“Borders, what’s up with that?” asks Sri Lankan musician M.I.A. in the lead track “Borders.” Unfortunately, on her latest studio album, we never get a clear answer. AIM lacks a distinct target, and the final result misses the mark. Compared with previous hits “Sunshowers” and “Paper Planes” that propelled M.I.A’s message into[Read More…]
Articles by Will Burgess
Album Review: Rodeo – Travis Scott
Texas-born rapper Travis Scott has been cultivating hype for his debut LP for more than a year now. His earlier mixtape, Days Before Rodeo (2014), showcased a 12-track warm-up with a title that promised that this was only the beginning, which only makes the hit-or-miss[Read More…]
Unearthing Montreal’s urban landscapes
For some students, venturing beyond the McGill bubble means going bar-hopping on Saint- Laurent or adventurously moving to the Plateau after moving out of residence. But truly understanding the city—especially without being a native citizen—is hard to do on one’s own. There’s usually a specific identity and character behind each[Read More…]
Post-graduate students vote to leave Canadian Federation of Students
Last Thursday and Friday, members of the Post-Graduate Students’ Society of McGill University (PGSS) voted against continued membership with the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), a national union for post-secondary student societies.
The substance of style
Since the invention of the printing press, news media has endeavoured to employ capitation in the interest of magnetizing readers into ratifying their viewpoints and escalating their market share. The McGill Tribune is no exception, as the paper employs strategic readership engagement tactics in order to endue its student body[Read More…]
Various artists—Catch the throne
In the weeks leading up to the anticipated Season Four premiere of Game of Thrones, some HBO executives apparently thought it was a good idea to spend a chunk of their marketing budget on commissioning a mixtape project called Catch the Throne. The somewhat bizarre rationale for the project was[Read More…]
Remakes vs. originals
For every cover like Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watch Tower” that gives a classic song a fresh and worthy interpretation, there are efforts like HIlary Duff’s take on The Who’s “My Generation” that should be banned from the airwaves. Here’s how some of 2013’s prominent[Read More…]
Venue histories
From the West end to the Mile End, Montreal is home to entertainment venues that make its prolific cultural presence possible. The Tribune’s Arts & Entertainment team dug up the histories of some of the city’s notable venues for a look at how they became what they are today. [Read More…]
Karneef – Love Between Us
What place does retro pop have in the contemporary indie and electronic soundscapes of Montreal? Local musician Karneef doesn’t seem to care, and his debut LP Love Between Us presents his fastidious funk vision, with all its offbeat lyrics and diverse instruments, largely arranged and played by Karneef alone. Karneef[Read More…]
High concepts
McGill students window-shopping west of campus may encounter a different display on the exterior of Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts (FOFA) Gallery. Just east of the windows showcasing North Face jackets, something else is being sold: conceptual art. A large print of Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art is roughly[Read More…]
Catching and releasing the Bitcoin bug
If the virtual currency Bitcoin is still in its infancy today, it was merely an embryo when I first heard of it. After spending last year obsessively researching how Bitcoin worked, periodically watching its price rise and fall, and deliberating over its future, I bought 20 Bitcoins for about 11[Read More…]
Miley Cyrus—inspiration or abomination?
Despite her hit songís title, Miley should stop Fan or not, you’ve heard of Miley Cyrus. The former Disney darling has, for the past few years, gone to greater and greater lengths to shed her Hannah Montana past. Now that the staggering transformation of her image is complete, the question[Read More…]
Album Review: The Weeknd – Kiss Land
“This the s**t that I live for, with the people I’d die for.”
Juicy J: Stay Trippy
For Juicy J, being ‘trippy’ is both a state of mind and a lifestyle, and in Stay Trippy, he raps about living it for 20 years. Throughout, the former Three 6 Mafia member condones codeine, crime, and cannabis, detailing his experiences with each. Dipping between tempos, he will rap pointedly over a beat and then continue in double-time. In his intro, ‘Stop It,’ he speaks of “getting high like I’m eighteen but I been rich since the late eighties,” and continues to reference themes of intoxication and career longevity throughout the album.
Earl Sweatshirt: Doris
The last time Earl Sweatshirt was in the spotlight—for his much-hyped mixtape Earl—he dropped everything and disappeared to Samoa. Soon, rumours, mainly fueled by colleague and collaborator Tyler the Creator’s more-than-half-serious “Free Earl” campaign, circulated that he was forced into a boarding school by his mother. Now he is again a product and a victim of hype; on his latest album, Doris, he airs his grievances and talent in equal measure.
Neither a lender nor a borrower be: Financing McGill theatre
McGill dramatists are, by necessity and by definition, a passionate group. Unpaid as student artists, unrecognized in a frequently desolate and fine arts-free environment, passion is often all they have. Despite these conditions, they have thrived. Productions that fly under the radar still sell out. Shows rivaling those on professional[Read More…]
Interview with Armin van Buuren
What’s it like to be the world’s number one DJ? One could look for the answer in Dutch trance producer Armin van Buuren’s latest single “This Is What It Feels Like,” which was released on his fifth studio album, Intense, on Apr. 3. The song features Vancouver singer Trevor Guthrie[Read More…]
Girls gone wild
For a movie featuring Selena Gomez as a church girl named Faith, and directed by a guy named Harmony, Spring Breakers sure contains a lot of godless chaos. Writer/director and cinema enfant terrible Harmony Korine returns with another movie about rebellious youth, with characters who seek the same variety of[Read More…]
Now playing: homemade McGill movies
A few weeks after the Oscars, Student Television at McGill (TVM) is returning with its own annual film festival—albeit on a much smaller scale. The Fokus Film Festival, now in its seventh year, comprises of a series of events, including a 72-hour filmmaking competition and the screening of the submitted[Read More…]
Suuns: Images du Futur
Suuns’ lead singer Ben Shemie refers to the environment in which his Montreal band recorded Images du Futur—the Quebec student protests of last year—as, according to the press release, “a climate of excitement, hope, and frustration.” But if the album is a political statement, it would be best described as[Read More…]
Snowbirds in the wild
Last week, the one question that inevitably dominated casual conversations among McGill students was where everyone spent their reading weeks. A lucky few had the opportunity to travel south and enjoy warmer weather, staying in the West Indies or even Florida, a traditional destination for March break. While we’re all[Read More…]
Music journalism: you’re doing it wrong
Last week, the New York Times’ credibility was called into question when reporter John Broder’s negative review of the Tesla Model S, an electric car, was challenged by none other than the company’s CEO, Elon Musk. The story caused a stir in the press, simply because the subjects of mainstream[Read More…]
MTL: then and now
ABC:MTL’s urban series is in the final stages of the alphabet, with a collection titled Streetview now showing alongside a third wave of projects exhibited at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). While the months-long ABC works have been crowd-sourced from the Montreal masses, the photos in the exhibit have[Read More…]
Beat the cold with the coolest beats
After a week of chilly weather, Montreal crowds knew what they signed up for when they headed to Igloofest. Vieux-Port is hosting the annual music festival, which is now halfway over after a second weekend of survival dancing in neon snowsuits. I volunteered to join the crowds and report back,[Read More…]
Thomas Demand: deceit and delight
Walking into Thomas Demand’s Embassy (2007), it is easy to empathize with the uneasiness the artist must have felt when visiting the titular Embassy of the Republic of Niger in Rome to prepare for this series. Frameless, life-size prints, appearing as part of the wall they are mounted on, depict[Read More…]
Where the wild things are
Landscapes have always been a natural muse for Canadian artists, and interpretations of such an inherently stable subject have always been a welcome challenge for those who want to capture its grandeur in a unique way. The Group of Seven painted vistas abstractly, but still captured the native beauty of[Read More…]
(III): Crystal Castles
If Crystal Castles’ duo of Alice Glass and Ethan Kath danced near the edge of despair in their first releases, (I) and (II), in their latest effort, (III), they take the plunge. Producer Kath toys less with the bleepy 8-bit sound that characterized their debut, which had a threateningly manic[Read More…]
McGill alumnus and current DJ Kid Koala spins up a storm
DJ Eric San, aka “Kid Koala,” stresses the importance of DIY style in producing his latest album, 12 bit Blues. “It’s kind of like if you’re a chef and you’re growing your own vegetables,” says the Canadian beat chopper and ‘turntablist’ of his latest project. While Kid Koala constructed the[Read More…]
Seeing RED will feel like anything but
“What do you see?” repeats Mark Rothko to his assistant in an early scene of the Segal Centre’s RED, a Montreal production of the hit Broadway play by John Logan. Lead actor Randy Hughson’s shrewd Rothko may as well be directing that question at us, his mantra imploring the audience[Read More…]