REVIEW: Black Sabbath kicks ass in Edmonton
Whether lapsed Catholics or apostate Protestants, fans of all religious persuasions gave roaring approval to the solid, reliable shift that Black Sabbath put in at the doom metal factory on Tuesday night. It wasn’t hard to see why 18,000 Edmonton fans flocked to see these metal legends get their hands dirty at Rexall Place. When [...]
God lives in the music of Black Sabbath!
The difference between eternal salvation and eternal damnation for Black Sabbath may come down to punctuation. The official title of the reunited band’s first new song since 1978 is God is Dead? – with the question mark – and yet in the recording Ozzy Osbourne sings the title of the song so many times that [...]
Burton Cummings at Rock Fest, reunions at Hot Plains
Festival announcements are piling up, as area citizens try to stuff as much fun and frivolity into the short Canadian summer as humanly possible. We must. First up, because it’s fresh, is the reveal of the line-up for the annual Edmonton Rock Music Festival. Burton Cummings is the biggest name of an all-Canadian classic rock [...]
Edmonton big winner at Edmonton Music Awards
It’s hard to know who the biggest winner was at the 2014 Edmonton Music Awards – the artists that collected the prizes or our “awesome” city itself. There was a lot of love in the room at the Royal Alberta Museum Theatre Sunday night – and most of it for Edmonton – for the fourth [...]
INTERVIEW: Il Divo no boy band!
Il Divo does not know the meaning of the words “novelty act” – literally. There seems to be no comparable idiom in Western European languages for the concept of entertainment whose style outshines its apparent substance and seems to survive on irony. A three-quarters European group of four guys in Armani suits crooning “Memory” or [...]
MUSIC PREVIEW: Collective Soul now classic rock
Has enough time passed that we can nostalgic for Collective Soul? With four albums in the decade, each of them achieving platinum status both north and south of the border, and a consistent roster that lasted into the 2000’s, this band was the ubiquitous infrastructure that the 1990’s music scene was built around. Led by [...]
Johnny Rotten comes to Edmonton in Jesus Christ Superstar
So you are the Christ, you’re the great Jesus Christ. Prove to me that you’re divine, change my water into wine … and God save the queen’s fascist regime! Is that how it goes? How’s this for a masterpiece of casting: Johnny Rotten, aka John Lydon, will be playing the role of King Herod in [...]
Classified keeps it real Canadian, really high
Like a lot of white rappers of a certain age, Classified, aka Luke Boyd, listened to Snoop and Dr. Dre when he was a kid. That stuff wasn’t easy to find in Enfield, Nova Scotia, where he came of age in the mid-1990s. Cassette tapes were treasured possessions. He and three other dudes comprised the [...]
You can’t take the metal out of the Maimann
Kevin Maimann is a folkie with a metalhead inside screaming to get out – or is it the other way around? There is little doubt that the 27-year-old Edmonton Sun music columnist is a metal fan. As a teenager he braided his hair like the dude from Korn. He says he doesn’t consider himself a [...]
