From Hotel2Tango to Studio PM, Montreal's producers, engineers and string arrangers quietly shaped some of alt rock's most influential albums, from Arcade Fire and The National to Sarah McLachlan and Frank Ocean.
Sin-é was a tiny Irish cafe at 122 St. Mark's Place with one cappuccino machine and no real stage. In 1992 it became Jeff Buckley's Monday-night residency and the room where Columbia signed him. The story of a forty-seat venue that launched Grace.
A federal radio quota, a small Toronto label, a Montreal recording studio in a former garment loft, and a juried prize designed to ignore sales numbers, four pieces of infrastructure that turned a mid-sized country into the gravitational center of English-language indie. The pieces still exist. The result no longer does.
Two venues, two provinces, four decades of Canadian rock, Les Foufounes Électriques against The Horseshoe Tavern. Who carries more weight, who bled more, and why El Mocambo plays a different game.
From Hanna, Alberta to Burlington, Ontario, the bands that turned Canadian radio into a flannel-and-distortion factory between 1994 and 2007, and what the critics did to them on the way out. By the mid-1990s Canada had a Bryan Adams problem and a Tragically Hip problem, too much success funneled into two national lanes, with little [&he
From a 150-cap punk room on Sainte-Catherine to a sweltering hockey arena in Verdun, this is the live-music memory of a city that has always punched above its weight.
The single that made R.E.M. globally famous is also the gravity well that kept them from escaping mainstream expectations. A diagnosis, not a takedown.
