Winterruption Edition!

Written By Jeff MacCallum

Today we are excited to use our weekly Quick Picks column to highlight some new music from artists that will be playing this year’s Winterruption YEG festival. From January 20th-24th, the downtown core in Edmonton is alive with festival goers braving the winter and bouncing from venue to venue to check out music, comedy, drag, and more. Tickets and wristbands are selling fast so head over to the festival’s website to secure yours before they’re gone.

Chad VanGaalen - Freedom is Love EP

Confession time… I have not paid attention to Chad VanGaalen’s recent burst of musical creativity. Calgary’s iconic indie artist has been releasing new albums at a break-neck speed and I finally hit play on a release in his Full Moon Bummer series. The Freedom is Love EP slays. VanGaalen goes back and forth between rip-roaring garage-punk and the trademark outsider-folk that made him an indie sensation. I hate that I love this EP so much… now I have to start digging into the 16 releases he’s dropped in the past 5 years and I just don’t have that kind of time!

Handsome Tiger - FIRST PEOPLE II

Vancouver’s Handsome Tiger dropped FIRST PEOPLE II in May and I’m still putting it on when looking for energetic beats to pump me up. EDM music isn’t normally something I enjoy but this record is unlike any dance album I’ve ever heard. Taking big, in-your-face, beats and adding pow-wow vocals has been happening in Canada’s indigenous music scenes for a while now, I love it, you love, the two styles work perfectly. On FIRST PEOPLE II, Handsome Tiger tosses another log on the fire by adding Pan-African rhythms to the mix and let me tell you, that last log must have been soaked in gasoline cause it gets the fire raging!

Jacob Brodovsky - Tell The Kids We Tried

With a soft cadence that brings to mind John K Samson, Jacob Brodovsky’s newest album is a contemplative tour de force of calming folk tunes with country flourishes and catchy moments akin to folk-pop. After scrapping a bunch of material and beginning anew under the ‘song a week’ strategy, Brodovsky pivoted and the songs became much more personal and immediate. Much of the material is of his experience of leaving a loved community for political reasons and raising children in this tumultuous time. Tell The Kids We Tried is honest and vulnerable and as such, is the Winnipeg singer/songwriters best work to date.

TRAITRS - POSSESSOR

The Toronto duo TRAITRS have amassed an incredible international following and their latest album, POSSESSOR, has been a wild success. Completely sold out of all physical media, the duo may have underestimated their popularity. Crafting dark and brooding coldwave with 80s synth- forward, post-punk nostalgia, TRAITRS pull off the impressive feat of sounding modern and classic at the same time.

Jeff MacCallum

Jeff MacCallum is our founder. He created Cups N Cakes simply because he had a love of local music. Soon the platform grew beyond the confines of his scene in Edmonton to include all of Canada.

"I did it all very DIY. Everything you see was me learning on the fly. I'm a carpenter not a musician, or a journalist, or a publicist... I'm a carpenter and a weird crazy music fan that thought he could do something fun that might benefit something I care about"

Over the years, MacCallum's commitment to elevating Canadian music earned him a spot as a Polaris Prize Juror, a WCMA Juror, a consultant for music festival curation, and a dear friend to independent music in Canada.

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