Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo 2019 - Preview

Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo Set To Party Like It’s 1985

by Christine Leonard

Calling all wannabe Ghostbusters, Stormtroopers and Avengers, the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo is pledging to take attendees back to the future! Already celebrating its 14th year, the highly anticipated annual event is primed to welcome an impressive roster of cultural icons and stars of silver and small screens for their 2019 edition.

“I think one of the big marquee things that we’ve got is Michael J. Fox is coming through Calgary. He was supposed to come out last year, but due to medical issues, he just couldn’t make it. He was like ‘I’ve got to make good on this promise to come out to Calgary,’” says director Kandrix Foong, who emphasizes that the Expo isn’t just about science fiction and fantasy franchises.

“The thing we’ve always done with our shows is divide and conquer. Part of our objective is – if you bring a whole family then there’s something for everyone. Dad might be a big Star Trek fan, Mom might be a Vampire Diaries fan and the kids will have other stuff that they are into, as well. So, this is not just one genre or one thing. It is definitely about entertainment in general and we definitely like the idea of exposing people to different forms and genres of entertainment.”

Capitalizing on the fandom surrounding the hottest movies and television shows of today, the Expo introduces emergent trends and artists while showcasing classic characters and treasured titles of yesteryear. It’s a balance that keeps cosplayers and collectors coming back to the four-day marathon of pop media time and again, with over 90,000 people passing through its gates in 2018.

“There’s a lot of depth in terms of the types of celebrities and guests that we bring out. I think every year we bring out 80 to 100 different kinds of guests and you just get a chance to meet the people who are actually working in this industry.”

The year 1985 will be alive and well as the cast of Back to the Future are joined by members of the original Goonies crew. Additionally, the new Hellboy David Harbour will be appearing, as will Shazam’s Zachary Levi, Dr. Who’s Catherine Tate, Baywatch babe Pam Anderson and Robocop’s Peter Weller. And, don’t forget TV’s Wonder Woman, Linda Carter will be presenting “This Life. My Music. My Story.” as a special ticketed event.

“We definitely do offer a broad mix. There are a lot of classic guests who are still very active in what they’re doing and it’s just good to see,” confirms Foong.

Fans and guests will be granted the opportunity to walk-the-walk again this year as the enormously popular POW! (Parade of Wonders) is set to saunter through Calgary’s downtown core on the morning of Friday, April 26.

“It’s like when the Flames are on a championship run, you can feel the energy and momentum throughout the city. Now you’re proud that this is what’s going on in your own backyard!”

The Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo runs from April 25 to 27 at Stampede Park (Calgary)https://www.calgaryexpo.com/en/home.html

25th, April 2019

in • Alberta, CITY

Single Premiere: The Baseborn Band – “Pray It Away”

Single Premiere:
The Baseborn Band
“Pray It Away”

by Christine Leonard

Tanked-up on an unfaltering lust for belting out high-wattage blues, the moonlight howlers who call themselves The Baseborn Band have been treading that fine line between boot-stomping Saturday night dance parties and Sunday morning comedowns since 2017.

Habitually feasting on the hair of the dog that bit them, boisterous lead singer/guitarist Lowell Van Carroll (Wolf Teeth, Insufficient Funds), metrognome/bassist Kuba Van der Pol (D.O.A., The Sweaters) and infernal combustion engine/drummer Dallas Lobb (The Electric Revival, Pervcore) dig deep to generate an impassioned autobiography of hard-rockin’ tunes.

“Some you’d listen to while your drunk and passed out in a ditch and others are ones that will get you movin’ and jumping around,” explains Van Carroll.

The Baseborn Band’s self-titled debut packs a whiskey and diesel wallop. It’s an impressive measure of the trio’s heavy-blues horsepower and burning appetite for staging roof-raising live performances. The album’s standout single, “Pray It Away,” expertly captures the essence of good intentions gone bad. Something the rough-and-tumble outfit not only identifies with but also readily confesses to in song whenever the opportunity presents itself! Channelling spiritual influencers ranging from Tom Waits to Motörhead, The Baseborn Band will school you on how to shake hands with your personal demons and tap into the potential of your inner Lemmy.

The Baseborn Band performs live on The Baseborn Band performs with Mammoth Grove, Denimachine, Bloated Pig and others at 420Fest on April 18 at County Line Saloon (Calgary)

16th, April 2019 

in • Alberta, • Rockpile, MUSIC

To Infinity And Beyond, Gone Cosmic - Interview

Gone Cosmic Travel

 Sideways In Time

By Christine Leonard

Photo: Mario Montes

Coming of age in an erratic era, vocalist Abbie Thurgood, lead singer of the breakout band Gone Cosmic, has found herself grappling with the same issues that confront other millennials facing their mid-twenties. Already an accomplished songwriter and recording artist by her teens, she had spent time honing her solo style and building up her musical I.Q. performing in acts such as The Torchettes. Yet she was still restless.

“I was going through a lot of changes during this time,” Thurgood confides. “My life completely shifted in every direction. My work, my love life, my band life – everything did a 180. I was going through this process of wondering why my brain was reacting to things and certain situations, why I was making the choices I was making and what’s bringing me to the point I’m at now.”

The stars aligned and Thurgood found herself in the enviable position of being presented with a body of deeply groovy instrumental compositions that was just begging for her vocal enhancements. The catch? These were no run of the mill verse-and-chorus rock songs. Amassed by the collision of veteran Calgary players, guitarist Devin “Darty” Purdy and bassist Brett Whittingham of Chron Goblin and drummer Marcello Castronuovo of Witchstone, Gone Cosmic’s lysergic catalogue ranges the interstellar abyss between freeform metal and heavy jazz.

“It’s insane. I remember the first time I heard the basement demos. I ended up sitting there for five hours and breaking it all down song by song and making notes on where the deadlocks went into cool stargazy bridges,” she recounts in vivid detail. “All of the songs were a challenge. I love this style of music and I love the heavier stuff, but I’ve never written to it. I was like, ‘Okay, how do I completely step out of my element and throw myself into this?’ It was a matter of finding and placing the melodies, which came rather naturally despite the fact that it was all chaos!”

Taming the turmoil that boils beneath the surface, Thurgood’s agency over Gone Cosmic’s volatile atoms has resulted in a supersonic psych-rock synergy of controlled detonations and harrowing lyrical odysseys.

“I think the intimidation factor for me was that these are heavy, punchy, crazy tracks and coming from a doo-wop, soul and a little bit of rock background ultimately my voice wasn’t pushed to what it is now,” Thurgood observes. “It would be easy to get lost within what the instruments are doing, so it needed to have that powerful grasp. I started to do my best to go bigger and bring the power through the vocals and actually getting that attention because even though I was comfy, I know I have this growl and I have this intensity.”

Bottling that rocket-fuelled energy, Gone Cosmic ventured to OCL Studios in September of 2018, when the golden wheat of Earth was at its highest. There the quartet captured the eight complex and compelling tracks that make up their forthcoming full-length debut, Sideways in Time (Kozmik Artifactz), with the oversight of engineer/producer Josh Rob Gwilliam.

“It was the madness of the songs. It wasn’t formulaic. It may never be. It completely came down to the art of what we wanted to create. And it came through beautifully,” reflects Thurgood. “I was thinking ‘Okay. This is my genre!’ Even as a singer-songwriter back in the day when I went down to Nashville. People were asking ‘What’s your genre?’ I had no idea. ‘I’m not country. I’m not blues. I don’t know.’ So, this is the first time it works!”

Space out at Gone Cosmic’s album release party with All Hands on Jane and The Ashley Hundred April 12 at The Palomino Smokehouse and Social Club (Calgary), April 13 at Bohemia (Edmonton), April 14 at Bo’s Bar & Stage (Red Deer), April 19 at Amigos Cantina (Saskatoon), April 20 at German Club (Regina), May 3 at Wheelies (Victoria) and May 4 at SBC Restaurant (Vancouver)

10th, April 2019  

in • AB - Features, • Alberta, • Rockpile, FEATURED, MUSIC

Album Review: Down By Law – Redoubt

DOWN BY LAW
Redoubt
[Pine Hill Records]

If you need a quick orientation to the work of SoCal punk legends Down by Law, look no further than their definitive 1991 song “Right or Wrong.” An unpolished skate punk spat that beats its fists against the entropy of existence, that raw and ready anthem came to represent the detritus that was swirling about in the minds of an era’s wasted youth.

Cue a montage of world tours, drained swimming pools, patched up denim vests and endless moshpits, suddenly it’s three decades and eleven albums later and vocalist Dave Smalley (ALL, Dag Nasty, Dave Smalley & The Bandoleros) is still putting out melodic albums that simply rock.

Pulling from the band’s surf-soaked roots, their new 10-inch vinyl EP is a slick guitar-driven soundtrack for sailing away from your post-modern problems. No regerts, as the misspelled saying goes. Redoubt displays its road rash scars and stick-and-poke tattoos with an air of pride. From the open waves of “At the Redoubt” to blue barrel-riding fish taco “For Your Eyes Only” and the lazily ambitious “Boring Things” (sung by guitarist Sam Williams), Down by Law’s latest will have you reaching for your board shorts and wallet-chain.

By Christine Leonard

08th, April 2019 

in • Record Reviews, MUSIC, REVIEWS

Album Review: Teenage Bottlerocket – Stay Rad

Teenage Bottlerocket
Stay Rad
[Fat Wreck Chords]

A bargain at any price, Teenage Bottlerocket’s newest LP is a pop-punk gift to the people from a group that has already contributed plenty in their twenty years of performing and producing feisty party anthems. Jammed with 14 listener-appreciative punk rock tracks that each clock in around the two-minute mark almost without fail, Stay Rad is a testament to the blue-collar idea factory operating at the band’s core.

Rally racing in a checkered cape, “Death Kart” comes off happier than it has any right to; while another celebration of friendship, “Everything to Me,” expresses an absurd degree of joy and affection. Cherishing moments and mutts, leg-humper “I Wanna Be a Dog” shakes off any serious intentions in favour of another silly yet life-preserving “Stupid Song.”

Note to self: “Night of the Knuckleheads” is probably going to be the perfect background theme for all of your impending summer misadventures. It’s only a matter of time until Teenage Bottlerocket invites a hitchhiker on their fun bus, this time its “Creature from the Black Metal Lagoon,” a humorous homage to the dark side that churns up some of the album’s biggest riffs while managing to scoff at all those “shitty Warped Tour bands.”

By Christine Leonard

08th, April 2019 

in • Record Reviews, MUSIC, REVIEWS

Single Premiere: Gone Cosmic – "Faded Release"

by Christine Leonard

A shimmering beacon amidst the dark matter of outer space, the latest track to be leaked from Gone Cosmic’s much-anticipated debut album, Sideways in Time, lands like a feather fallen from the headdress of Osiris. Rising from the frost-traced canyons of Mars, the sleeper hit gathers disparate elements from the realms of metal, jazz, psych-rock, R&B (and more) to form a blazing phoenix that streaks across the galaxy.

Flaming meteor and commanding vocalist, Abbie Thurgood describes the song’s whiplash-inducing orbit as “a throat-punching, face-melting, melodically-driven trip.” A soul-strafing tirade that “touches on the ultimate sacrifice and give-all nature that takes place for a loved one,” Gone Cosmic’s “Faded Release” is an offering fit for any stargate altar or playlist.

Gone Cosmic’s new album Sideways in Time will be released through the Kozmik Artifactz record label on April 12.

25th, March 2019

in • Alberta, MUSIC

GrimSkunk - 30th Anniversary Interview

Politipunks GrimSkunk Celebrate 

30 Years of Making a Grand Stink 

By Christine Leonard 

Photo by Carl Thériault

CALGARY – French, English, Russian, Spanish — There’s no language barrier that can’t be bridged by the fragrant vibes of Quebec’s legendary ska-rock orchestra GrimSkunk. The veteran politipunks are celebrating 30 years of making music and mayhem under the flag of hemp and justice for all.

“When we started our career punk and metal had already gone around the block a couple of times,” says lead singer/organist Joe Evil. “It was sort of getting repetitive. We wanted to mix in a new style. How we became creative was to do punk and metal but mix it completely with any sort of style or language.”

GrimSkunk has always maintained an amazing sense of humour and grace when it comes to exploring inroads to spiritual harmony and mutual enrichment.

“We sort of did it when it was okay to do it and now it’s like, the news is pretty harsh, and can I understand cultural appropriation. We’ve taken elements from everywhere. We’ve had Greek songs, we’ve had Spanish words over flamenco-style music, and we’ve had North African songs with Persian words. We’ve done them just for the fun of doing it and the influences that they’ve had on us. Because as a ‘global band’ right at the verge of the Internet, or before the Internet, there was world music and that was a big influence on us. We were turned on by those styles and wanted to integrate it into our punk rock and psychedelic rock.”

A multilingual montage of genres that keeps the punk rock party thumping, GrimSkunk’s latest release, Unreason in the Age of Madness, was dropped on the band’s own Indica Records label in 2018. Also ringing in their 20th anniversary as a company this year, Indica has long been home to an exotic blend of artists who might not have been heard were it not for GrimSkunk’s musical green thumb.

“Obviously, as times goes by, different styles become popular,” Evil acknowledges. “We are getting influenced by ourselves earlier in our career finally. Now, I can finally start to relate to bands that have been around for decades! I can finally relate to Rush!” 

GrimSkunk perform March 27 at Wild Bill’s (Banff), March 28 at The Drake Public House (Canmore), March 29 at Broken City (Calgary), March 31 at Doc Willoughby’s (Kelowna) and April 4 at Venue (Vancouver)

22nd, March 2019 

in • Alberta, • Shrapnel, CITY, MUSIC