La Force "XO SKELETON"
XO SKELETON is the supple, steady, uncanny new album by La Force: a mixture of haunted pop and hot-blooded R&B that glistens at the meeting-point between life, death, and love. The album, coproduced by La Force and Warren Spicer (Plants and Animals), will be available everywhere in digital and LP format on September 29 via Secret City Records. La Force also shares Fall tour dates: three headlining shows in Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa presenting the new album, as well as European support dates for Patrick Watson.
PUNT "The Heat"
Brooklyn-based fuzz punk duo Punt, are excited to announce the Friday September 22nd release of their long awaited sophomore album titled The Heat. Alongside this announcement they share the first taste of The Heat in the double-headed form of “I’m Bad” b/w ”Take Me Home”.
With “I’m Bad” the duo deliver a fearless dive down the rabbit hole of tenacious ambition. Vocalist/bassist, Eli Frank explains, “it’s about not knowing how to get what you want, but you know you’re meant to be doing big shit. It probably won’t happen, but fuck it cuz it’s all about the ride anyway. That ride into the pits of hell baby.”
“Take Me Home” finds Punt placing heaving hooks front and center as Frank explores the twisted mind of a boozed up “macho idiot out to pick a fight”.
Punt creates short and sharp sonic explosions that capture the creative collision of Eli Frank, and drummer Bill Michel. Strong wills, stronger opinions, and a shared uncompromising outlook on what constitutes musical legitimacy, are served up in two-minute manifestos that’ll kick anyone to the curb in their quest to deliver unflinching realness.
First forged in the 2010s, Punt initially burned out as quick as they caught fire. Introduced by a mutual friend, Frank and Michel set out to write and record their debut album in a single week. The resulting album Oil was released in 2015 and soon after the duo went their separate ways.
After an 8 year break, following the release of Oil, the duo were drawn back together during a sweltering NYC heat wave in 2021. The resulting album, The Heat, hauls listeners through the grimy underbelly of the city, exploring the “random terrible thoughts” in Frank’s brain and delivering a fuzzed out and riff heavy salute to all things noir.
Colleen "Le Jour Et La Nuit Du Rèel"
Le jour et la nuit du réel (“The day and the night of reality” in French) is an album of parallels and contrasts. Schott’s first purely instrumental work since 2007’s Les ondes silencieuses, and her first double album, Le jour et la nuit du réel started as an album of songs with lyrics in the style of her previous album The Tunnel and the Clearing before gradually morphing into wordless suites of compositions divided into movements. Schott realized that synthesis was the best expressive tool at her disposal to grapple with a theme that seemed to be constantly on her mind: the impossibility of truly grasping all facets of reality, especially one’s own emotional reality and that of others. Each movement within a suite employs different synthesis settings, but with distinctive chords and motifs that provide a throughline, guiding the listener through shifting sonic landscapes. Schott elaborates: “To me, the capacity of synthesis to alter – subtly or radically – the physical embodiment in sound of the same series of notes is akin to how, when given new information about a person or a situation, we can reevaluate our initial perception of what we thought was the “reality” of that person or situation, sometimes drastically so.”
The album’s construct falls into two larger sections, day and night. A kaleidoscopic range of sounds speckle the album’s seven suites, aiming to translate the range and nuance of emotions, both deeply personal and communal, and the complexity of identity, as we shift from day to night. Daytime opens with more friction, tension, and abrasive timbres emulating the invigoration of daylight with “Subterranean” and “The long wait”, before softening into the warm luminance of “To hold and to be held” and “Mon coeur”. “Be without being seen” functions as a twilight transition zone, first melancholy, then threatening, mimicking the fact that nighttime tends to warp our sense of reality, often making it more intense. “Les parenthèses enchantées,” named for a French idiom that, roughly interpreted, means “a beautiful moment destined to end soon”, plunges the listener into the second half, night. The descent into slower, more melancholy textures and longer trails of delay slips into the pulsating, bottomless recesses of “Night looping”, a direct reference to Schott’s own recurrent insomnia.
