In Jaime, Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard has a contender for album of the year. Howard’s most recent offering, 13th Century Metal, “as "a roller-coaster of a spoken-word rant that's part self-help exhortation, part sermon. View Howard performing the song live with her touring band in this Danny Clinch-directed video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7YtOa7jD_c

Howard, who performed on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" on September 26, has extended her North American headline tour into November. Every online ticket purchased for the U.S. fall headline dates will include a CD of the new album, Jaime.

Toronto unit Great Lake Swimmers are currently halfway through a nine week North American tour in support of acclaimed new album, The Waves, The Wake. The band returns home for what promises to be a very special performance on November 23 at The Danforth Music Hall with special guests Sister Ray prior to heading across the Atlantic for a 19 date European tour to close out the year.

Recorded in the 145-year-old Bishop Cronyn Memorial Church in London, Ontario and produced by Chris Stringer (Union Sound), lead singer-songwriter Tony Dekker decided to challenge himself by writing new music without any acoustic guitar, which has always been his instrumental mainstay. He further digressed from previous songwriting patterns by looking at each track individually and then tailoring the instrumentation to bring each song to life in its own distinctive way.

Amateur Hour is the new album from genre-hopping songwriter Chris Velan and it started out as songs about a relationship and all the emotional baggage that comes with it; desire, love, resentment, pain. But soon he realized that the relationship he was exploring was the one with himself.

Due out September 14, Amateur Hour unfolds like a series of monologues in a one-act play where the characters are locked in a room and forced to respond and react to unexpected news, discovering that what they thought to be true of themselves was in fact not.

First single, “All Time Record”, is a bit of mystery for Velan. “It came in the form of an urgent stream of babble that I had to quickly record into my phone and then later transcribe and translate,” he says. “It wasn’t as much about the meaning of the words as it was their sound. I think that’s why it retains this elusive, joyful quality. It doesn’t want to be pinned down.”

LISTEN AND SHARE “ALL TIME RECORD” HERE