British Columbia roots and blues singer, songwriter, guitarist Judy Brown celebrates the southern Ontario launch of her new full-length solo recording titled ‘Say It’ with two key concerts. The first show is in Hamilton at Mississippi Queen Foods Restaurant on Thursday, September 6, and the second is in Mississauga at the Southside Shuffle, 20th Anniversary Port Credit Blues and Jazz Festival on Friday, September 7, 2018. Note: See all concert details below.

Produced by Maple Blues and JUNO award-winners Gary Kendall (Downchild Blues Band) and Teddy Leonard (Fathead) – ‘Say It’ (released May 18, 2018) – represents Brown’s journey in roots and blues that began in Alberta, followed by 30 years in the Toronto music scene and now marks an exciting next chapter. After taking time to raise her two children, in 2017, Brown made a move west to Nelson, BC (to be near family and a supportive arts community) and returned to recording with long-time musical friends and collaborators Kendall and Leonard.

This is a new artist and a new label both with strong connections to bluesman Jimmy ‘Duck’ Holmes and his family-run downtown café-bar-juke joint in Bentonia Mississippi. Munson has released a few self-produced indie efforts in recent years but ‘Rose Hill’ marks a change with a new US blues label and an optimistic purpose that shines through each successive track.

Munson favours acoustic guitar mostly, with some enjoyable and understated slide-work also thrown into the mix. His own approach is clearly influenced by the likes of Skip James and Jack Owens, both pioneers of the style now largely labeled, ‘Bentonia Blues,’ a type of picking that leans heavily on tradition but sparked-up by haunting, eerily redolent minor tunings. This is the style favored by Jimmy ‘Duck’ Holmes himself, who guests here on one track, and which pretty much owes its origins to Holmes’s family business, the renowned Blue Front Café in Bentonia where the album was recorded.

Founding KISS guitarist and Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame member, Ace Frehley, has released a new song called Rockin' With The Boys. This is the second song Frehley has released this year, from his forthcoming all-new Spaceman album, due October 19, 2018, via Entertainment One (eOne). Frehley previously released the track, Bronx Boy, in April.

Spaceman, Frehley’s eighth solo LP, features nine new original tracks including a cover of Eddie Money’s, I Wanna Go Back, a ripping power pop makeover of the original.

Wily Bo Walker is one of those guys who never seems to fail to deliver interesting, varied, finger-on-the-pulse blues music that rips and roars along pulling in a huge variety of influences and crossing genres at almost every twist or turn. Originally from Scotland, Walker is a London-based picker, singer-songwriter who is prepared to nail his colors and balls to the wall with a remarkable release bulging at the seams with sheer class and originality.

In recent years he has turned out albums that always surprise and delight in pretty much equal measure. His fretwork is gripping and driving while his voice scratches the paint from bar-room walls and clears the head with ease. With this latest offering, ‘Almost Transparent Blues,’ Walker again turns up the heat to produce an eleven-track album that holds echoes of Stevie Ray one moment followed by Lightnin’ Hopkins and Springsteen or Joe Cocker the next. Each successive cut draws the listener deeper into his revelatory riptide and rattles the roof with startling effect and essence.

Some of the greatest artists in our modern lexicon have been introduced to us through the magic of mixtapes and compilation albums. A lot of the time, comps aren’t necessarily geared towards conveying a specific artistic narrative or theme and purely designed to get attention and commercial interest ignited in a record label, and other times they represent a change in the tide culturally and professionally throughout music and pop culture. BWH Music Group has become synonymous with hosting some of the biggest and brightest young stars on their roster, and the label’s epic new comp That Summer is nothing short of an eclectic, albeit insightful look into what the future of pop music in a variety of genres is going to look like in the next ten years.

Spayed Koolie is the name of a little band from Florida that, if you’re keen on country music, you should definitely start familiarizing yourself with over the next coming months, because they’re coming to take over. Their latest record Ashtray Change is indeed a garage rock record tailored specifically for fans of lumbering, white-hot southern stylizations and old-school outlaw country, and even though I didn’t know who these guys were a little more than a week ago, they’ve already made a handful of new fans out of myself and the people that I’ve shared this new album with recently. What makes Ashtray Change such a sexy choice for newcomers to the country music genre isn’t just its open accessibility that features shades from a variety of influences seeming to work together in this setting much better than they did on their own; it’s the fact that for perhaps the very first time in the history of country music, we’ve got some bright young stars who aren’t singing about the same old subject matter and pretending that it’s somehow different or revolutionary compared to those who came before them.

Submitted by Thomas Patton III

CKY (Chad I Ginsburg, Jess Margera and Matt Deis) have released a brand new music video for their track, Wiping Off The Dead, from their most recent LP, The Phoenix. Directed by Dave Causa, this is the third music video we've seen from the band off their current release.

"Our good friend Dave Causa filmed us rehearsing for our UK tour last summer and the end result was us making a badass music video," says drummer Jess Margera. "It was filmed before we ever played a single show for the release of our album. Thank you, Dave, and thank you CKY alliance! Enjoy this great video from the archives."

The official music video for Ruston Kelly’s new single, Mockingbird, has premiered across Viacom platforms in an unprecedented partnership between CMT Music, MTVU and MTV Live. Watch/share here.

Of the song and video, Kelly shares, “I wrote Mockingbird in a Dominican hotel, on the edge of a bed, at like six in the morning. I needed a release from a cyclical pattern of a doomed relationship. The kind that leaves you with less than what you went in with. But, what directors Stephen Kinigopoulos and Alexa King reminded me with their proposed story about a single mother, is even though I write about my own personal situations, it’s also everyone’s story: the human condition, our connected plight in a mad world. Regardless of how it’s expressed, we all struggle through something with hope on the other side. That’s this song and that’s this video. That’s also why I fell in love working with them immediately.”

Nashville, TN – One listen to the brand-new album, “This Side or The Other,” and you’ll know David Olney is a man familiar with the wandering life and yearning heart of a poet. After more than 30 years in music, he’s had as many incarnations as you can imagine. His resume has expanded to include acting, poetry and a popular weekly stream cast. All of this adds to Olney’s strength as a songwriter’s songwriter, and one of Nashville’s founding fathers of Americana music.

While “This Side or The Other” is not a concept album, there are some recurring themes. The frequent reference to walls in these songs – walls being built and tumbling down – will suggest that while Olney has encountered more than his own share of walls, he is still trying his best to understand them.

“I wanted to explore the idea of walls,” says Olney, “What does a wall mean? What does it mean to be an immigrant who comes upon that wall as a wanderer, someone lost and alone?”

Vancouver indie folk-pop artist Stephanie Ratcliff is excited to announce the release of her new EP Land In Unknown Places on Friday, July 27th and will celebrate with a show at Reality Vancouver on release day, followed by a string of Canadian Tour Dates throughout Ontario and Eastern Canada in August. See below for full tour schedule.

The first single from the EP, 'Come Alive', made its debut just over a week ago on June 29th when the video (Stephanie's first official music video!) premiered at Live in Limbo. Directed by Dan Loewen, the video tells a very simple kind of love story, even though the song isn't necessarily about romantic love.

Washington state R&B/soul singer-songwriter Allen Stone has released a new single, "Warriors", today via ATO Records - share the lyric video via YouTube - in advance of a performance of the track this Sunday, July 1 on ABC's broadcast of the Special Olympics opening ceremony in Seattle - Stone will be backed during the performance by a 2000 member choir. The single, produced by Jamie Lidell, will be featured on an as-yet-to-be-announced full-length album, which Stone has been putting the finishing touches on.

Discussing the song, Allen stated, "This song came in a period of struggle. Inspiration hadn't come through to visit for a while. I had felt like I was just pushing a big rock up a hill while wearing flip-flops. I was reminded at that moment that true success comes when you face adversity head on and push through those moments of hardship. Walk tall like Warriors even when terrified."

Less than two weeks before the release of his album Wide Awake (July 13/ATO), Rayland Baxter has offered a new song from the Butch Walker-produced project. "79 Shiny Revolvers" was the first song Rayland wrote during his three-month-long isolation quest at Franklin, Kentucky's secluded Thunder Sound Studios. He composed fifty songs there, ten of which eventually became Wide Awake.

"79 Shiny Revolvers" is, in Rayland's own estimation, one of the most important songs he's ever written. Its lyrics burst with irony and cutting humor to interrogate our nation's fixation on guns: "You really wanna save the world, man / well, I wanna save it too / we can blow em away / the American way."

Says Rayland, "'79 Shiny Revolvers' is a satirical and sensitive song about the shortcomings of our human race. I watch and I write, not only as an onlooker but as a participant. As the world continues to swing around the sun, I cannot help but notice that we are good people. However, our shortcomings have been highlighted by a long line of imperfect decisions. Leonard Cohen died the day I wrote this song."

San Francisco based singer/songwriter Scott Smith builds on the success of his EP release Igniting the Flame with a double-sided single featuring songs “I Will Love You” and “Spinning Round”. His country rock sound is shepherded by Igniting the Flame producer Julie Wolf and she invests two essentially romantic tunes with the sort of sonic atmospherics both songs require to realize their potential. Smith has sacrificed nothing from his memorable debut and, if anything, this new release, however brief, reveals another subtle shade in his songwriting color. His vocal chops elevate the package to another level and deliver every ounce of meaning he can to its lyrics without becoming overwrought. There’s a classic tilt to the way he attacks a song, it's phrasing, and relationship to the other instruments recalling icons of the past while still writing and recording songs that never sound like museum pieces.

When I first sat down to write this review for Luna Keller’s new summer single “Packing My Bags,” I couldn’t really make up my mind whether or not Keller reminds me more of Dean Ween or Bob Dylan. Sure, she has all of the giddy eccentricity of Ween, along with his stylishly creative guitar licks, but there’s a distinctive hostility in her voice that is a lot like Dylan’s trademark irreverent rebelliousness. But then I came to the right conclusion; Keller takes a little bit from both and adds a uniquely 21st-century urban spin to this postmodern variety of indie stylized folk rock, and it’s better than anything I could have asked for as a music fan going into this summer.

South American based act Monsieur Job has released a memorable single “Chow Chow eyyy Pow Pow” certain to be an enormous hit with Latino listeners, but the quality is so high that’s safe to say this song has a lot of crossover potential begging to be realized. The power of this release is twofold – it lies in the mix of Caribbean/Latino influences with the urban beats now so common in EDM and hip-hop, but given an additional spike in Monsieur Jobs’ hands. The second factor is in how the band’s four members bring a cross-section of influences. Songwriters Toby Holguin and Stan Kolev, alongside other members Charlie Illera and Leo Jaramillo, are well schooled in both DJ style and live music that enables them to bring organic qualities to bear on the largely electronica nature of the music. This is one of the year’s most compelling singles thus far and will likely finish as such. It’s also coupled with a powerful remixed version that will enjoy many admirers as well.

Canadian singer/songwriter Noble Son (aka Adam Kirschner) unleashes his debut album Joy in Violence, a follow-up to the three prior EPs that he released since 2011. It’s been a long journey for the musicians who found himself face to face with his own personal demons and mental struggles in 2017 which kicked off a dedicated songwriting spree that resulted in 8 pieces all of which would be recorded for Joy in Violence. This record is an alien trip through the bleakest, blackest recesses of the human mind as it battle to fight against its own sinister urges and the music on this LP truly gives off that eerie, ethereal vibration.

What with Toronto's deep and longstanding relationship with reggae music, the genre cognoscenti round here can be hard on contemporary acts doing original material. Luckily they were in short supply among a packed house because D.C. based Soja deal in a reggae muchly influenced by the area’s local hip-hop, with alt-rock in its DNA. So there was room aplenty for superbly dreadlocked frontman Jacob Hemphill to show off his shredding chops on songs like "Be Aware" and "Tear It Down".

Submitted by William Elgin

Tampa, Florida native Dru Cutler, now a Brooklyn transplant and a respected member of the Big Apple indie music community, has released a two-song EP sampler previewing his upcoming full-length studio platter Bring Closer the Distance. The two songs, a cover of Leonard Cohen’s lesser known gem “Dance Me to the End of Love” and the original “Oceanside”, are wildly different in some respects. To his credit, Cutler isn’t content with merely aping Cohen’s original as a form of backhanded tribute or whatever else and instead, recasts the song as a whiskey-soaked dancehall number. The rockier strains of “Oceanside” and the personal nature of its lyrical content provide a striking contrast for listeners without ever seeming like an ill-fit. Cutler’s unabashed confidence in tackling material from one of the 20th century’s most respected songwriters gives me kind of a jolt and his willingness to make the tune his own stands in stark difference with his lesser contemporaries who would have pursued the path of least resistance if they bothered to cover the song at all.

There’s a lot of fire and fury released over the course of Red Black Red’s debut, Resettlement, but the album’s eight songs are full of intelligence and thoughtfulness as well. The clear strands of alternative rock and electronica coloring the release is masterfully orchestrated from song to song and Enrico Fernando’s songwriting and performances alike can rarely be accused of repeating itself. He gives the audience a different look, virtually every time out on Resettlement without ever stretching too far and overextending listener’s credibility. The lyrical work going into this album is a, perhaps, surprisingly successful component in Resettlement’s mix and the songwriting is often inspired by the immigrant experience in the United States and the challenges many of those individuals and families face in modern America. The treatment, however, is never too ponderous and the production frames Fernando’s message in the polished, professional light.