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Finally, drum & bass with a little meat on its bones, rife with quiet menace and dark as all hell. Bareknuckled beats boosted off Bu
After phoning in the Tricky Woo bomb scare with their debut 7" and last year's Rock and Roll Music Part One, Tricky Woo finally light the fuse with The Enemy Is Real. Thanks to having Sonic Unyon in their corner, Tricky Woo hold true to their claims, blowing the Canadian indie scene to kingdom come. These hellbent rock 'n' rollers leave the ghetto of garage with nary a look back and don't stop with merely entertaining--they manage to send their love-filled messages of hate with the precision of a nailgun to your head. So for god sakes put down that Bran Van 3000 CD and pick up the best thing to come out of Montreal in a long, long time. 9/10 (Johnson Cummins) Jeff Buckley Sketches for 'My Sweetheart the Drunk' (Columbia/Sony) It's difficult not to hear Jeff Buckley's chiming and sublime rock music as all the more poignant now that he's gone. And it's difficult to put these early sessions and demos for what would have been his second album up against the buffed beauty of Grace. But it's not hard to hear Buckley shine through on this double-disc set, whether it's on the full-band studio recordings produced by Tom Verlaine or solo four-track "sketches." Buckley's liquid-crystal voice verges on pure soul at points here. Fitting, for that's all he is now. 8/10 (Chris Yurkiw)
Usually once the Factor-approved emblem is affixed on the back of a CD you can pretty much cancel the trip to your local record store BUT... in this extremely rare case this government-approved Vancouver-based rock is actually not half-bad. Kind of nearing GWAR silliness and including what is sure to be a hit in Quebec (the 10-1/2 minute epic "Quadrilogy"), you can't help but crack a bit of a grin when you hear the male/female vocal duet dance a little too close to "Bohemian Rhapsody." Recommended to that rare breed of people who thought Spinal Tap was a real band. 6.5/10 (Johnson Cummins) At Jailhouse with What the Fuck and the Bratts, Saturday, May 30, 9pm, $5.
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Amon Tobin Permutations (Ninja Tune/Outside)
ddy Rich claim the foreground, be they fluid as a cat on the prowl or dense as a batucada riot on the streets of Rio. This over a narcotic blend of jazz, samba and film scores, a sexy, sinister concoction the colour of gasoline on wet asphalt. Pulling up within shooting distance of barefaced lounge jazz and Braziliana, Tobin shows what side his bread is buttered on. Were Permutations a film noir, it would be lauded for both its 'gritty realism' and 'trippy surrealism,' and that's a damn hard balance to strike. 9.5/10 (Rupert Bottenberg)
Tricky Woo The Enemy Is Real (Sonic Unyon)
Muscle Bitches Hellephant (Factor)