Best of 2011: Our Favourite Albums By Other Bands

Sandro Perri - Impossible SpacesRich Aucoin - We're All Dying to LiveMy Morning Jacket - CircuitalMiracle Fortress - Was I The Wave?Shotgun Jimmie - Transistor SisterThe Burning Hell - Flux CapacitorHooded Fang - Tosta MistaBeirut - The Rip TideTimber Timbre - Creep On Creepin' OnIron & Wine - Kiss Each Other CleanDoug Hoyer - Walks with the Tender and Growing NightWilco - The Whole Love

I know it’s getting a bit late to do 2011 year end lists, but it was another great year for music, so I wanted to quickly make a note of the albums we enjoyed most.

Here they are in no particular order (except that Sandro Perri really was #1 …so good):

Sandro PerriImpossible Spaces
Rich AucoinWe’re All Dying to Live
My Morning JacketCircuital
Miracle FortressWas I The Wave?
Shotgun JimmieTransistor Sister
The Burning HellFlux Capacitor
Hooded FangTosta Mista
BeirutThe Rip Tide
Timber TimbreCreep On Creepin’ On
Iron & WineKiss Each Other Clean
Doug HoyerWalks with the Tender and Growing Night
WilcoThe Whole Love

Check them all out if you get the chance and support the bands making such amazing music! We’ve got lots on the go for 2012, so expect some new tunes from us as the year chugs along.

Happy Halloween!

Here’s an oldy, but a ghouly for your trick or treating playlist.

Happy Halloween everyone!

New Music: Thirteen – Big Star Cover

Dog Is Blue - Thirteen (a 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!

Thirteen (a Big Star Cover) by Dog Is Blue

Press: Popmatters Review of Tortoise

Dog Is Blue - Tortoise Album CoverThe good folks at Popmatters posted a very flattering review of Tortoise this week. Amongst the praise was this humbling quote for the books:

It’s refreshing to hear a record almost entirely free of irony and informed by a childlike curiosity that reminds us how pleasant and important the human imagination can be. Sit back, enjoy, and smile all the day long, for Dog Is Blue is as unpretentious as they come.

Read the entire review here. Suffice to say that we’d never heard of Greg Brown before, but are very happy with the comparison…

Buy CD and digital from Zunior | Bandcamp | iTunes | emusic

Art: 100 Days of Batman Drawings

Batman Is watching You - 100 Days of Batman Jealous of all the attention that Laura’s art has been getting her lately, I decided to get off my ass and get back into drawing too. The result is a new tumblr site where I’ll be posting 100 drawings of Batman done on my iPad using various sketching apps and a stylus.

Check it out and enjoy the self-deprecation as I put the caped-crusader through my embarrassing quest to remember how to draw:

http://100daysofbatman.tumblr.com

(the image to the left is an animated .gif I put together of two of the drawings…)

Food Art: Laura’s Drawings On Display

Laura Heaney - Pringles, coloured pencil on paperWe played a really fun show at the Central this weekend that saw me screwing up lyrics and zapping people in the eye with a laser bubble gun, but more on that tomorrow.

In the meantime, Laura’s art has been ramping up more and more lately and her latest series is on display at our favourite hang-out, Broadview Espresso. This time around she’s calling out the majestic standing we’ve given to processed food by meticulously rendering various types of junky snacks in hyper-realistic coloured pencil drawings reminiscent of old dutch still-lives. That’s a mouthful (zing!), so just take a look at the amazing image to the left for a better idea…

Teaming up with Katrina Atkinson, the sister-in-law of our good friend/viola player extraordinaire, Anna Atkinson, the two are having an opening reception at Broadview Espresso in the evening on Thursday, August 11.

In the meantime, check out more of Laura’s amazing work at her site as well as her newly created Facebook page.

Buy Our Music: Hot Air Balloons EP Now On Bandcamp

Remember last year when we released a collection made up of a new song and some covers of tunes written by friends of ours called Hot Air Balloons EP?

Well, it’s finally available on Bandcamp for those of you who want to buy the individual songs (we still recommend buying the whole shebang from Zunior.com for only $2.22, as it all goes to support the Daily Bread Food Bank).

Want our version of The Burning Hell’s “It Happens In Florida” for your very own? Here it is for only $0.99!

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