Courtesy of Young Empires Even though the Junos are in town this we tekend, JunoFest was just a minor sideshow to the usual meat market adventures at Toronto's Drake Hotel, where the city's most beautiful people go on weekends to exchange smoldering glances. Fortunately, up-and-coming electro-rock trio Young Empires' blend of house-y beats, ...

Night Slugs Like a lot of dance music producers these days, Egyptrixx doesn't confine his music to any one subgenre. His debut album, 'Bible Eyes,' -- the first full-length released by the new yet already widely praised UK label Night Slugs -- is electronic dance music, sure, but aside from that, David Psutka tells Spinner over coffee in his ...

Night Slugs | Young Turks | Merge Records What's the difference between dance music and electronic music? On its face, the question sounds silly, or at least, needlessly specific, like one of those insignificant arguments that used to seize fans of drum'n'bass (or should that be jungle?) for weeks at a time. In 2011, though, synth-y sounds ...

Mysteries of Trade If Bonjay were a typical group, you'd be so over them already. Alanna Stuart and Pho Swain's first mixtape in 2007 found the two Toronto residents mashing up dancehall, R&B and indie rock; their first EP, 'Gimme Gimme,' came out two whole years later, which is a lifetime in blog-buzz terms (Vampire Weekend's ...

Sony Nova Scotia rapper Classified is used to hearing his own songs when he's out on tour every night. When he's at home on the couch watching mixed martial arts (MMA) fighting, however, it's a bit more of a surprise. And so Classified (real name Luke Boyd) got a jolt when he heard UFC competitor Patrick Côté had used 'Oh... ...

The tantalizing smell of Texas BBQ has finally wafted over to the hip-hop side of the music industry, coaxing them into joining their rock and country cousins on their annual Austin pilgrimage to South by Southwest. The past few years have seen SXSW's rap contingent go from a handful of Houston heroes to ...

Celebrities have been holding up fancy products and smiling in exchange for cash since, oh, roughly the dawn of time. Many, like Britney Spears, even fill their music videos with product placement. Determining if these ad dollars are well spent depends on the endorser, the product they're pushing and minor ...