Great news, Canadians! Today’s Beacon roundup will make your life immeasurably better. It will reduce crime! It will lower the price of groceries! It will help you afford a good house in a nice neighbourhood! It will get you a better job! It will pay for your prescription drugs! It will reduce the deficit! It will make the air cleaner and water sweeter! It will even help you down there, if you follow. What? You don’t believe me? So why would you buy it when some weasel-faced, power-hungry little shitbird makes pandering, bullshit promises like these? Asking for a friend. And now, on with the show:
Ryland Moranz | The Hell Of This Town
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Alberta musician Ryland Moranz shares his single and video The Hell Of This Town. A folk/bluegrass multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter from Lethbridge, Ryland’s new album Better/Worse is due Nov. 15. Blending traditional country with a modern edge, The Hell Of This Town is the second preview of the album. Despite what the title suggests, Ryland actually wrote the track as a love song for his wife. “For as far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a touring musician. Not only that, I wanted to be the kind of musician that slept on people’s couches and was never in any place too long. Not a great life plan, but a romantic notion. I really think that’s me in a nutshell. A terminal romantic. When I started touring full time, I found to my surprise that whenever I was on the road, I wanted to be home; and inversely, whenever I was home, I wanted to be on the road. It was a complicated reconciliation. The Hell Of This Town is my coming to terms with the present. The immediacy of longing and the entropy of the cosmos. It’s a love song to my wife. It’s a lament for the old things. A remembrance of joy. A promise to spend my days exactly where I am, no matter where that is.”
Allegories | Evaporate
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Allegories, the electronic/experimental pop duo hailing from Hamilton, offer Evaporate, a lush, romantic piece which harkens back to the group’s early days of obscuring their identities. “Can you recall, everything I held so close to me, kiss me,” gradually envelopes over a bed of synths, bass, and beats, using the full range of his voice to mine the song’s vulnerability. Friends would think that a female vocalist was singing on Evaporate when the duo first played it for their friends, the band going so far as to conjure up a female pop star that they would credit as the lead vocalist, complete with auditions, a video, and social media accounts. “And then for a brief second [we] released the song. No one blinked. The charade went completely undetected, and that soured the experiment,” they explain. “We realized we wanted people in on the deception. To even collaborate with it. But we hadn’t thought that far ahead and we were growing tired of the constant aesthetic shell game. So, we disappeared into the studio for another six years. Then we happened upon the song again. It blew us away. The whole artifice of presentation had obscured how vibrant the track was. So we dove back in, without the weight of trying to construct a duplicitous world the ideas flowed easily. A much-needed reminder that it’s the music that matters. Everything else that follows just holds it in place. And if you worry too much about the elaborate frame, the art becomes overshadowed.”
Meko Brain | Say The Word
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Meko Brain (the fantastic new solo project from Mike O’Brien) has just released his debut LP Wonderment. It is a picture of economy: The words, arrangements, and instrumentation are all directly aimed at serving the song, whose inner core is formed by O’Brien’s clean, mellow acoustic guitar alongside melodic, gently probing basslines (care of Jason Haberman), and the wonderful Ringo-meets-Levon Helm drumming of the legendary Don Kerr (Ron Sexsmith, Rheostatics). Today, Meko Brain is sharing the single Say The Word. “I found that during the pandemic I was forced to contend with myself and how I relate to the people I’m closest to in a very real way,” says O’Brien. “Being quarantined with the family you start to consider every action and how it affects them. Say The Word is just me directly reflecting on that reality and knowing that the words you choose can have an impact in both positive and negative ways. Expressions of love can be shown in so many different ways but sometimes the most direct way is to say the word.”
Grizzly Coast | Two Balloons
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Since 2020’s Party of One EP, Toronto’s Alannah Kavanagh has grown as an artist. When she started Grizzly Coast at 22, she was playing confessional songwriter-style acoustic shows. Over time, Alannah got a band and they were scrappy — playing gigs and music they thought was fun without putting too much thought into things. But Alannah and her band meticulously explored ideas and made deliberate musical choices to create their transformative debut album Staying Power. It’s a testament to growth, commitment, and the power of trusting oneself in the face of life’s uncertainties. The album’s joyful focus track Two Balloons was inspired by Alannah’s relationship with her husband. “I liked the idea of calling us two balloons,” she says. “I thought about kids at a carnival who get so excited to get a balloon, and then just forget about it and let it fly off into the skies, forgotten. The lyric ‘We are two lost balloons at heights they never knew” uses that imagery to portray how we were left behind by others, but in finding each other we reached new and unexpected heights.”
Terra Lightfoot | Out Of Time
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Juno-nominated Ontario singer-songwriter Terra Lightfoot is sharing an acoustic version of Out Of Time, a track from her most recent album Healing Power. Performed with best friend and touring bandmember Elijah “Eli” Abrams, this finds the duo leaning into their live harmonies. “Eli has started singing more over the past year and when we rehearsed this song before the Healing Power touring cycle started, he started singing a harmony, and I sincerely mean this as a compliment, but it sounded so good I assumed it was someone else in the band,” Lightfoor says. “I had never heard him sing like that before that moment. I think that this song became an opportunity for him to shine in a quieter moment in the set, not just the ripping through the loud and wild rock ’n’ roll moments we tend to share onstage.” Lightfoot wrote Out Of Time after having a near spiritual experience with a tree growing on top of a mountain in Austria: “I felt so deeply connected to this tree when I saw it, growing all alone without any other trees around. I took it to heart and it became a symbol of perseverance or just growing wherever you’re at, and that being good enough.”
His His | My Friend Wants To Be A Freemason
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “His His, the recording project of Toronto artist Aidan Belo, shares another new track from the upcoming EP Good Gold Cassette, set for release on Nov. 15. My Friend Wants To Be A Freemason is, yes, “a song about one of my childhood friends who had the idea of joining the freemasonry,” says Belo. “Prior to his fascination of becoming a freemason, I had very little knowledge of what it meant and what it is that they do. The idea of joining this secret society consumed my friend, and for a couple of months it was all that he’d talk about. The obsession eventually fizzled out and I never heard about it again. A few months later, I found out that one of the regulars who eats at my dad’s restaurant, where I work, is the officer for the Masonic lodge that is in town. I never introduced my friend to him, but I wrote a song about it.”
Opepongo | H
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Opeongo is the moniker of Ontario’s Keegan Trumpour and an ever-rotating cast of musicians. Opeongo just releasee their third album Eventual Mt. Lee. Its single H found new meaning to Keegan as part of this collection of tribute songs. Speaking on its origin, he says: “I wrote the first line of this song years ago when I was still in high school, after reading about the 1930’s Hollywood actress Peg Entwistle, who took her own life by jumping off of the “H” of the Hollywood(land) sign — ‘Holy hell, Peg, Hollywood is haunting me.’ I never had an idea beyond the alliteration until I truly knew what grief was; that it looks you in the eye at every stop and start of the day; that it can be a friend, but mostly a menace; that it might get muted in moments but is always present, clear as day. I imagined being someone who loved Peg and was loved by her, and constantly seeing this H taunting and haunting like the sore thumb that grief was. Once I had truly lost someone this deeply I understood what this silly line I had started writing in highschool was all about.”
Busty And The Bass | All The Things I Couldn’t Say To You (Acoustic)
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Busty And The Bass just released the Deluxe Version of Forever Never Cares, with alternate versions, demos, and unreleased tracks. “Forever Never Cares was forged in a deep desire to grow as a band and to have our music represent our values and influences on a deeper level than ever before,” says Chris Vincent. From the epic jazz odyssey (and title track) Forever Never Cares to the bouncy, club-style joint Dance Spot (Demo), the beautifully messy collection lets us give a taste of all of the different sounds we were working with at this time. “We also included a couple demos and original songwriting voice memos to get a sneak peek into the inception of some of these songs. Chris’s original demo for All The Things I Couldn’t Say To You and my songwriting sessions for Smoke And The Pine lets our fans hear how some of these tracks first began and eventually developed over time.”
