“Chainsaw” Artist: Ramones Album: Ramones Released: February 4, 1976 This song begins with a chainsaw. Jonny Ramone’s heavily distorted, relentless guitar keeps up that chainsaw sound throughout—power chords, power chords, and more power chords—and Joey Ramone’s doo-wop, ooooh-oh-oh vocals don’t even try to disguise the fact that the song is[Read More…]
Music
Deep Cuts: Dark Undertones
Chainsaw Artist: Ramones Album: Ramones Released: February 4, 1976 This song begins with a chainsaw. Jonny Ramone’s heavily distorted, relentless guitar keeps up that chainsaw sound throughout—power chords, power chords, and more power chords—and Joey Ramone’s doo-wop, ooooh-oh-oh vocals don’t even try to disguise the fact that the song is[Read More…]
Redemption Songs
“Why are you bothering to do good for people who have done so much bad?” As the founder of Pros and Cons, a pilot program that gives musical mentorship to prison inmates, Hugh Christopher Brown has put a lot of thought into this question. Ultimately for him, the answer comes[Read More…]
Deep Cuts: Songs for my future wedding
God Only Knows Artist: Beach Boys Album: Pet Sounds Released: May 16, 1966 This wonderful, harmonically complex, feel-good track is not always rightfully recognized as one of the greatest tracks of the 1960s. According to the songwriters, it is a story told from the point of view of a man[Read More…]
Deep Cuts: Creepy Love Songs
Run For Your Life Artist: The Beatles Album: Rubber Soul Year: December 3, 1965 When a song begins with “I’d rather see you dead little girl/ Than to see you with another man,” it’s off to a rocky start. Backed by surprisingly upbeat accompaniment, John Lennon spouts harrowing paranoia in[Read More…]
Deep Cuts: Songs called “Shine a Light”
“Shine a Light” Artist: The Rolling Stones Album: Exile on Main St. Released: May 12, 1972 Though the Rolling Stones’ 1972 double album Exile on Main St. is now considered to be one of the greatest albums of all time, its penultimate track, “Shine a Light,” with its groovy, honky-tonk[Read More…]
Pop rhetoric: The marriage of hip hop and jazz on rap’s periphery
In 2011, three jazz students at Toronto’s Humber College performed a piece inspired by rap collective Odd Future. Their instructors promptly declared that the piece had no artistic value. Undiscouraged, the young musicians uploaded their arrangement to YouTube under the name “The Odd Future Sessions.” As it happened, Odd Future’s[Read More…]
Lose your language to dance with Le Couleur
Montreal-based trio Le Couleur is back in town promoting their latest EP, Dolce Desir. The drummer of the electro-dance-pop group, Steven Chouniard, took time to speak with the Tribune in the midst of their tour, which began in New York City and will be continuing up to Quebec City. For[Read More…]
‘Tis the winter of Mike Dubue’s discontent
Mike Dubue, founder and frontman of Ottawa-based experimental indie band Hilotrons, has spent the last few years stylizing discontent. Hilotrons’ latest album, To Trip with Terpsichore, is not so much about anger but more of an overarching dissatisfaction with the way things are. “Each song is relative to a situation,”[Read More…]
Deep Cuts: Mellow and meditative
Weightless Artist: Marconi Union Album: Single Released: October 16, 2011 In 2011, with the help of professional sound therapists, the British artist Marconi Union purposely crafted the most relaxing song of all time. The eight-minute ambient track is a conglomerate of perfectly calculated harmonic intervals, designed to induce a[Read More…]
