MIL-SPEC + WILD SIDE + RITES

MIL-SPEC (hardcore, CAN – Lockin’ Out Records) Since forming in 2016, Toronto’s Mil-Spec has developed an inimitable, “intergenerational” hardcore sound and style — tuneful, erudite, allusive, and full of hooks — which they’ve taken to audiences all over the world, touring Canada, the United States (supporting Militarie Gun, Shelter, and Narrow Head), Europe (supporting Have Heart’s 2019 reunion), and Japan. In the process they’ve become a formidable live act, with a rare three-guitar attack. Their 2023 sophomore LP, Marathon, improves on the melody and melodrama that made 2020’s World House a minor pandemic classic. Produced by the band, with help from Ned Russin of Glitterer and Title Fight, Marathon contains nine heartfelt hardcore songs and one EDM monologue about opening for Power Trip at what would be their final U.S. show before singer Riley Gale’s untimely death. Classic straight edge hardcore mixed with D.C. Revolution Summer mixed with the Great American College Rock Songbook and a touch of British post-punk — that’s Mil-Spec. For fans of Rites of Spring, Husker Du, Supertouch, Leatherface, Turning Point, and Dag Nasty. WILD SIDE (hardcore, CAN – BBB Records) Wild Side is a Canadian band, Niagara Falls born — Niagara Falls, that garish streetscape crawling with hawkers, hustlers, boosters, and bad boys, that profaned Arcadia where life-affirming vistas of sublime natural beauty yield to an enveloping motley of eye-burning kitsch. Wild Side go at things as they have taught themselves, free-style, and they make records in their own way: first to book studio time, last to submit masters. For those who were planning to hibernate during this long winter of mawkish ’90s-chug revival, their latest record (already 6 years old but still so relevant) includes 10 songs built on speed, heaviness (in the old sense), deadpan humour, and riffs that check in at the brain’s pleasure centres and never check out — all with a syrupy overlay of flamboyant lead guitar that serves up NWOBHM, Zakk Wylde, Dr. Know, Jay Skin, and most every vibe in between. Topping it off is vocalist Brandon MacFarlane — Wild Side’s heart, soul, brain, and trapezius muscles — who ruminates at length, in an enlightened-everyman vernacular all his own, on eternal subjects such as the paper chase, the human body’s essential frailty, the scourge of fake friends, and what to do when the lights go out. For fans of Warzone and Iron Boots.