Canadian/Mi’kmaq singer and filmmaker Willie Dunn passed away last week, leaving behind a legacy of cutting revolutionary songs describing the genocide and land theft by colonialists who “founded” Canada. His most enduring song is the epic 10 minute Ballad of Crowfoot but some of his shorter tunes are gut-wrenchingly honest and unwavering depictions of the horrors of residential schools, biological warfare and the slow, bureaucratic genocide by treaty and the Indian Act. Willie will be remembered and missed and hopefully in this new dawn of First Nations uprising, bring inspiration to those fighting for treaty rights and land claims.

Another loss to the music community this week came with the passing of noise pioneer Zev Asher who died age 50 after a long battle with a rare and terminal blood disease.
I hung out with him and we chatted a few times about music, he was a deep and sharp person with lots of interesting stories of his time in Japan, working with the likes of Merzbow , Aube and KK Null. He was also a filmmaker, who made a wonderful documentary on London, Ontario’s legends of noise and improv Nihilist Spasm Band. His work is masterful, deep and of the highest quality within the frame of noise, which is a very hard idiom to work within with compositional conviction. He died too young and struggled with too much pain and it’s a huge huge loss.
Rest In Peace, Zev.

Unbergnar surf garage band from Boston with a very long name… they have a full legth LP coming out on Scorpi – O – Tone in september and I really hope this is a sign of a resurgence in raw surf music. Oh please! Especially when the kids are shredding this hard!

Living up to the name, this band makes a rad sort of falling-down-the-stairs kind of twang R&B punk noise that I quite like. Nabbed one of their self-titled cassettes recently and it’s got some really bad-ass riffs with nice heapings of lo-fi slime ‘pon every tune.

Love the Gunk it’s the only thing to do. I gave their last release a huge thumbs up and their new tape ain’t no different, just a distorted party jam full of the rawest screamers this side of Mactaquac. You will go to their shows and freak out n shit.

Oh, Oh Oh … what’d I say about the return of surf? Damn, what can you do but be totally stoked while listening to Ottawa’s Tropical Dripps? These guys poo riffs n sunshine and under the shit-fi recording hiss are some really really good players, which is key. You need a bit of mastery to rip surf punk riffs this hard and make em fresh. There’s a touch of Richard Hell in the vocals, which puts a cherry on top.

If my best finds of the last year are any indication, Ottawa and Boston are pretty much owning these days, churning out sick band after sick band.. I can barely keep up. Boston’s The Fagettes are no different, bringing back old stylee garage r&b jams and updating them with a bit of rad modern psych/whatev attitude. Great stuff!

Oh of course Nashville is still pumping out fantastic bands.. like Sudonistas for example.. featuring former (and current part-time) skin-pounder for Bad Cop , Karl Merkley. They have a comfortable slow burn made for late night highway driving, check out this track “Can’t Do Right”, the singer howling some tortured soul into the void till it explodes into a distroted keyboard wail right at the end. Sublime.

I have written about Jess Roze before and she returns now as Télégraphe Jungle her unique and instantly gratifying voice meshing perfectly over a much heavier style of songwriting, bolstered by the fretboard fireworks of CRABE ‘s Mertin Höek . The perfect balance of catchy lilting hooks and heavy, fist-pumping breakdowns. Unabashed use of chorus pedals and intricate vocal layering that still leaves the unique quality of Jess’ voice intact. There is youth and sunshine all through this EP with a few dark clouds in all the right places. Each one could be considered a perfect pop/punk tune if pop/punk had gone the route it was meant to, with real emotion, pathos and originality.

Part of a resurgence in tweaky math-punk bands in Montreal (toppling the sloppy garage punk regime of the last 5 years) Girl Arm comes at you bearing a huge artillery of off-center syncopations and sidestep neatly the inherent wankiness of Math-anything by being loud, fast and exciting in all the right changes.