More Coldplay than Kraftwerk, Morgan Doctor's second album for Aporia mixes classic pop intervals with grand, sweeping and distorted guitars. As on her last album, Is This Home, Morgan is once again accompanied on multiple tracks by the haunting vocals of Tamara Williamson and on the opening number by Clara Engel.
- Free Download: This Day Is Gone
- Free Download: Silver City
A rare bird from Canada's musical woods, Lily Frost is inspired by spiritual exploration, human relationships, achieving the impossible, and long espressos. A serious musician who plays her own guitar and writes all her own songs, she's released 8 albums to date (including her work with seminal lounge group The Colorifics). Her work is cinematic, blending film noir, stark minimalism, cinematic images, and coruscating, soul-stabbing honesty.
Her music is impossible to describe, utterly unique, in a category of its own. Slinky, cool, with haunting melodies and dreamlike imagery, exotic, rhythmic, in the Parisian chanteuse tradition of Francoise Hardy, but utterly modern. She "seduces audiences with her sultry serenades," as one (perhaps slightly smitten) newspaper writer once put it. She herself has described it as "dim candelight stuff, makeout music with Latino flavouring," which is maybe as close as words can get. Her music's been featured in a popular Telus ad ("Who's that singer?" everyone asked when it came out), on the soundtrack to the movie Crazy Beautiful starring Kristen Dunst -- and recently "Enchantment" from Cine-Magique was featured on ABC's ultrapopular drama (and great showcase for independent music) Grey's Anatomy.
Genre: Eclectic / Alternative Pop / Cabaret
Sounds Like: Martha Wainwright, Sondre Lerche, Francoise Hardy, Feist
- Free Download: Enchantment
Since the release of their 2004 debut, Toronto-based Stirling continue to spend their days and nights honing an epic sound that contains a great deal of dial-twirling, frequency-taming, pedal-engaging, and Bowie-inspired hollering that owes much to such bands as the Jesus and Mary Chain, Pulp, Talk Talk, and Roxy Music. Much louder and perhaps more aggressive than their previous outing, The Fall Of The Winter Palace turns up the guitars, revealing why this band has been busy opening for the likes of Elbow, Kasabian, the Futureheads, the Duke Spirit, Islands and many others.
Genre: Alternative Rock, Brit-pop
Sounds Like: David Bowie, Roxy Music, Talk Talk, Pulp
- Free Download: My Resistance Is Low
A rare bird from Canada's musical woods, Lily Frost is inspired by spiritual exploration, human relationships, achieving the impossible, and long espressos. A serious musician who plays her own guitar and writes all her own songs, she's released 8 albums to date (including her work with seminal lounge group The Colorifics). Her work is cinematic, blending film noir, stark minimalism, cinematic images, and coruscating, soul-stabbing honesty.
Her music is impossible to describe, utterly unique, in a category of its own. Slinky, cool, with haunting melodies and dreamlike imagery, exotic, rhythmic, in the Parisian chanteuse tradition of Francoise Hardy, but utterly modern. She "seduces audiences with her sultry serenades," as one (perhaps slightly smitten) newspaper writer once put it. She herself has described it as "dim candelight stuff, makeout music with Latino flavouring," which is maybe as close as words can get. Her music's been featured in a popular Telus ad ("Who's that singer?" everyone asked when it came out), on the soundtrack to the movie Crazy Beautiful starring Kristen Dunst -- and recently "Enchantment" from Cine-Magique was featured on ABC's ultrapopular drama (and great showcase for independent music) Grey's Anatomy.
Genre: Eclectic / Alternative Pop / Cabaret
Sounds Like: Martha Wainwright, Sondre Lerche, Francoise Hardy, Feist
- Free Download: Pantomime
"It's a blurred wall of swirling, cascading guitars washing over dirty jungle/electronic beats, delicate angelic male/female vocals and rolling bass-lines that take the listener to far off places." - Michael Ulrich
- Free Download: Miranda