Tracks from the Underground

Over the past several years, Canada has pushed out a slew of exciting, innovative bands. In the late '90s, Godspeed You Black Emperor! impressed listeners with its symphonic and theatrical experiments with post-rock. Similarly, Broken Social Scene's lush, quirky albums have constantly been well-crafted. The indie-pop band Stars has been played on The OC and Degrassi: The Next Generation.

Two Canadian bands that have recently caught my attention in the past couple of months are Tokyo Police Club and Apostle of Hustle. If you're looking for some extremely fun, non-Top-40 music, check these two out immediately.

Tokyo Police Club has only released a debut EP titled A Lesson in Crime. The album, clocking in at 16:22, is ridiculously short - but the music is driven by such high energy that it doesn't matter. That's what one wants in pop music, isn't it? The band is from Newmarket, Ontario and played at Edgefest last summer and Osheaga Festival the following September. They are currently scheduled to play at Coachella in April. And so, Rolling Stone deservedly called the band one of the best "neo-punk post-anti-rock (circa '73) since the Pavement (Matador Records) reissue of Wowee Zowee." That's a big statement, particularly based off of a seven-song EP. Regarding the EP's brevity, vocalist Graham Wright recently told Ukula: "It's very quick, quick, quick, one, two, three. Some of the songs don't have a lot of space in them and the album doesn't have a whole lot of room to breathe, but I think in the case of an EP this is a really good thing." We surely have a lot to look forward to from Tokyo Police Club.

Apostle of Hustle is basically a Broken Social Scene side project. It was formed by the latter's lead guitarist Andrew Whiteman in 2001, who also released a solo album in 1995 titled Fear of Zen. Nevertheless, the story goes: before writing the spectacular Broken Social Scene album You Forgot It in People with the rest of his band mates, Whitehead visited his godmother in Cuba. During that time, he learned the tres, a Cuban guitar, and became infatuated with Spanish music. Apostle of Hustle is the end-product of the Cuba trip.

The band's first album, Folkloric Feel, was released in 2004. Its second titled National Anthem of Nowhere was released last month (the world music influence is even obvious from the title). So far, I really like the song "My Sword Hand's Anger." The band, in fact, launched a contest calling upon fans to remix or cover that track.