Caleb Ross’ stories do not behoove summaries. Let’s just get that out of the way. Let’s also just say that they contain blood drinking, deformity, death, and disfigurement, to varying degrees. These stories swirl like nightmares: a populace of anti-protagonists so wounded that there is generally no hope for their redemption. The reader acts as sponge, absorbing their pain. Making sense of it. As the reader, you are the first man on the scene; as such, you are to perform the tasks the characters themselves are no longer capable of performing: observe, record, and interpret. Seek your own closure. …

In true do-it-yourself fashion, Toronto singer-songwriter Danny Handes took pretty much whatever he could find—guitar, microphone, tambourine, knitting needles—and weaved an impressive debut album. The Asterisk Eye is a musical quilt, a patchwork of 14 songs that cover a lot of ground. It travels pretty much everywhere, from “So Bad” with its AC/DC-like driven riff to the softer land of “Our Leaves Are Green Again” and “Long Road,” which would be fitting on a mix-tape with the likes of Keane and Thom Yorke. “Hearts Again” is a catchy windows-rolled-down-on-a-cool-fall-night companion …

“I won’t settle nope not a little bit.”
If it sounds like a proclamation it should, and it comes beautifully by way of Emma-Lee, Canadian singer-songwriter on “Where You Want To Be.” Since last time we heard from her she has managed to get exactly where she wants to be. Her debut album, Never Just A Dream, which was given 4/4 stars from the Toronto Star—and also fared quite nicely with Oxyfication—is a brilliant beginning-to-end coming-of-age listening experience that defies genre classification. For the better part of the two years leading …

A clever songwriter with a classically divine voice Toronto, Canada’s Emma-Lee spins songs of mass seduction on her debut album, Never Just A Dream. Built from ambivalent tales of heartbreak and redemption that everyone who has loved has gone through, the songs are like sonic submersibles, delving their way into the parts of you that make you tick. The catchy lyrics and osmotic melodies follow you and before you know it you’re bopping right along.
The luscious landscape of “That Sinking Feeling” sets the proper mood for what you’re going to …

Justin Nicholes, author of the novel Ash Dogs (Another Sky Press), has set up for himself quite a challenge with this debut offering. His protagonist, former high school football star and current Iraq war veteran, Marcus Green, has returned home from his tour of duty and must assimilate back into domestic life. The novel focuses on Marcus’s attempt at a simple, comfortable existence far removed from the rigors of war, which by design downplays the forward momentum present in most longer fiction works.
Because the novel focuses almost entirely on Marcus’s …

Canadian singer-songwriter, Amelie Lefebvre’s (she goes by Amelie) music is like a stranger hugging you: you don’t have to understand, or know the person doing the hugging to feel the warmth in their embrace. That old cliche about music being universal, that rings true here. All but one song on her debut album, Amelie, is sung in French, a language probably foreign to a lot of people south of the Canadian border. But from the album’s opening track “24 heures” (an acoustic version also closes the disk) your ears tell …