surfs atop an enormous, undulating riptide of reversed reverb, this backmasked beauty surging through pieces like “Light Prism” or the record’s title track. Though Monkman’s knack for sigh-worthy shoegaze hooks is undeniable, his pedalboarding likewise plunges the album into more experimental territory.

“I would just randomly record a riff, not even to a tempo, and then I would add a bunch of leads on top of it—really cheesy, long lead parts,” Monkman explains of blissfully twisted Bleached Wavves moments like its introductory “Clouded Formation,” a reversed recording which Monkman adds may or may not appear in unaltered form on his next Zoon LP.

Shortlisted for this year’s Polaris Music Prize, Bleached Wavves is a rewarding listen full of nuanced hooks and deceptively minimal arranging. Speaking with Gut Feeling, Monkman dished on his gear specs, his love of Delta blues, and the beat-up acoustic that serves as the bedrock of his Bleached Wavves.

While occasionally accurate, it’s funny to think that a record label can be defined by a single genre. If you bring up Motown, Fat Wreck Chords, or Earache in conversation, for instance, many folks will start spinning the sounds of ‘60s soul, board-shorted pop-punk, or first wave death metal in their brains. That shorthand rarely takes into account the full scope of a label roster. There are often exceptions to the rule, and that’s why this week we’re talking about Jade Tree Records.

For a good chunk of time between the mid ‘90s and the mid ‘00s, the Delaware-based label was known for iconic emo-punk releases from bands like the Promise Ring and Jets to Brazil, as well as the adjacent experimentalism of Joan of Arc (themselves built from the ashes of punk group Cap’n Jazz, whose full discography was re-released by Jade Tree as 1998’s Analphabetapolothology).

This month’s Gut Feeling Podcast is an interview with The Noise Floor Recording Studio‘s Terry Ondang. Currently based in Gabriola Island, B.C., the Noise Floor’s idyllic beachside setting has brought artists like Orville Peck, Dead Soft, Wolf Parade, and Partner through its doors over the past decade.

On top of studio life, Terry gets into: Nirvana as her gateway to punk and hardcore; booking SNFU and D.O.A. shows at The Java Joint as Miss Terry; winging a show offer e-mail to Fugazi, and cinching it; adding guest vocals to various Noise Floor sessions; and prepping new music of her own some 25+ years after first grappling with a Strat copy.

It’s a deep dive, hope you enjoy!

Dumb’s “Pizza Slice” officially came out of the oven last week, but the Vancouver quartet’s latest, and arguably spiciest single (one side of a split 7-inch with Tough Age) will undoubtedly stay fresh for some time yet.

Part of this comes down to the band’s twitchy post-punk framework and guitarist-vocalist Franco Rossino’s half-spoken, stream-of-consciousness itemizing of Value Village trade-ins, friendly phone calls and—yes, obviously—pecorino-topped foodstuffs. It’s also a song where guitarist Nick Short goes absolutely buck on his whammy bar, providing a series of top platform dives and quivering pinch squeals that, as he explains, pay homage to his friends in San Francisco’s Pardoner, but likewise conjure the seedy and chaotic, Slayer-style underbelly of metal.

The whammy acrobatics are a return to form, of sorts, with Short explaining that he recently returned to the agile bar dynamics of a Fender Stratocaster after chunking out the bulk of 2018’s Seeing Green and 2019’s Club Nites LP on a Les Paul—an instrument famously lacking an extra, string-waggling appendage.

We’ve got another rewind on-deck, this time looking at dark pop figure Tamaryn.

I’d interviewed Tamaryn all the way back in 2008 for a Canadian magazine start-up, though the publication folded before the first issue was able to hit the press.

Missy D has made her name in Vancouver as a longtime emcee with a penchant for soulfully-sung hooks. That’s on display, full-force, across last year’s joyful, emotionally poignant Yes Mama EP, and more recently through this spring’s synth-bass bumping “Rollin” single.

Earlier this year, Missy D went multi-hyphenate by launching her own Instagram Live series, Missy D Interviews. Each Wednesday, she connects with a mixture of established and emerging artists to talk music and more. This includes collaborative partners like rapper Kimmortal, and Vancouver artists like Teon Gibbs and Prado. She’ll also speak with producers, photographers, social justice advocates, and more. No matter the guest, Missy D is enthusiastic to chop it up, often serenading each guest as they pop into the bottom half of an Instagram Live split-frame.

Urbana, Illinois’ Mud Records began in the ‘90s as Geoff Merritt’s off-shoot label from his main imprint, the indie-pop focused Parasol Records (which, itself, was an outgrowth of his Parasol mail-order music distribution hub). According to the label bio, Merritt’s Mud “wanted to document the post-Nirvana Urbana-Champaign music scene,” perhaps taking a more ragged and punk-centred look at ‘90s-era guitar music than comparatively more-polished Parasol acts like The Velvet Crush.

Early on, Mud championed local acts that would go on to great acclaim, like with a 7-inch for fuzz-layering, eventual major label signees Hum, or through the landmark The Age of Octeen album from Champaign emo favourites Braid. Amp-cranked rock wasn’t always Mud’s M.O., though, with some of their sweetest releases likewise being their subtlest.

All told, I was generally more aware of the emo-adjacent music on Mud than the power-pop on Parasol (though an electronics-spiked 7-inch from New Jersey’s All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors is a sick outlier in the latter’s catalogue). While certainly not getting too deep into Mud’s 60-plus releases, these are a few of my favourites.

Jack Duckworth’s Discogs page is a hefty scroll-through, and even that is incomplete. Born on Vancouver Island but currently based in Glasgow, the multi-hyphenate’s back catalogue runs from teenage punk (Forgotten), to wiry, danceable hardcore (The Measure), to darkly romantic post-punk (Radio Berlin), to industrial-tinged landscapes (A Luna Red, Primes), and more — no Discogs listing for his mid ’90s emo band Slough of Despond, though it’s possible they never recorded.

Soft Riot is Jack’s current and longest tenured guise, first formed as a solo project while living in London, England in 2011. While acts like Radio Berlin, A Luna Red, and Primes poked at synth-forward sounds, Jack was also primarily handling guitar and bass duties in those earlier projects.

With Soft Riot, he fully submerged himself into frazzled sinewaves, fanciful synth patches, and dense layers of digital percussion. Along the way, he’s delivered twitchy, post-apocalyptic terrorscaping (2013’s Fiction Prediction), avant-pop anthems (2018’s The Outsider In The Mirrors), and evocative electro ambiance (2020’s elegiac Chin Up).