David Bowie has always been a favourite of ours and at the time of his death it occurred to us that we had never covered any of his songs. Here’s our take on an absolute classic, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” from 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Acoustic Temptations cover (free download)
I recently found this old acoustic recording of The Temptations’ “Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)” on an old hard drive. The vocals aren’t perfect, the lyrics aren’t always even right and the guitar could use work, but that never stopped me from uploading to Soundcloud before.
Listen and download for free below!
Click here for more details on the cover illustration.
New Music: Original Christmas Song for Charity
Check out our first original holiday song, as part of the latest Zunior Christmas album in support of The Daily Bread Food Bank.
New Music: J.J. Cale Cover
Arguably the cover song we’ve recorded more than any other, it’s about time we shared a version of J.J. Cale’s “Call The Doctor.”
New Music: Holiday Stan Rogers & Flaming Lips Combo Song!
I don’t blame you for thinking that headline sounds a bit ridiculous, but it’s true: we’ve got a new tune on Zunior’s annual charity Christmas compilation that blends the melody of Stan Rogers’ classic “Barrett’s Privateers” with the lyrics of The Flaming Lips “Christmas At the Zoo.”
Not only that, but our song is in amazingly zany company, as our good friends The Burning Hell have combined “Summer of ’69” with “Deck the Halls” and Nick Zubeck’s blend of “Sunglasses At Night” and “Silent Night” is amazing.
In case it’s not obvious, the mandate for this year’s charity collection (Zunior does a holiday compilation every year to benefit the Daily Bread Food Bank) was to take a revered Canadian song and overlay the lyrics of a Christmas classic. Our interpretation of those two things was a bit more loose than some, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t the most fun we’ve had in the studio in a long time. On paper it’s definitely the weirdest thing we’ve ever recorded, but I’d like to think we added our own strange holiday flare to the whole thing.
Check out the compilation at Zunior.com for only $8.88 and get some crazy original music for the holidays along with the warm & fuzzies of supporting a great charity.
New Music: Thirteen – Big Star Cover
Boom. Married. We’re now officially “Canada’s garage-folk power couple” (I can put things in quotation marks that only I said, right?). In honour of our recent nuptials (held at the amazing Daverne farm house where we did some recording last year), we covered our favourite song/first dance— Big Star’s “Thirteen” (originally released on the amazing album #1 Record in 1972).
It’s been recorded over the years by some amazing bands and we’ve always wanted to put our spin on it. In this case, that involved the usual amount of homemade guitar pedals, weird old drum machines ($10 Yamaha RX17 mostly) as well as throwing the entire thing through a hand-me-down Yamaha MT-8X cassette recorder with some homemade delay and wah for good measure. Of course, as usual, Laura’s voice is the real standout here…
The result is something we’re really happy with, as it’s different than any version we’ve heard.
Listen by clicking the “play” button below, or download it for keeps by clicking the arrow on the right side. Thanks for listening!
New Music: Gordon Lightfoot Cover for Canada Day!
Happy Canada Day, folks. In honour of the Great White North’s big day, Herohill asked us to be part of an amazing collection of musicians paying tribute to one of the nations most revered songwriters, Gordon Lightfoot.
He’s got a lot of material to choose from, so after a few days of listening to the LPs in our collection we couldn’t resist trying our hand at “High and Dry,” from the Sundown album. The melody in this tune is top notch. I hope we did it justice!
New Music: Free Download of Tortoise!
In honour of our tour kickoff tonight with Pat LePoidevin at The Tranzac in Toronto, here’s a free download of the title-track of our upcoming album, Tortoise!
More raucous than the previously posted “Southern Ontario,” Mathias of The Burning Hell called this one a “garage-rock anthem.”
Listen below or click the black arrow to download it!
New Video and Download: Southern Ontario
Remember a few weeks back when we went to Joey Bruni‘s farm to shoot performance videos for Tortoise? Well, here we are with Anna Atkinson playing “Southern Ontario” live on an old tractor!
Speaking of which, press for Tortoise is starting to roll in and They Wounded Jukebox had some very flattering things to say about “Southern Ontario” (and us in general). They also posted the track for download on Soundcloud, which you can listen to below or click the arrow on the right side to grab it for later.
We also added both it and “Tortoise” to our CBC Radio 3 page, so head over there to become a fan and take a listen!
New Music: Construction & Destruction Tribute!
This album has been a very well kept secret for a long time and our track in particular has been ready since February, but it’s finally time to unveil the excellent tribute to our good friends Construction & Destruction!
A Nova Scotia-based duo made up of David Trenaman and Colleen Collins, Construction & Destruction are a) an excellent band with over 4 albums under their belt and b) two of the kindest people on the planet. We’re also playing a bunch of shows with them in eastern Canada in May, so it’s been tough keeping this project a secret through all the email back-and-forth.
Not only does this album pay tribute to one of our favourite bands, but it also features covers of THAT band, by our OTHER favourite bands (like The Burning Hell, Shotgun Jimmie & Wax Mannequin to name but a few), so I can’t tell you how excited we are to be a part of it.
We chose the C&D tune “The Oracle,” from their most recent album, the excellent Mutatis Mutandis, as it totally knocked us off our feet when we first heard it. Lyrics like this don’t come around every day. I highly recommend checking out the original, as Colleen’s conviction and delivery is unparalleled.
Listen to our version below and pick up the whole shebang from Zunior.com…oh, and did I mention that all the money goes right to the band themselves? I don’t even think they know about the album yet, so it’ll be a nice surprise if people jump on this (as they should)!