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Classified pride

Classified at B-Side (129 Peter), Friday (June 11), 10 pm. $6. 416-204-9660. nova scotia mc classified has been on a steady slog to some kind of rap peak. He's won DMC competitions in Halifax and released his wacky but respected video for Unexpected from his album Trial And Error. Lately, his name has come up on the radar as much for his production skills as for his emceeing abilities, with work upcoming for big-name artists like Maestro. Even with skills and steady work, he's not expecting any help from Canadian major labels,whose rap-handling skills he's not so into.

"It's almost a joke. Swollen Members are pretty much the only rappers from here making any money for a label."

He sees his producer/MC status as an advantage that gives him the ability to go into a studio and finish a song with ease. He also feels that his production abilities have surpassed his mike skills. This could have more to do with self-criticism than with lack of mouth talent.

"Once you think you can't get any better, that's when your music will start declining in quality. It's the same as anything – practise and just keep doing it.

"Do it around people. Don't be shy about it. If you're gonna be an MC, you gotta have confidence."

Heart attack

SS CARDIACS at Clinton's (693 Bloor West), Friday (June 11), 10 pm. $7. 416-535-9541. Jessie Stein is a ferociously proud ex-Montrealer – she still laments the inferior bagels in this city. She left her hometown to hit the hallowed halls of Toronto academia a couple years ago, but she's ditched school in favour of becoming a full-on musician.

This is excellent news for the local scene, since Stein is an ace songwriter who's gotten even better since she hooked up with pals Dana Snell (of Dana and the Talent) and Andy Lloyd (of Spitfires and Mayflowers) to form the SS Cardiacs, a melodically wide-eyed indie pop tribute to all that is witty and wondrous in everyday life.

Look for even more good news when Stein's older brother, By Divine Right's Jose Contreras, helps out the Cardiacs with their upcoming album.

Listening to the band, you'd assume those kooky kids all cut their teeth on the crème de la crème of mid-90s indie rock – possibly due to Stein's eerily dead-on Juliana Hatfield warble or the off-kilter hookiness of their tunes. Nuh-uh, says Stein, although she has been touched by alt-rock royalty.

"I grew up on 60s and 70s rock and radio garbage, and Dana and the Talent are super 60s and 70s nerds. Untouchables like Television and the Beatles and the Band and the Stones. And Dana's a drummer, so she likes Rush. I dig the Pixies and GBV, but my favourite 90s band is for sure Pavement – especially their more dishevelled stuff.

"But the best 90s rock USA story in recent memory was hanging at Kevin Drew's with Spiral Stairs and the Preston School boys. Both Kevin and I were all giddy and dorky about it. I just kept on thinking how I might as well have been eating pizza with George Harrison."

Denise James

Curse of McGee

DENISE JAMES performing as part of the RAinBOW QUARTZ SHoWCASE at Healey's (178 Bathurst), Friday (June 11), 10 pm. $8. 416-703-5882. Ever since the white stripes became media darlings, their Detroit scene contemporaries – the Von Bondies, the Go and the Soledad Brothers, in fact just about every guitar-strapped artist from the Motor City – seem to have enjoyed some White Stripes publicity windfall. Except Denise James. Despite writing and recording an exceptionally good second album, It's Not Enough To Love (Rainbow Quartz), with songs ranging from Jackie DeShannon-style swingers to sweetly melancholic love-gone-wrong ballads à la Françoise Hardy – James continues to toil in relative obscurity.

When you discover that her self-titled debut was released by the ill-fated Poptones label, it all begins to make sense. While some might argue that the anti-Midas touch of Poptones boss Alan McGee is just a myth, Poptones casualties Slumber Party, Cosmic Rough Riders, A Quiet Revolution, Beachbuggy and Captain Soul would likely beg to differ.

For her part, James says simply, "After five or six years of trying to get somebody to put my first record out, I felt very fortunate to have Poptones finally release it."

It's a testament to James's determination that she's still in the game today.

"When someone breaks out of Detroit, it tends to be a phenomenal success. I find it strange how you're either hugely famous and draw enormous crowds or considered nothing special and play for very few people.

"There's really no in-between here." Do the math

FROM FICTION at the Rivoli (332 Queen West), Friday (June 11), 11 pm. $10. 416-596-1908.

As hype for locals from fiction rises like summer mercury, the band's members find themselves in an awkward spot. They've got tons of fans, they've opened for (and out-rocked) big indies like the Illuminati and the Rapture, but singer/strummer Quentin Ede and drummer Rob Gordon, now seated beside me on a bench in Queen's Park, are still washing dishes for a living.

Critics love 'em. The major labels? Not so much.

"We've already talked to those people," says Gordon. "They won't sign us."

Most A&Rs find math rock too challenging for the masses. But Ede says so-called math rock isn't really what From Fiction's all about.

"Playing in different time signatures is just a way of creating tension for us," says Ede.

"But it's not really a genre," says Gordon. "It's just rock. Who cares if you can play in 23/4 time? If it doesn't rock, it doesn't rock."

Either way, they still have to ask record stores to sell their CDs. Stores should really say yes, because From Fiction's latest, produced by Ian Blurton, should fly off the shelves.

Panty lines

Pantychrist at Sneaky Dee's (431 College), Friday (June 11), 11 pm. $6. 416-603-3090. All-girl hamilton punk rock band Pantychrist met in a washroom. "I was out at a gig with Amy (Hell, bass) and we were in the washroom talking about music or something," says drummer Patty Christ, "when these two young girls (Dan Yell and Izabelle Steele) jumped out of a stall and started asking questions like 'You play music? What do you play?' And from the moment Dan Yell opened her mouth I knew it was gonna be awesome."

Pantychrist deliver hardcore with a touch of the early 80s: snarling, angry-as-fuck vocals and crushing drums. They're described as an all-grrrl Black Flag. Their self-titled demo plays beautifully with all the good old punk rock clichés, featuring songs with titles like Suicide and Carve Your Name Into My Chest and lyrics like "Fuck your fucking attitude!"

A mere few months after they met, Steele walked into a practice sporting tattoos of all her bandmates' faces.

"We were all like, 'Wow, that's commitment!' Mine actually looks a lot like me."

Another unique thing about the band is that they have five kids between them. Let's change the name to Diaper Christ.

"Amy has three and I have two," says Christ. "My kids know what I do and Amy's kids know what she does, but they don't brag about it. One of mine is so square, though. She's rebelling against rebellion. It's great."

Other mommies aren't always nice.

"Another kindergarten mom said, 'I saw your picture in the paper,' and I was happy. I thought, 'Oh, I'm famous! I'm famous!' But then she asked, 'Pantychrist? As a Christian, I find that very offensive.'

"So I said, 'As a human being, I find Christians very offensive. '"

Magneta force

MAGNETA LANE at Rancho Relaxo (300 College), Friday (June 11), midnight. $8. 416-920-0366. With a garagey aesthetic, influ ences ranging from Blondie and the Pretenders to the Velvets and the Kinks, and raw lyrics that plumb the depths of interpersonal relationships, all-girl upstarts Magneta Lane seem poised to be the 21st-century answer to the Runaways. And while founder Lexi Valentine claims she started the band partly because she was sick of going to shows where the only roles for ladies seemed to be eyelash-batting groupie or drink-toting girlfriend by the side of the stage, she refuses to be labelled with the F-word.

"We just wanted to have a band for kicks. People have asked if our lyrics are about hating men, but it's not true. We try to balance everything equally between the male and female sides of the equation."

Young Valentine and her best friends Nadia King, Portia Kinks and French started Magneta Lane barely half a year ago, but they've already won fans in high places – including the community-building kids from ever-expanding label Paper Bag Records, who plan to release the band's first album, recorded with the Uncut's Jon Drew, in the fall.

It's been very serendipitous, says Valentine.

"We ended up playing a gig with the Uncut when another show was cancelled and Enrique from Paper Bag saw us play. They started coming to all our shows, and it's been really exciting. In the end, though, this is like an extension of hanging out for us. We don't have that many friends outside the band, so this is our own clan."

Junior league

JUNIOR BOYS at the Swallow Lounge (292 College), Friday (June 11), midnight. $6. Jeremy greenspan of junior boys says his sister has always made a difference in his life. "She listened to progressive rock, so that's what I grew up listening to."

At the age of 16, however, when he moved to join his sister in England, he discovered synth pop and new wave.

"It was a mind-blowing experience hearing John Foxx, Ultravox and Japan for the first time."

But wait, he's 24. That means he was 16 in 1996 when, like, nobody was listening to that stuff.

"Yeah. Just me and my friends."

Now, with his partner, Matt Didemus, Greenspan is drawing on all those early influences, combining them with UK garage, dub techno and a slew of elements both archaic and modern to create a wholly singular, lovely sound of naked experimental beats layered into an often melancholy ambient dance pop landscape.

On record, it's great stuff. For the live show, however, they've had to rework every single tune.

Naive, yes? Greenspan never thought he'd actually have to play in front of people.

"We never worked out the songs from a live perspective. Now we have a bunch of synthesizers plus guitars and bass so we can do as entertaining a live show as possible."

They've received an astounding amount of coverage from all over the place: the UK, Spain, Sweden, Germany and Portugal. Greenspan is not surprised at all the attention.

"I have nothing to compare it to, so I thought, 'Doesn't everybody get this kind of press?' Maybe not. I'm pretty naive, I guess."

Father's day

The Desert Fathers at the 360 (326 Queen West), Friday (June 11), midnight. $10. 416-593-0840. too many bands fail to live up to their names. Not so with this trio of New Yorkers. Back around the 4th century, the desert fathers were a small band of monks who wandered into the endless sands without the barest necessities of life to find spiritual enlightenment through solitude.

In 2004, the Desert Fathers are three ultra-talented weirdos with a penchant for transcendent music delivered with ascetic precision. The pure strangeness of their music communicates a feeling of near-hysterical spirituality, while effectively aggressively referencing modern modes.

"Our music is bent," says guitarist/vocalist Aquaman. "It's warped and heavy and serious and absurd and funny. Most indie and mainstream things today are concerned with only one thing – fashion. Our record is really about moments of truth."

If there were a prize for bands that could polarize listeners into zealous camps of yeas and nays, the Desert Fathers would be front-runners. Their recently released album, The Spirituality, is gaining momentum in some circles as the great hidden gem of 2004.

But its compositional dissonance and the outright oddness of their ideas make it the sort of highbrow rock that many will find hard to swallow.

Emergency route

Ambulance Ltd at Lee's Palace (529 Bloor West), Friday (June 11), 1 am. $10. 416-532-1598. if you take ambulance ltd at their word, you'd have to believe that one band can encompass nearly the full breadth of the rock canon. The Brooklyn-based band claims Motown, 60s blues and psychedelia, 70s punk and classic rock, 80s Brit pop and new wave and, finally, the shoegazing self-indulgence of the early 90s as the sources of their savvy sound.

Ambulance Ltd aren't too dear about it either, willingly copping to the lesser cool of Seals and Croft, Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan and even Hall and Oats.

It's debatable whether they actually measure up to their ambitious self-description, but when it comes to their 2003 EP and their 2004 full-length (both eponymously titled), they don't mind flying under the radar.

"People like to have their own secret finds, private music," says Ambulance guitarist Benji Lysaght. "If you become too big, people look for something else. There are always bands coming from the underground into the mainstream. That's the life cycle of rock music."

Even before TVT Records signed the band, Ambulance Ltd's reverberating riffs had the critics in a twist, prompting comparisons to My Bloody Valentine and Ride, while the youthful harmonies suggested Teenage Fanclub's popland bravado. The reality is a little closer to the saccharine pop-psychedelia of Inspiral Carpets, the Charlatans and a glibber Stone Roses.

Ambulance Ltd aren't mired in imitation, though. They have their own thing going on, and it's early days yet. Could get even better.

NYC Smoke

Up in Smoke

NYCSMOKE at Rancho Relaxo (300 College), Friday (June 11), 1 am. $8. 416-920-0366. ah, new york. it's the only city where a Chicago-born pianist's son can mutate into a Lower East Side hard-rock hipster, then become buddies with the world's foremost postmodern composers. The hipster here is singer/songwriter/guitarist Howie Statland, who recorded five albums with Thin Lizard Dawn on RCA.

The pomo maestro is Philip Glass, renowned for perverting the concept of music at large.

After attending a screening of Statland's art flick Low Flame, Glass asked the rocker to collaborate on the music for a Ralph Steiner film.

"We would sit in his room," says Statland from bed in his Manhattan apartment. "He'd play piano and I'd play guitar. He'd ask me what kind of ideas I had that day and we'd just vibe off of them."

Years later, he ditched his avant-garde aesthetic and reverted to straight rock with NYCSmoke, a four-piece who record their Replacements-style sound altogether live.

But on Friday, it'll just be Statland on guitar with cello accompaniment, performing from the new record, Hearts And Stones, NYCSmoke's heavy follow-up to For The Posers.

"I always feel like if a song's really good, you can play it stripped down. If the song stands that test, then it's worth playing."