“We weren’t necessarily going for an animal name,” Bison BC co-guitarist/ co-vocalist James Farwell tells me when I ask about the name Bison. “We’d tossed around these Godawful made up words - ‘what looks good in a good metal fo...
Glorywhore is a great name, and when playing with HookerPop, it's awesome. In the first week of the New Year, I went to the Princeton to check out Glorywhore. What I got was a petite Suicide Girl, Maiwan, with her incredible scratchy growl ...
Bison members I spoke to agree that the closure of The Cobalt would (or is it will?) be a “huge blow” for the Vancouver music scene. “Bison has played The Cobalt probably about five times,” guitarist/ vocalist James Farwell tells me...
Thee Manipulators
The morning after I first saw local 5 piece garage rock band Thee
Manipulators I woke up with two maracas in my bed and a lot more pins
on my jacket. Strangely, I had acquired a pin of an intoxicated/hungry looking fe...
GWAR – Oderus Urungus Does Not Smoke Crack Well With Others
Oderus Urungus is not the sort of intergalactic barbarian warlord who minces his words. I spoke with the leader of GWAR recently, and between copious puffs on his crack pipe,...
Dr Joey Only is in the house
Vancouver’s genuine adventurous punk rock country boy and underdog, our Stompin’ Tom and Hank Williams rolled into one, had to be interviewed. It wasn’t death threats to us really but a message he left on...
The venue shift for the Subhumans May 15th gig - from the Anza to the Ukrainian Hall (805 E. Pender) - returns the band to the scene of the famed 1979 Rock Against Prisons benefit, which also included Tunnel Canary, AKA, the female-fronted ...
Paul McKenzie Interview Part 2
CJ: The band formed in 1992. How was starting a punk project in the high-age of grunge music?
Paul: I could bend your ear for an hour with a question like that. We knew some bands in Seattle that would set...
Minto Climbs Olympus by Matt Hagarty
It's any young band's dream to record an album with such a marquee name as Steve Albini's. Recording with the famed sound engineer/pundit responsible for output from Nirvana, Superchunk, The Stooges,...
From Feb 26th to Mar 21st Bison BC toured Europe. They hit eleven different countries in twenty-four days and played a show every night. I’ve heard somewhere that Europeans love metal so I’m sure it was a crazy good time, and did great ...
Wreaking havoc on the Vancouver scene for more than a decade, The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets never fail to come up with strange and exhilarating new ways to reach out and clutch their victims. Staying true to their uniquely horrid app...
INTERVIEW
Wantmonster are straight off the hard streets of Nelson B.C. Ok, the streets there aren’t very hard, unless you’re afraid of hippies with giant dreads that look like matted down stinky beaver tails, and who isn’t? Wantmon...
Cambridge has been prominent in the Vancouver punk scene since late 2005. Tour is nothing new to them; this is their second cross-Canada run. The first one went quite well up until a breakdown in Brandon, Manitoba caused them to miss some s...
I’ve always thought that someone should rhyme “Erik Estrada” with “vagina dentata” in a song, and it occurred to me, when I came late and awestruck to the solo output of songwriter and Nomeansno/Hanson Brothers guitarist Tom Holli...