Miesha and the Spanks - Please Don't Blow/Girls, Like Wolves (2013)

So, we're still reeling from the coitus interruptus of the cancellation of this year's Sled Island. But at least we had three great days - and managed to score this tape, which Miesha and the Spanks were giving out for FREE! at their show at the Legion.

This is a two-track sampler of the band's upcoming Ian Blurton-produced full length, and it sounds pretty amazing. Big, big guitars and drums, with lots of room for Miesha's voice.

We're putting this (along with the rest of our tape collection) on a nice, high shelf to keep it dry in case the CCPS offices ever flood. You can grab the tracks off of bandcamp.

Breaker - In Days of Heavy Metal (1982)

We're going to go a bit sideways here, as we slip into the abyss that is Sled Island. We just found out about this last week, when we were visiting Recordland. Eraz Cohen started asking if we'd heard about this obscure metal band... which, not being super-conversant in metal, we of course hadn't. But a bit of digging on the interwebs, and we were able to find out a whole bunch about these guys. Well, a relatively good amount anyways.

Folks who are more in the know about such things suggest that these guys were well ahead of their time. We're surprised to hear such a well-produced record coming out of the city at that time - apparently this was recorded here at EK Sound and produced by one of the guys from the Stampeders.

Which almost redeems the Stampeders. Almost.

CCPS Miscellany: All Woman Brothers Band - Pay Back (1995)

More thanks to Mark Kocher for this little record from Edmonton's All Woman Brothers Band. We don't know why we didn't have a copy of this already - but the CCPS collection is full of oversights. We also didn't realize that this recording had such strong ties to Calgary, with a release via Sloth, recording at Airwaves and the mighty Steve Elaschuk making a vocal contribution.

Yelp!

CCPS Miscellany: Jr. Gone Wild and Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie - Live at the Hyperbole

Mark Kocher also passed us a rip of this CD, and while it's, well, a rip of a CD, we do think it's worth sharing. Because it pairs two of our favourite Edmonton exports into one deeelicious package.

Apparently Jr. Gone Wild had a bit of a history of playing with comedy troupe Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie (perhaps most famous for "The Toronto Song"), and this is a document of a 1993 performance (according to this weebsite).

Suffice to say, yuks abound on this.

CCPS Miscellany: Jr. Gone Wild - Folk You: The Guido Sessions (1989)

The CCPS is subject to a lot - and we mean A LOT - of weird coincidences. And each time, it's a real treat. So imagine how thrilled we were to get this tape the same week we found out that Jr. Gone Wild have reunited and are playing a string of shows around the province (including an upcoming show in a week here in Calgary)?

We'd like to thank Mark Kocher for passing this along to us - it's a really great reminder of a band who helped set the standard for a pile of bands that followed.

Folk you, too!

Lab Coast - Wilding (2010)

So, as we have previously alluded to, the CCPS believes in the supremacy of tape in terms of recorded media. An unexpected consequence of this belief it that when we find something on tape that we already have on CD/vinyl/mp3, we HAVE to buy it. Hence today's post.

We're pretty sure we bought this Wilding CD about two years ago and - as with all Lab Coast recordings - we really, really like it. So we bought it again when we saw the tape in Sloth. This is a much different band than the one that you'll see these days, with just Chris Dadge and David Laing making some amazing, low-fi pop (along with a couple of their usual conspirators on the cassette-only live track).

Get it via the Lab Coast bandcamp.

Mark Mills - Go Love Yourself (2013)

We didn't even think of this until we were queueing this tape up for posting - but remember how yesterday we were talking about the rock and roll lottery show? Another part of our favourite part of the night, alongside Devin Friesen, was Mark Mills. Who we hadn't really noticed before - probably because we've been too busy filling our iPods with obscure Forbidden Dimension tracks.

Anyways, as Beatroute pointed out last month, Mark Mills has played with Life Like Cobra and Hot Sweet Noise. And now he's got a solo tape out. A tape! And a pretty great one at that - this is a rare thing in Calgary, straight up, super-danceable synth pop. Probably the closest thing we have in the CCPS collection to this is Ohama, which puts Mark in good company.

Here's the video for one of the tracks off this tape - we think this is a better sell for the city than that painful tourism video that came out a couple of months ago:



We think you can get this from Mark's bandcamp.

Bitter Fictions - Nos. 1 & 2 (2012)

Here's another tape we "gripped" while at Sloth last week. Quite frankly, we've been a bit scared of opening the door to improv-based tapes like Bitter Fictions, as there seems to be a never-ending supply. But after seeing Devin Friesen alongside a couple of our favourite Calgarians at last month's rock and roll roulette show convinced us to man up and dive in. So we grabbed this one. Why? We're not sure. But we've been fighting a compulsion to go back and pick up his new record ever since.

You can grab this off of the Bitter Fictions bandcamp, 'natch.

GreyScreen - Thrillogy (2012)

We've had a good tape week here at the CCPS, mostly because we finally picked up a couple of tapes that have been tempting us at the front of Sloth for a while. We, as the kids say, "gripped" some soon-to-be "rarez".

The first is this amazing bit of 8-bit mastery from Bart Records mastermind Kevin Stebner. Turns out, this is the perfect soundtrack for our crippling addiction to Team Fortress 2 (wonder why we're light on posts some months? It's probably because it's easier to play TF2 than to write 100 words).

Here's a video of Stebner rockin' the Nintendos at Olympic Plaza. The best thing about an Olympic Plaza show is, of course, watching the audience. It takes all sorts, eh?



You can download this from the GreyScreen bandcamp.

CCPS Miscellany: James Leroy - Distinction (2010)

More from Lethbridge! We've been amazed at the quality of stuff that has come out of that city - and also the quantity that has been linked to Paul Lawton.  While this tape was put out by Scotch Tapes in 2010, it collects stuff that Lawton and James Leroy recorded in the early 2000's - stuff that we once got our hands on via Soulseek or some other weird filesharing method.

Anyways, this is more straight-ahead pop than the more psych-tinged stuff that Lawton (and Leroy?) have been exploring recently with the Ketamines.



We believe this is out of print, so we'll let you borrow our copy.