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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”).

Photo by Vanessa Heins

BY GREGORY ADAMS

Whether through ethereal slide patterns or a mauve miasma of chord work, Zoon’s Daniel Monkman delivered a staggeringly gorgeous smorgasbord of guitar layering on the project’s 2020 debut full-length, 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).

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.

You like your hardcore old school? Deranged had that covered early on through landmark releases from Toronto’s Career Suicide and Fucked Up. Feel like getting upended by a fuzzed-out spiral of grungy, post-surf guitar damage? The grand majority of White Lung’s early catalogue was issued with a Deranged logo on the back, too (though hats off to Hockey Dad Records for issuing that first 7-inch). It’s a label that’s dabbled in anything from abrasive d-beat (D.S.-13, Heat) to all-smiles power pop (The Tranzmitors), and everything in between.

By no means a comprehensive look at a label nearly 400 releases deep (last leaving us with Gainesville jangle punk unit UV-TV’s Happy LP in 2019), but inspired by some semi-recent pieces I’d put together around Mint Records, Constellation, and Touch & Go, these are a few personal faves from the Deranged catalogue.

Earlier this spring, Vancouver indie-pop veterans Said the Whale teased their still-in-the-works seventh full-length album with the resplendent “Everything She Touches Is Gold To Me,” a pitch-perfect, plaid-and-paisley whirl of Pacific Northwest psychedelia. Led by the band’s patented multi-part vocal harmonies, it all goes down rather smooth, though the guitarwork took some creative finessing to get there.

Specifically, guitarist/vocalist Tyler Bancroft only hit the tone zone with his vintage Harmony Stratotone after bandmate Ben Worcester helped cut back the instrument’s curmudgeonly crackling sound by getting down on his knees and holding Tyler’s patch chord firmly in place during a take. Awkward, sure, but Ben’s added handiwork got the job done.

Speaking with Gut Feeling, Tyler got into making Said the Whale’s latest with producer Steve Bays (Hot Hot Heat, Mounties, Left Field Messiah), the Bancroft family’s intergenerational appreciation for Sears catalogue guitars, and whether or not the band’s newest member will bring scintillating six-string acrobatics to these newest songs.

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.

BY GREGORY ADAMS

BY GREGORY ADAMS

The Sloan archive is sprawling, impressively so. Credit that to nearly 30 years of activity and four unique songwriting voices in members Chris Murphy, Patrick Pentland, Jay Ferguson, and Andrew Scott. For nearly a decade, the Toronto-by-way-of-Halifax foursome have unearthed a trove of alternate takes, scrapped demos, and other unreleased rarities for a series of vinyl boxsets around early albums Twice Removed, One Chord to Another, and Navy Blues. With their new, limited edition B-Sides Win Vol. 1 vinyl collection, Sloan are showcasing deep cuts previously found on various singles and compilations.

This first volume covers the band’s early days, leading up to and around the release of their landmark Smeared LP from 1992. While arguably not the loudest period of Sloan (at the very least, it’s neck-and-neck with the air raid siren-blaring AC/DC worship of Navy Blues anthem “Money City Maniacs”), it’s certainly the scrappiest, equally pulling influence from the shoegazing sonics of My Bloody Valentine and various distorted factions of the American Underground.

Welcome to Gut Feeling, a newsletter about how musicians found their sound. It’s written by me, Gregory Adams.

Some quick background info: I’m an arts reporter up in Vancouver, B.C., generally publishing artist profiles through a handful of newspapers, magazines, and websites. Some local, some not so local! Mostly hardcore and metal coverage, but not always! Through a mix of luck, hustle, and privilege, I’ve been able to speak with a number of artists about the music they make, and how/why they make it. Inspired by other writers out there, I’m looking forward to bringing stories to Substack, too.

Gut Feeling is in soft-launch mode throughout the fall, but the plan is to self-publish weekly conversations with artists I’m feeling right now. Some may be more direct profiles, while others might be Q+As on the gear that got them through their latest release. I’ll also be doing track reviews, the occasional throwback piece, and more!

Most editions of the newsletter will be free, but I’m looking at some exclusive content for paid subscribers a little further down the line. I’m starting off today by looking at a couple of brain-crushing hardcore cuts, though an interview with one of my favourite local bands pops up by week’s end.