....East Coast rock band The Trews achieved some measure of success
with their last album Den of Thieves, but they're hoping their new
album No Time For Later takes things a few steps further.

"There's been a lot of changes in our world since the last
one," guitarist John-Angus MacDonald says with two of his band mates
over a late lunch in downtown Toronto. "We had a couple of new
producers and we also had a new partnership with Universal. There are
definitely a lot of new things going on in the world of The Trews but I
don't know if you'd call them chances."

The group, consisting of brothers John-Angus and singer Colin
MacDonald, bassist Jack Syperek and drummer Sean Dalton, perform a
sold-out show tomorrow at The Mod Club to celebrate the new album's
release.

John-Angus says the band went right to work on No Time For
Later, spending about three or four months in a rehearsal space
amassing material before paring the 30 to 40 songs down to the final
track listing.

He also says the producing tandem of Gus Van Go and Werner F. helped in separating the musical wheat from the chaff.

"I think what's more difficult than knowing when to let go is
being objective and being willing to sacrifice a few of your babies for
the good of the project," he says. "Everybody is creative and everybody
writes and brings something to the table so it's good to have an
objective fifth part in the studio to help us kill our babies, if you
will."

As for No Time For Later, the band runs the gamut from a
bagpipe intro on the galloping I Can't Stop Laughing to the John
Fogerty-ish title track, a song singer Simon Wilcox helped out with.

"It was one of those songs that came at the tail end of the
session because she was asking if we could knock off soon and get to
the song later," John-Angus says. "Colin said there's no time for
later, we'll finish the song. She was like, 'No, let's work on that
song.' He said, 'What song?' She said, 'The line you just said.' He
wrote the verse and the chorus in about five minutes."

Another track worthy of attention is Gun Control, a song
created following the Virginia Tech massacre last April and bound to
strike a nerve after last week's tragic events at Northern Illinois
University.

"We were sitting around the apartment and watching all the
coverage from CNN and Fox," John-Angus says. "It just seemed so
blatantly obvious they were beating around the bush. The problem was
how did this kid have a gun in the first place? It's a personal and
political view from us. One of the great things about this job is that
you get to put those feelings into words."

The band will support former KISS guitarist Ace Frehley on a
North American tour this spring before mounting their own headlining
Canadian tour in April. The Trews are also taking time off this summer
so Syperek can tie the knot with his girlfriend back in Nova Scotia.

But the band intend on spreading their music in different regions, including the U.S. and Europe.

"We're comfortable in doing a lot of the leg work because we've
done it once before," John-Angus says. "Going in and doing it in
another country, you just change the name of the country and radio
station you're at."

6th January 2009

As the Summer Olympics in Beijing were coming to a close, Toronto
singer Ali Slaight and her family enjoyed its vacation in the balmy
Bahamas.

In fact, one night Slaight was watching the Canadian
highlights on a television from a bar called The Rock House, but she
couldn't hear the sound.

She certainly would've gotten a surprise had she heard what
the accompanying music was: Her own tune, The Story of Your Life, from
her EP, Trace The Stars.

'I was just sitting there saying, 'Oh look at all the cool
Canadian moments,' ' Slaight says, fresh from her third-year finals at
Boston's Berklee College of Music. 'And there were so many people there
but I had no idea that my song was on television because it was on
mute. I thought it was kind of funny then I actually realized that we
had watched it.'

The daughter of media mogul Gary Slaight (of Standard
Broadcasting Inc. fame) spent most of past summer working on the
six-song effort while getting some help from musicians Simon Wilcox and
Tomi Swick.

Slaight, 20, says the experience of writing songs was something new to her.

'It wasn't so much of a challenge as it was a new experience
that I wasn't really used to,' she says. 'But as soon as the ideas
started flowing, they helped me with different aspects of songwriting
and it got easier and easier.'

Slaight, who took a keen interest in music around the age of
14, says Family of Friends is her favourite tune, one about her friends
back at the prestigious Boston institute.

Meanwhile, other light pop numbers, such as the title track
and Apple of My Eye, bring to mind the likes of British pop darlings
Kate Nash and Lily Allen. And The Story of Your Life could be mistaken
for something from Amanda Marshall's catalogue.

But the singer says that while her father certainly has some
clout in media circles, Slaight says she wouldn't have an EP if she
didn't have the pipes or musical chops to back it up.

'If I didn't write songs like this and didn't really know what
I was doing, then I don't think it would've happened at all because I
would have had to at least have some experience in the music industry,'
she says. 'What I've learned at Berklee over the past three years has
taught me how to work my way through the industry a little bit better.

'PRETTY HARSH'

'I know what makes a good idea and a bad idea in the music
industry. It's pretty harsh but knowing certain things has helped me
stay on top as well as the support of my father.'

As for her schooling, Slaight won't return to class until late
January and has one more year left on her degree. She says the
experience has been challenging but definitely worthwhile.

'I don't just sing, I have to take conducting classes, harmony
classes, ear training classes, music theory -- everything that has
anything to do with music,' she says. 'That's a really, really cool
part of it. And the people are incredible and I've made some amazing
friends.'

As it stands now, Slaight is waiting to see what the reaction is to this current EP before committing to the next step.

'I just want to see where this goes right now,' she says. 'I
haven't been in Toronto for a while so I'm just excited to see how
people will react to it and if they like it or not. Right now I just
want to focus on finishing school.' 

Ali's Bio:

In
between her studies at the prestigious Berklee School of Music in
Boston, 19-year-old Ali Slaight spent the summer writing and recording
at home in Toronto. In collaboration with Canadian producer Justin Gray
(Joss Stone, Bret Ryan, Kim Stockwood) and writer Simon Wilcox (Three
Days Grace, Jorane) she co-wrote four of the songs from her forthcoming
EP release Trace The Stars.


2007's 'The Story of Your Life' connected Ali's music to Canadians with
more than 40 Million radio audience impressions and achieved Top10
(Mediabase AC) status in February of this year. Recently the song also
served as the soundtrack to CBC TV's stirring Canadian Olympic
highlight recap. As the lead single from Warner Music's Women &
Songs 11 compilation CD, her music was along side iconic pop females
like Jully Black, Kelly Clarkson, and Nelly Furtado and helped achieve
a Top30 Soundscan Sales Debut.


Of 'Great Expectations' Ali says 'it picks up where Story Of Your Life
left off, it was written by my friend Simon Wilcox, and it basically
says that there's nothing stopping you from achieving what you want, if
you set your mind to it'.


Canadians have grown up with Ali's voice. Her rendition of Seals' 'Kiss
From A Rose' was nominated for best AC single at the 2006 Canadian
Radio Music Awards. Her version of Etta James 'At Last' adorned The
Real Divas Torch Light Vol. II compilation, while she rallied her
Berklee roommates to sing background vocals on Bill King's tribute to
Bob Dylan, The Saturday Nite Fish Fry's Dirt Road Blues CD, The
Roomies, as they are now dubbed recorded a version of 'It Ain't Me
Babe' for the album.


With her friends, Bess James and Stacey Kaniuk, she formed the singing
group Take Three, and the trio have become radio's Seasonal Darlings
with their versions of 'Oh Holy Night' and 'Winter Wonderland' each
reaching No. 1 on the BDS AC Radio chart and can be found on Take
Three's 2007 Christmas Compilation Home For Christmas .


As Ali begins her third term of training at Berklee, she sites the
freedom of the recording process with Justin. 'I wanted to be involved
in every step of the way of this session, from the writing, recording
and even co-producing one of the songs'. Trace The Stars showcases
Ali's vocal maturity throughout it's 6 songs and is the best evidence
of her talent and lifelong love of music.

Betty Bonifassi and Jean-Phi Goncalves knew each other for five years before the one-hour encounter that changed their careers. One day last year
they went into a studio to record something that "wasn't even a song,"
as Goncalves puts it, and they came out with a Beast.

Bonifassi and Goncalves are the two halves of Beast, which stands an
excellent chance of being the next big success story from the Montreal
music scene. The duo's self-titled debut album was released in 22
countries on iTunes before its Canadian CD launch on
Pheromone/Universal earlier this month, and was picked up by Verve
Forecast in the United States and Island Records in Britain before the
band had played a single show outside Canada.

Bonifassi is the better-known of the two: She sang on the soundtrack to The Triplets of Belleville
(and at the Academy Awards when the theme song took an Oscar nomination
in 2004), and on a widely heard album by Montreal's DJ Champion,
including a single (No Heaven) that rocked the Juno Awards
broadcast last year. Goncalves has drummed and written for several top
Quebec musicians, including Daniel Bélanger, Jean-Pierre Ferland and
Plaster, Goncalves's own electro-dance trio.

Beast was born by accident, after Goncalves asked Bonifassi to add
some vocals to a track he was working on. She arrived with a handful of
lyrics and no expectations. Within an hour, the song fragment had
mushroomed into the first draft of a tough, wide-screen epic about the
resilience of human habit in the face of all disasters. The album
version, which is called Devil, has the heavy tread of a
rock-inflected dance, the punch of a down-tempo rap number, and the
melodic charm of a cabaret on the outskirts of hell.

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"The mood was very dark," says Bonifassi. "And that was right for
me. It was a very dark period in my life," though she declines to say
why. "We started to follow that song, to see where it would take us."

She knew from the start that the destination would not be familiar.
She had expected to sing for Goncalves, and she does sing in Devil's chorus, but the verses are done in a hard, spoken-word delivery that Bonifassi had never tried before.

"Jean-Phi pushed me on that. I'm a singer, not a rapper. I had my
text, and he just said, 'Go.' I have an impact in talking, or
slamming," she says, using the English word that, in France, refers to
a declamation with music that is more like dub poetry than rap. "For
me, that was really breaking boundaries."

Beast's music moves with the recombinant energy of a fast-moving
virus, through a wide but coherent variety of styles. Blues, funk and
old-time gospel all make an appearance, along with big-booted guitar
melodies that recall the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone, and sweetly
sinister constructions like those in the film music of Danny Elfman (to
name two of Beast's favourite composers). Goncalves's production claims
a big aural space, with fat bass-lines often grinding far below a
recurrent high vocal sound (sometimes synthetic, sometimes real) that
could stand for the promise of hope in a bleak situation, or the
mockery of remote angels.

"It's very organic and electronic at the same time," says Goncalves.
However synthetic his instrumental choices, they're always grounded by
Bonifassi's powerful, earthy singing. This is probably the first record
to show the full tonal range of her astounding voice, from the brassy
bray heard in Ashtray (against a soft background of mandolins) to the soothing maternal sound in the chorus of Dark Eyes.

The first three songs were written quickly, and then the hard work
began, and continued for 11 months. Beast called in Canadian chanteuse
and songwriter Simon Wilcox to help with the lyrics, and to coach
Bonifassi in her English slamming.

Both Bonifassi and Goncalves were born in France, and arrived
separately in Montreal one month apart in 1997. His family is
Portuguese, and her parents are Italian and Yugoslavian, so they have
each had a double history of emigration.

"I would never have done the Triplets or Champion or Beast in France," says Bonifassi. "They would never have let me. The music industry there is very closed."

The decision to record in English was an easy one, and not entirely
driven by the language's higher marketability. Goncalves says he needed
the strong rhythmic character of English to make this record what it
is. The smoother, less emphatic phrasing of French would not have
worked.

They did their first tour together this fall, playing opening sets
for the Vancouver dance-punk band, You Say Party! We Say Die! They're
just now starting to figure out what a full Beast show should look
like, as they prepare for a Quebec tour in the New Year, some industry
showcases in a few countries where the band has signed but not played,
and a wider touring schedule that should begin in the fall of 2009.

"The album was the script, now we're shooting the movie," says
Bonifassi. "You have to put life into the script, and that's what we do
in the shows."