Besides Asides

In our ongoing effort to bring you fine folks on the internet fresh content we've decided to add a new feature to the blog in the form of Freedom or Sort Of. The object of Freedom or Sort Of will be to highlight new (or not so new) quality music that is provided either free from the artist or provided at a non-fixed donation price (including free).

Toronto's Deadly Snakes evolved from a fairly standard garage rock/punk band to a diverse well rounded unit, demonstrating a love of tradition folk, country, 60's pop and soul music in their lo-fi tunes. They called it a day in 2006 after the release of Porcella -or- A Bird in the Hand Is Worthless, an album who's medium very much plays into how much one will enjoy it. You see the band released a standard 13 track album on the CD/iTunes release but the vinyl was a whopping 20 track double LP. The vinyl is a much different and arguably much better beast but for some reason it is out of print. So I've gone ahead and ripped my copy of the 12", I warn you now this is an inherently lo-fi production and my ripping is not without it's flaws and skips but I cleaned it up as best I could and it is still amazing to hear like this. Re-recording 4 LP sides until it came out just perfect was not an option. So here it is in all it's glory, do yourself a favour though if you find a copy at your local record shop or on ebay for a good price scoop it up and hear one of the best album of the last decade as it was meant to be heard!

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At the time Main Source's debut album Breaking Atoms wasn't seen as the groundbreaking near flawless piece of hip-hop that it is today. Sadly, like many great acts the New York/Toronto group never managed to recapture the magic of that album due in part to MC/Producer Large Professor leaving the group in 1992. Many casual hip-hop fans might not recognize the name Main Source off the top of their heads but you will probably recognize their sound as Large Professor was one of the two main architects behind the production on Nas' undeniably classic Illmatic. Although, Large Professor left the group they had already started working on a follow-up to Breaking Atoms entitled The Science but it was never finished or released and Mikey D replaced Large Pro on the mic for the official follow-up which was shelved. So what I've collected here is all the non-LP material from Main Source while Large Pro was still in the group including songs that were intended for the unreleased The Science LP. Enjoy:

So it appears like some house keeping needed to be done, because I messed up a bunch of stuff during my last update that was supposed to fix problems around the blog. First of all the Leatherface b-side collection link is fixed with a dl link including all the material, and I fixed the broken links to the Bayonettes discography and Weakerthans b-sides collection as well. It also appeared I left a song or two off of the Weakerthans collection that I intended to put on but I guess couldn't find a good quality source for them at the time so I've included them in the re-up. I also removed several old posts from the archive from the very beginning of the blog before Pants started helping me and before I had figured out exactly what I wanted to do with the blog. I'll probably be re-posting some of the content again in a more uniform format.

In Weakerthans related ish I was going to post a Weakerthans bootleg that a friend of mine recorded from a set they played this year in the basement of a record shop that sounds amazing BUT my copy of the recording was full of skips so I couldn't. Hopefully, I'll be able to visit him in the next month or so and get a new copy made to share with you fine people. With school starting up I assume some slow down will commence in feature updates, distance makes the heart grow fonder or something.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions, feel free to drop them here or send me an email.

My favourite "era" of Toronto's ever controversial Fucked Up was probably around the time of their first LP, Hidden World, and it's associated singles. This BBC session was recorded in May of 2007 in support of that record and showcases three fantastic renditions of songs from that LP as well as the b-side "Black Hats". My personal favourite is this version of "Manqueller Man" as Ben Cook's fantastic backup vocals give this version a little extra "something", Ben would go on to join the band as a third guitarist and play on future studio recordings by the band. I've been sitting on this for a few years and it doesn't seem to have much internet presence,although I did find it on one blog but the quality doesn't appear to be as good as this version and it doesn't have the great artwork made for it :). Enjoy!:

I'm happy to bring to you a new "feature" of the blog called Get In Where You Fit In or GIWYFI as the kids are calling it. Essentially while coming up with content to post I found there was certain things that didn't really fall into the category of b-sides collection, live/radio/studio session bootleg or out-of-print album and that is where Get In Where You Fit In comes into play.

What I have for you today is a group of demos that Dear Landlord recorded prior to their excellent Dream Homes LP and even their early splits with Chinese Telephones and Off With Their Heads. A good chunk of these are demo versions of songs that would end up on Dream Homes and the their 7" stuff. The songs are essentially the same with the only difference being the recordings, there maybe some slight differences in the lyrics and playing but nothing significant enough for me to notice. I just that you might enjoy hearing some great songs in a different way. Here they are: