Leif 🇨🇦

Michelle Zauner - Japanese Breakfast - wrote one of the best books of 2021 and keeps giving us fantastic records. For Melancholy Brunettes is a great record for cool, rain-spotted Saturday mornings when the sky refuses to clear despite the night's total evacuation.

Also, before I forget - recently saw Canadian rock legends Our Lady Peace here in Ottawa. Time has dulled neither their intensity nor their passion. Great to hear highlights from Clumsy and Happiness... but the pinnacle of the night was a blistering version of Starseed - perhaps their best song! 🇨🇦

Back at it - thrilled to be listening to Insomnium's recently repressed masterpiece, Shadows of the Dying Sun. This is melodic death metal at some of its finest, and a fitting soundtrack to reading about technofeudalism and the destruction of democracy. Bon courage!

Musk and Trump Are Causing the Dumbest Imperial Collapse in History Empires have fallen before. But it’s never been this purely idiotic.

Whatever else their merits of this piece, it adequately conveys some of the emotions caused by recent events vis a vis global policy.

"Trumpism strikes directly at the heart of American power projection: trust."

prospect.org/world/2025-0...

Here's a great take on how three destructive and virulent strands of capitalism have utterly choked the democratic state.

Look, I'm up early working on my French because in Canada we respect and value other cultures (🇨🇦) and so I turn to Kessoncoda's remarkable Outerstate, which is perfect for a snowy, meditative Saturday morning while the brain is busy. Love the complex, propulsive, intelligent drumwork here.

The New Way Slowly Rolling Camera · Single · 2025 · 1 songs

I’ve been a fan of both Caoilfhionn Rose and Slowly Rolling Camera for years now, and to see their collaboration is really exciting. If you’re into ethereal and pensive lyrics over atmospheric modern jazz, this is worth your time. Here’s hoping for the album!

open.spotify.com/album/4Gyvje...

Mal Waldron is one of those pianists you'll always recognize. His melancholic and intellectual approach is always a highlight for me. For this record, First Encounters, Waldron teams up with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Hiroshi Murakami for a remarkable session in Tokyo at the start of the 70s.

The Path to American Authoritarianism What comes after democratic breakdown.

"When fear, exhaustion, or resignation crowds out citizens’ commitment to democracy, emergent authoritarianism begins to take root."

Great piece about the need to participate in democracy or disappear into authoritarian governance for and by the rich.

www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

Another great Canadian rock band that is so, so formative to me and many others. If you know, you know. Tonight, it's Wolf Parade! 🤘 🇨🇦

Not that anyone asked, but if someone did, I'd say that one of my top picks is the remarkable, transformative, and soulful Archie Shepps. In particular, while his early work is full of surprises and his middle period is free, I find his late turn towards the blues so, so compelling. Black Ballads.

YouTube video by Massey Hall+ Constantines Live at Massey Hall | May 27, 2015

Here, a gift:

youtu.be/AqoL5XegJuw?...

If there was one band in the world I could convince to get back together, it would be the Canadians known and loved as The Constantines. Words like formative and important barely cut it. The best band I've seen live, some of the best albums, and a sound that I come back to over and over again.

This is so good. Thank you.

Today is a day for The Halo Effect's latest banger, The March of the Unheard. For my money, Mikael Stanne and company are among the few prominent metal bands giving justice to that old Gothenburg sound. And watching neighbours burn their house to the ground is cause for considerable emotion.

Colombia Stood Up to Trump—But the Media Let Him Shape the Narrative President Gustavo Petro succeeded in forcing Trump to change his deportation plans. But the biggest U.S. news networks haven’t reported it that way.

Great recent story about how media will tell the story of their domestic incumbency, a tendency which is going to increase especially in a situation where oligarchs have seized control of a state and its social media apparatus.

www.currentaffairs.org/news/colombi...

Today's mood is 🇨🇦 with one of the Weakerthans' era-defining records, Reconstruction Tour, playing on a Fluance. For me, the Weakerthans have always defined the best of Canada in their thoughtfulness, care and bravery.

Read the transcript of Trudeau’s response to U.S. tariffs on Canada - National | Globalnews.ca U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Saturday, imposing tariffs on Canadian goods and spurring Canadian retaliatory tariffs.

Whatever the end goal here for the USA, which is undoubtedly greed among its oligarchical pariahs, it is sad to see one of the fundamental alliances of the modern era broken so callously. Canada is many things. Weak is not among them.

Vive le Canada 🇨🇦

globalnews.ca/news/1099337...

Okay maybe not instead of but "in addition to" right yes.

How tariffs could hurt farmers in both Canada and the U.S. | The Narwhal Agricultural trade between Canada and the U.S. is worth US$70 billion. Manitoba farmers brace themselves as both countries threaten tariffs

The trade war looms, but instead of the oligarchic saboteurs dismantling America, think about people and what they really want and need. Hope, community, and stability in a well managed world. Think, for example, of farmers on both sides of the border.

thenarwhal.ca/manitoba-far...

First listen of Mogwai's great new album, The Bad Fire. A lot has been said about their transformations as a band, but I'll say this here: they always nail the feelings of malaise, and hope, and unease, and explosion.

YouTube video by Gondwana Records Jasmine Myra - Rising (Official Video)

youtu.be/lp6taD4Ob3M?...

On this blustery day, captured by the winds and the news equally, what better to listen to than one of last year's best albums: Jasmine Myra's Rising. Courage is nourished by such replenishment.

Went to see Slowdive play the Bronson Centre last night in Ottawa, and it was incredible. Their steady grasp of the powers of wistfulness is beautiful to see. And they're a lot of fun!

YouTube video by viagra boys Viagra Boys - Man Made of Meat (Official Video)

Viagra Boys are riding the zeitgeist high, as is their wont. How do they do it, this uncanny effect of staring into the soul until it blinks?

youtu.be/UD4jRK5j2Ow?...

YouTube video by PlugResearch Samamidon- Tribulation (Official Music Video)

Here's an old, old song from him, back in the days when the name was a single word, and one that captures that ethereal mist that envelopes his folk roots. Tribulation!

youtu.be/z_CoYyxxV24?...

YouTube video by Sam Amidon Sam Amidon - I'm On My Journey Home (Official Video)

youtu.be/Z3iLnxklx5c?...

‘You have to get behind the song’: singer Sam Amidon on fronting Bon Iver, schooling Paul Mescal and the new folk revival Bon Iver asked him to cover his new material and he’s teaching Mescal and Josh O’Connor to sing. But the interpreter is more interested in songs than stardom

Sam Amidon is coming out with a new album, Salt River, any minute now, which includes Sam Gendel's talents, and I am super excited. Every since I heard his album All is Well back in 2008 or so, I've been consistently blown away. Here's to you, Sam Amidon!

www.theguardian.com/music/2025/j...

For a while now I've been hemming and hawing about what book in French I feel comfortable starting in on. And then it hit me. Why not the perennial favourite. The children's classic turned blockbuster. The one and only. Here's to Bilbo Bessac! (A few changes were made in translation...!)