On his new album, Cult of Love, local retro-popster Art Imperial takes a grab bag of sounds from the ’50s and ’60s—doo-wop, surf rock, British Invasion pop, and Phil Spector girl groups to name a few—and creates a record that is at once heartbreaking and catchy. Imperial’s love of ’60s sounds doesn’t make him unique: [...]

It’s not totally accurate to call Toronto-based duo The Airplane Boys a rap group. It’s not that they don’t rap. They do, and pretty well, at that. It’s more that the Boys—who have been carrying the “next-Toronto-act-to-blow” tag for very close to a year—make a point of screwing with genre conventions, throwing handfuls of synthpop, [...]

Toronto-based musician Slakah the Beatchild is best known as a hip-hop and R&B producer, having made beats for artists like Drake and Melanie Durrant. On his latest album, The Other Side of Tomorrow, the first release from his “band” The Slakadeliqs (“band” in quotes, because he does it all himself), he changed direction and paid [...]

Echoes of Silence, the long-awaited third and final instalment in The Weeknd’s trilogy of mixtapes, starts with “D.D.,” (streaming at right) Abel Tesfaye’s re-interpretation of Michael Jackson’s 1987 classic “Dirty Diana.” In The Weeknd’s hands, the legendary MJ tune gets both darker and more desperate. Interestingly, while Tesfaye adds a distinct, Weeknd touch to “Diana,” [...]

There are two major problems with Take Care, the second official studio album from Torontonian rap mega-star Drake. First, and most prominently, is Drake’s weird tendency for sitting on the fence between pop star and MC. On one hand, Drizzy loves making pop music. The sad, forlorn, puppy-dog eyed version of Aubrey Graham that appears [...]

Every Tuesday, Torontoist scours record store shelves in search of the city’s most notable new releases and brings you the best—or sometimes just the biggest—of what we’ve heard in Sound Advice. If you haven’t caught wind of The Weeknd yet, don’t worry. Their faint blip on the radar is rapidly becoming a wailing siren, so [...]

It’s a strange, perhaps undesirable, thing to admit to, but Torontoist spends a lot of time thinking about R. Kelly. Generally it comes down to one core question that we just can’t answer (nor do we think we ever will): Is R. Kelly a genius or a lunatic? Here is a man who has produced [...]

Barack Obama lays down the smack in South Carolina’s presidential primary. Obama won by an enormous 28-point margin, prompting Bill Clinton to afterwards comment that this was no big deal because Jesse Jackson, who is a black man, like Barack Obama, won South Carolina when he ran for President, and did he mention that Barack [...]

Haydain Neale, 36-year-old singer of Toronto-based band jacksoul, is in hospital in critical condition following a vehicle accident on Friday evening at the intersection of Eglinton Avenue and Kennedy Road [map]. The performer’s injuries are serious, but he remains stable. His family has requested that details of his injuries and the hospital he has been [...]