I subscribe to roughly a jillion music newsletters, and Adam White’s Some Party is easily one of my favourites. Every week or two, he rounds up a crop of killer new Canadian rock albums, EPs, singles and videos — and he always manages to find artists and releases I’ve never heard (or even heard of), which is pretty damned impressive when you consider the amount of music that I get sent on a daily basis. Equally impressive: His tight, sharp, no-bullshit writing. So I asked Adam if he’d be willing to let me run some of his reviews, and to my great pleasure, he agreed. If you spend any time around these parts, I expect you’ll dig his work as much as I do. Here’s the first instalment. Enjoy.
Jim’s Plumbing And Electrical
The Business
Watch Back on Drugs on YouTube
Preview & purchase at Bandcamp
Members of underground Ottawa legends New Swears recently resurfaced as Jim’s Plumbing and Electrical. While the name’s new, the band retains the best qualities of their predecessor. While New Swears’ party-ready punk often felt like it was on the verge of spinning out of control, that choice was deliberate. The band proved, despite their brand, almost effortlessly tight. New Swears played with a kind of hard-won, inter-member telepathy that comes from years in the trenches. While Jim’s Plumbing takes a few stylistic detours (less gas, more grass), the shuffle hasn’t thrown out what worked.
Over four songs The Business finds the new outfit tight and polished. They’re less hitched to any hyphenated subgenre of punk this time out, instead embracing a relaxed ’70s barroom sound that gives their indulgences more time to breathe. The self-aware sleaze of their old outfit is still deeply ingrained in their DNA, but it’s taken a shower and is now wearing a clean shirt. You can never quite shake the smoke, though.
The record’s lead single feels like a statement of intent. Back on Drugs arrived alongside a wonderfully entertaining video based on a debaucherous slice of Canadian sports history. The band explained:
“In June 1990, the Canadian Government released the Dubin Inquiry, a federally sanctioned investigation of the use of drugs and banned substances in elite athletics.Sparked by Olympic Sprinter Ben Johnson’s bomb-drop of a disqualification after winning gold in the Men’s 100m dash at the Seoul Olympics. This government publication also details the tale of the 1988 Men’s Olympic Weightlifting team’s rampant drug related issues.Before leaving Canada for the games, the team submitted urine samples checking their systems for banned substances. Some of these screenings were found to be inconclusive, triggering necessary retesting. Unfortunately, some of these athletes had continued their steroid use immediately after their initial submissions. This caused a panic amongst the team leading two ingenious strategies. First, the consumption of as much beer as possible to flush the steroids out of their systems. The second, buying catheters to inject urine into their bladders to be expelled during testing. Neither of these plans worked.”
Jim’s Plumbing and Electrical plays as a five-piece here. Alex Jakimczuk recorded, mixed, and mastered the new material.
New Swears last released Night Mirror in 2019 through Dine Alone Records. In the years since, members of the group took an alt-country turn with Scorpion King and issued a series of scene-rooted video projects through the Clubhouse Recording Club.
Neil Haverty
Man Down
Watch on YouTube
Preview & purchase at Bandcamp
Neil Haverty’s been through the wringer. The narrative arc of indie bands, particularly esoteric late-2000s regional acts, is often brief. While it’s not surprising that Bruce Peninsula spent years off the grid, their absence goes beyond the usual “got a real job” narrative. While that’s indeed part of the story — Haverty’s spent a decade composing for film and television; he’s also spent the better part of that time battling leukemia.
The diagnosis and his subsequent struggles factor heavily into Man Down, Neil’s first solo single in over ten years. The vocalist’s brooding growl should be instantly familiar to anyone who followed Bruce Peninsula’s striking string of rootsy, gospel-tinged records. On the sombre track, he grapples with the messy reality of healing, addressing the clumsy fits-and-starts of recovery and re-prioritizing a life:
“Man Down reminds me how close I came to death, and how sure I was that it would fundamentally change my life. But the truth is, most things stayed the same. The ideals I formed while sick — about living differently, more intentionally — they blur and come in and out of focus with time. This song wrestles with that realization: that survival doesn’t always mean transformation, and that clinging to our old patterns is as human as anything else.”
Haverty recorded with Bruce Peninsula drummer Leon Taheny (Owen Pallett, Austra) producing. Man Down also features string arrangements by Merganzer’s Mika Posen (Timber Timbre, Jennifer Castle). Among the track’s delicate bed of keys and analog synth, the recording incorporates field recordings captured at the Museo Galileo in Florence. Phil Demetro mastered the single.
Bruce Peninsula last issued No Earthly Sound in 2020, their third full-length following 2011’s Open Flames.
Bologna Colorado
Get To The Point
Watch on YouTube
Halifax rockers Bologna Colorado sound like a band out of time on their new single Get To The Point. The generous take is that it feels like a long-lost proto-punk gem, a lightning-in-a-bottle product of amped-up youth brimming with sneering grit and overblown guitars. Realistically, the track would fit perfectly into the early-2000s garage revival — that short-lived moment when the mainstream woke up to bands like The Hives as they scrambled to repeat the success of The Strokes and White Stripes. It’s also the era when a naive, college-aged version of me held out hope that the universe would finally award the New Bomb Turks for doing it faster and better for decades, BUT I DIGRESS.
Wherever you place it, “Get to the Point” is a visceral thrill, heavy on attitude and gleefully absent of deeper meaning. Speaking to The Coast, bassist Adam Otmar acknowledges, “it’s just kind of a loud scream song…there’s not much to it.” While it may be a trifle, the recording finds the band at their sonic best, reaching a level of crisp, kinetic fidelity that their past work only hinted at. Frontman Cole Chalifoux notes that the band’s earlier records, 2024’s No Refund and 2023’s Entertainment Section, contain, by contrast, “songs that have a lot of meaning that we take very seriously.”
Formed in 2022, Bologna Colorado features Chalifoux on vocals and guitar, Otmar on bass, Emily Denesyk on keys and Will Adams on drums. The new track follows their first two records and November’s one-off single, Forget My Ex. Chalifoux also records solo as George Mooring.
Man Made Hill
Delicious Logo
Preview & purchase at Bandcamp
More than 20 albums in Hamilton’s Man Made Hill remains impressively elusive, delivering askew outsider art that’s ever enigmatic and, more often than not, gently threatening. The newly delivered Delicious Logo is the second entry in a new era that finds Randy Gagne plying their craft in a professional studio. Mirroring the assembly of 2022’s Mirage Repair, this latest album again sees the artist working with producer Jeremy Greenspan (Junior Boys, Jessy Lanza).
The 12-song set is the artist’s first with Toronto’s Telephone Explosion. In a writeup by Kevin Hainey, the label boasts “a tsunami windfall of sleazy synth pop, jagged funk, and sinister existential disco that veers in and out of comprehension.” You can see the glitchy fever-dream video for the lead single Trophy Shop on YouTube, along with a visualizer for the unsettling love song Never Give Up.
The set features appearances from experimental Russian-Estonian artist Lolina (fka Inga Copeland, ex-Hype Williams), percussionist Sean Dunal (Sexy Merlin) and Allie Blumas (ALMA, ex-a.k.a Alma, ex-DOOMSQUAD). The Katz sisters from Hamilton staple Sourpussy sing lead on a cover of Best Times, the 1986 theme from the cult Canadian sorority slasher flick Killer Party.
Dealbreaker
King Size
Preview & purchase at Bandcamp
Welland punks Dealbreaker celebrated their first anniversary with King Size, a digital/cassette compilation of their inaugural studio work. The set gathers material from the Run It Again and Quick Split EPs, along with the recent Power Moves single. The latter recently debuted as the theme song for comedian Mike Burns’ podcast of the same name.
Dealbreaker came together last year, featuring longtime Welland scene members Connor Johnstone (vocals), Nick Giammarco and Bil Huffman (guitars), Josh Van Hezewyk (bass), and Scott Brady (drums). There are some deep-cut local roots in that group. Giammarco, in particular, played in Canyon Carvers, who seemed to open every other Niagara show for a while. Johnstone’s visible with the Quite Alright design studio, working with a raft of Ontario bands. Dealbreaker is, in the best sense of the word, a garage band through and through — longtime friends convening on weekends to churn out brash songs with constant momentum, one foot in the ’90s, and shout-along choruses written with the audience in mind. The band dove into their backstory in a recent chat at Punknews with my pal Em Moore.
Look for the group in July at Buddies Fest in Tillsonburg, Ontario, appearing alongside ALL, Dillinger Four, The Flatliners, Greg Norton and more.
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To read the rest of this column — and more by Adam White — visit the Some Party website.
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Some Party is a newsletter sharing the latest in independent Canadian rock ‘n’ roll, curated more-or-less weekly by Adam White. Each edition explores punk, garage, psych, and otherwise uncategorizable indie rock, drawing lines from proto to post and taking some weird diversions along the way. You can stream featured songs from the latest editions of the newsletter via the Some Party Playlists, available on Apple Music and Spotify. You can buy Adam a coffee HERE.
