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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.

Paul is currently pressing up monthly sticker packs of his cross-pollinated comics designs through Patreon, as well as supplying some surrealist imagery you can to contort to your own liking via his new, self-published Ephemera Eyewash zine. But as a follow-up to the Deaf Club piece over at Guitar World, I thought I'd reach out to Paul and see how he went about cutting up Kiss for his latest album cover.

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.

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."

There is a bit of true-life tragedy to the tune, which is based on guitarist Stefan Babcock's long worn-in, 2006 Gibson Les Paul Special. The guitar had been gifted to Stefan by a friend, after another six-string of his accidentally got smashed-up on PUP's first U.S. tour in 2013. She came with the name Matilda.

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.

I recently found an old box of Memorex tapes containing interviews for a good chunk of my earliest published work, and a few unpublished oddities. One of those cassettes included a quick conversation with Sonny Kay, then the L.A.-based vocalist for Year Future.

Sonny's vocals made a big impact on me, whether it was him shrieking his cords raw above the skewed, mid '90s hardcore aesthetic of Angel Hair, or re-emerging with loads of digital delay-caked moans through the groundbreaking, keyboard-cloaked art-core of The VSS.

A couple of bands later, Year Future’s debut 12-inch — issued through Sonny's Gold Standard Laboratories imprint in 2003 — trafficked in a more acerbic, streamlined fury. Sonny's vocals on it are as lacerating as ever; guitarist Rockey Crane (also of Dead and Gone) is in full-on creep mode on songs like "All Of Your Eggs," where he works a penetrative, spring reverb skittering like a disciple of Dead Kennedy’s East Bay Ray. Bassist Sam Ott (formerly of the Fucking Angels) and drummer Jim Andersen (also of The Pattern and Talk Is Poison) held down the rhythm section at the time.

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!

Considering the searing guitar work she and Barishi’s Graham Brooks supply to Squeeze, I also had a few gear-related Q’s lined-up for SASAMI while I had her on the line.

This one’s a quick Gut Feeling gear talk, hope you dig it!

Photo by Oliver Halfin

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.

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.

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!

Sonically, Dissolution Wave is a total crusher, with both Bobby and vocalist-guitarist Doyle Martin powering through bittersweet space rock with effects-soaked aplomb. The album was tracked at Hum guitarist Matt Talbott’s Earth Analog Studios in Champaign, IL by Zac Montez, with Talbott also contributing piano and hypnotic guitar loops (he’d previously produced the band’s 2013 debut full-length, Further Out).

It’d been a while since I’d done a Gut Feeling gear talk, so while I had him on the line, Bobby graciously got into some of Dissolution Wave‘s most out-there tones.

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.

Speaking with Gut Feeling outside of their show in Vancouver, Chris Slorach got into the theft, METZ’s eternal gratitude to the broader indie rock community, and how one of the hardest working bands in underground punk is determined to work even harder.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Obviously something awful happened to the band this past week with the theft of the trailer, but on the other side of that, there was an immediate and heart-warming groundswell of support coming from friends, family, and the fanbase to help you through this.

Chris Slorach: There had been a lot of nerves about coming on this tour. As things were unfolding [with the theft], it felt like, ‘Is someone trying to tell me to stop doing this?’ So we woke up and the trailer was gone, but over the course of that day, the outpouring of support made me want to work harder. The number of people showing up to the shows with pedals; people from guitar stores offering up amps and drum kits….we felt a lot of love. The kind of thing that makes you feel misty-eyed.

There’s a lot of motivation when you realize that people really give a shit about what you do. It puts everything you do in a completely different perspective.

With what people had been bringing you, were they all things that had been in that list of stolen gear, or at least comparable?

People were messaging us over e-mail or Instagram asking us what we’d already acquired, and what we needed. A guy showed up to the Seattle show being like, ‘You can have this bass amp for a ridiculously low amount of money.’ Now I’ve got an 8x10 for the rest of the tour. Another guy showed up with a 4x12 for Alex. We were smart enough to bring all our guitars into the hotel [that night] so we managed to save the things with heavy sentimental value, but we lost everything else.

We left L.A. at 10 am, and by the time we got to San Francisco we had a full backline waiting for us—a smattering of pedals we could choose from; cables. People just rallied together behind us. I don’t even know how to express the amount of gratitude that we all have for the love that we felt from everybody. We didn’t miss a beat, you know? It was incredible.

Was there anything that was trickier to track down?

Yeah, there were boutique pedals that we had, but for touring we try to keep things as standard as possible. There are a handful of challenges that come with trying to replace an entire backline, right?

It’s a unique moment for METZ in that you’re out supporting your livestream concert album, Live at the Opera House, which was made last year to promote Atlas Vending in the absence of touring and in-person shows.

We’re touring to support Atlas Vending, that’s the idea here. The live record was a placeholder, but it was something we wanted to do. It was fun to present the album [Atlas Vending] in a live format that people could watch while they couldn’t go to shows.

Sometimes songs take on a new life when you take them out them out on the road. Since you’ve lived with Atlas Vending for a while now, have there been any mutations to these songs?

There are definitely places where we can stretch out in a lot of the new songs, but we haven’t fully explored that yet.

Anything from the record you’re especially juiced to be playing?

I’m excited to play everything off Atlas Vending. When we were making it, it felt like these songs would be perfect live.

“Framed by the Comet’s Tail” is a favourite, though. It’s one of the slower tracks on the record, but it’s got dynamics you can play around with in a live setting.

On the other side of that, are there any METZ songs that haven’t leant themselves to live performance?

We have a couple things that were specifically meant for record—a couple songs on [2018's] Strange Peace are like that, for sure. We also have this song coming out on a split with a band called Adulkt Life from the UK...we have a live version that we’ll do, but the [studio] version is meant for a record.

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 imprint. That’s great! I’d caught the announcement over at , 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 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.

"Fine musical products for the socially unaccepted"

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.

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 and . 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

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.

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 ) will undoubtedly stay fresh for some time yet.

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

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 (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.

Jack Duckworth’s 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 (), to darkly romantic post-punk (), to industrial-tinged landscapes (, Primes), and more — no Discogs listing for his mid ’90s emo band Slough of Despond, though it’s possible they never recorded.

While seemingly having slowed down in recent years, Deranged Records remains one of the most prolific punk labels of the 21st century. Founded by Gord Dufresne in 1999, the Canadian indie imprint has been home to hundreds of releases from a wide variety of punk-adjacent sounds.

The latest episode of the Gut Feeling Podcast is an extended look at / guitarist Jimmy James, who for the newsletter a couple of posts ago. There were a number of musical moments to our talk, which Jimmy punctuated with his prized Silvertone, and since the bulk of that didn’t quite fit the Q&A format, I’m posting the audio so you can get a feel for his style.

Hey everybody!

Hey everyone, welcome back to Gut Feeling!

Still working out some kinks, but the entire archive has been moved from Substack onto the newsletter’s current home at buttondown.email/GutFeeling. Looking forward to testing some features coming up through the platform soon, but in the meantime I’m going to kick off a semi-regular rewind of unpublished pieces that got lost over the years.

This profile on Betrayed was written in 2006 for Vancouver alt-weekly the Georgia Straight, when Betrayed was scheduled to open for . Instead, Betrayed broke up and the piece got shelved…until now!

Hey everyone!

Maybe you’ve caught wind of this, but either way it looks like the Substack Pro model has led to some rather exclusionary, transphobic rhetoric coming from a group of writers the company has invested in (vis-a-vis, among other things, salaries in part paid for through the percentages the company is taking off of other writers’ paid subscriptions). It’s looking like that’s the way forward for the platform, and like many writers, I’m not that invested in sticking around for it.

Maybe this is a good time to regroup and rethink where to take Gut Feeling from here. I’m looking into the other newsletter models out there, and am frankly a little overwhelmed. Thinking this might take a week or two to figure out, but the good news is it’s looking fairly easy to import the existing e-mail list to a different service, so you’ll continue to get the posts in your inbox once I get back at it. Hoping that bouncing the archive will be just as easy.