On last night's 12" Split release between Anagram and The Creeping Nobodies...

Both groups are getting tighter and stronger with every show. They remind me why I find most rock dead boring, precisely because they make it so exhilirating. I think of all those groups that make the same tasteless eunuch rock, stuck in the middle with no direction, sounding like everyone else under the sun, imitating or emultaing, never advancing or expanding, and smiling all the way through it in ignorant bliss...and I'm so grateful for this new sound we have in Toronto, embodied by the likes of The Lullabye Arkestra, No Dynamics, and the aforementioned groups. It's an atavistic kind of music that embraces the dark and carnal energy of human life akin to the ritualism of antiquity.

Anagram, dour and stoic but no less intense for it, have the faces of apparitions, hardboiled and ready to haunt, like a lost troupe of soldiers from a British colonial battalion. Matt Mason is the boldest frontman in recent Toronto music history. It's hard to imagine him singing from anywhere but within the crowd, ceding control to the bodies of his bloodthirsty audience, getting bashed around in the pit without losing a word or falling to the ground. The guitar work, and the added sax and sytnh, make up a most terrifying demolition crew, while the rhythm section churns up the ground underneath.

Meanwhile, The Nobodies, where other groups wouldn't even bother, can always be counted upon to bang on tin or entice electronic toys to sing ghastly wails into the night. They're one of the few reasons I haven't abandoned rock music altogether for electro.

Both groups played the newest material from the split, and they'll be doing so again tonight at Velvet Elvis in Anagram's home base of Oshawa.

Some new things to check out...

.1 DJ MINI

Known for years in Montreal for her club night at Parking, she's built herself up as a DJ long enough to generate some excitement in her hometown for her first album, Audio Hygiene, which plays a serious, globally competitve game of Twister with electro genres. It's out-deeps the deep and makes bangers out of what might be something less if it were made by anyone else.

.2 MODERN BOYS MODERN GIRLS

Shelbie, our CIUT music department assistant and Take 5 morning show live music coordinator, brought this group on Take 5 yesterday and I must say, what a choice! These guys and gals are behind the Casual Sex parties that pop up once in a while at various venues around the city. They'll be releasing a new disc tonight called The Edge of My Blade EP at The Bovine Sex Club, so check em out. Listen to the title track.

.3 LES GEORGES LENINGRAD

I'd never been too keen on them until I heard selections from their new album Sangue Puro, which places them in 2001 floating space baby territory. Their sound has become more expansive and adventurous, and the cavernous, cosmic coldness in those triangular and square-wave swells would fit brilliantly in a surround-sound, or dare I say it, quadrophonic realm. Check out a new track courtesy of Hate Something Beautiful.