the Toronto Star reviews High Kicks

The Stolen Minks, High Kicks. Muddy, party-starting slop-rock by four saucy ladies from Halifax. Exuberant in its primitivism, High Kicks has a joyous, slightly naive spark that sometimes evokes the sort of tuneful messes to which Calvin Johnson's name is often attached. It's insidiously catchy, good with a put-down – "Your Broken Heart" and "I Hate You" revel in their cattiness – and able to spin pop gold from a tune called "North End Strangler," so there are definitely worse remedies out there for the January blahs.

CKUT TOP LOUD 2008

ckut top 20 LOUD 2008
don cabarello - punkgasm - relapse
menace ruine - cult of ruins - alien8 CC
grails - doomsdayer holiday - temporary residence
earth - the bee made honey in the lion’s skull - southern lord
the melvins - nude with boots - ipecac
om - pilgrimage - southern lord
lustmord - other - hydra head
thisquietarmy - blackhaunter - elevation CC
moha - one way ticket to candyland - rune grammofon
sunn - domkirke - southern lord
burning witch - crippled lucifer - southern lord
harvey milk - the best game in town - hydra head
wrath of the weak - alogon - profound lore
conifer/ocean - split lp - important
venomous concept - poisoned apple - century media
black ships - omens - new romance for kids CC
ascend - ample fire within - southern lord
5ive - hesperus - tortuga
discord of a forgotten sketch - improv session - new romance for kids CC
russian circles - station - suicide squeeze

The Stolen Minks live @ Stereophonic

The Stolen Minks - Live at Stereophonic 6! from CultureHub on Vimeo.

5 Favs w/ The Stolen Minks @ That's Fucking Dynamite

5 Favs w/ The Stolen Minks

January 13th, 2009

We’re back with the Five Favorites feature…and this installment comes courtesy of Halifax’s The Stolen Minks. The band released their great new album, High Kicks, a few months back and soon after headed out on a tour that would make Magellan feel road weary (that’s right folks, That’s Fucking Dynamite, your premiere source for 15th century, Portuguese explorer humour). Tiina from the band was good enough to pass along a list of her current favorite albums, check ‘em out.

MP3: The Stolen Minks - Consecutives

Five Favorites with The Stolen Minks

Statues - New People Make Us Nervous

A perfect pop punk record. Every verse, every chorus and every bridge is catchy. There was a night on tour when were driving through the mountains in some terrible weather. I was driving, gripping the steering wheel and just about having a panic attack. Steph put on this album and I chilled the eff out and we made it though the mountains. Basically, Statues saved our lives.

The Bugs - …the Bugs

Our new friends in Portland OR, The Mean Jeans, played this band for us and we lost our minds. Fuckin’ A Right became our tour theme. If we ever get to see them play this song live, I think we’d freak out and be screaming and crying, like they were The Beatles.

Mission of Burma - Vs.


We brought a copy of Our Band Could Be Your Life on tour with us, and we’d all read bits of it here and there. Erica got the furthest in the book and therefore was an expert on 80’s hardcore. Some annoying boy would be talking shit about punk rock and Erica would be all, “Oh no, Rollins joined Black Flag in 1981, not 1980. Check your facts, son.” Erica bought a Mission of Burma CD for $5 from Amoeba records in San Francisco and we listened to it like crazy.

The Maynards - Date and Destroy

Our hometown BFFs finished their new album while we were on tour, but were kind enough to email it to us. It was such an awesome way to soothe our home-sickness. This is a super fun record from one of my favourite bands ever. My favourite song, In the CIA, has so much plot jammed into two minutes of solid rocking. There are like, character arcs. Amazing.

Jay Reatard - Blood Visions

We took a day off on tour and drove to Philadelphia just to see Jay Reatard. We listened to this album so much and marveled at how awesome it is. Then we all got a a little sad when we heard Jay, in an interview with Nardwuar, say that he generally doesn’t like female vocals. Sob! I don’t care! I can change him, Mom!

Loud top 20 (canada 11/2008)

1 Amon Amarth Twilight Of The Thundergod Metal Blade
2 Misery Index Traitors Relapse
3 Bison BC * Quiet Earth Metal Blade
4 Fiftywatthead * Fogcutter igned By Force
5 Gojira The Way Of All Flesh Prosthetic
6 Burst Lazarus Bird Relapse
7 Fucked Up * The Chemistry Of Common Life Matador
8 All That Remains Overcome Razor & Tie
9 D.O.A. * Northern Avenger Sudden Death
10 Unearth The March Metal Blade
11 Metallica Death Magnetic Warner
12 Metal Church This Present Wasteland SPV
13 Enslaved Vertabrae Nuclear Blast
14 Into Eternity * The Incurable Tragedy Century Media
15 Iced Earth The Crucible Of Man: Something Wicked Part II SPV
16 Toxic Holocaust An Overdose Of Death Relapse
17 Black Ships * Omens New Romance For Kids
18 Cradle Of Filth Godspeed On The Devils Thunder Roadrunner
19 Psycroptic Ob(servant) Nuclear Blast
20 Meshuggah Contradictions Nuclear Blast

Black Ships // Ottawa Xpress - Mtl Hour

December 11th, 2008

Black Ships - Omens
(New Romance For Kids Records)

Dave Jaffer

Live and on recordings, Black Ships songs feel like prospective physical assaults in dark places, with buried vocals that play like words of foreboding and a layered guitar wall that's claustrophobia-inducing and doom-inspiring. However, despite appearances, there's a lot of creativity afoot here. Hard music rarely boasts capital-S style, but Omens is quite stylish. Tempo shifts, like the one transitioning No Eulogy into The Flaws in Self Help, jostle and resituate the listener. Other stylistic aspects of this debut LP set Black Ships apart, but I'll let you find 'em. For now, I'll salute "Montreal's loudest band" with a bra-fucking-vo.

Eye Weekly Holiday Record Guide: Punk/Metal

Eye Weekly diss production butt dig the riffs

BLACK SHIPS ***
Omens / New Romance For Kids

On Omens, Montreal’s beastly and thunderous Black Ships perfectly balance melodic tendencies bastardized by detuned aggression. Uniting Cancer Bats’ modest metallic edge with Cursed’s death-metal-meets-hardcore guttural prowess as well as the apocalyptic slant of High On Fire, Omens is direct and hyperactive, packed with girth and rabid fury. But while their redlining distortion initially creates a strong, haunting atmosphere, by the halfway mark it becomes a tiresome jumble of static detracting from their obvious abilities. When Black Ships step up the production aspects of their hardcore dirge, they may acquire the underground scene’s throne that was abdicated by Cursed. For now, they still have some plotting to do. KC

Black Ships // issue oriented blog

Black Ships // Omens
New Romance For Kids



I really thought this was Union Of Uranus when I first heard it (which in case you didn’t know – that’s a very good thing). Omens is blast of bitterness from Montreal that is equal parts Entombed sludge and Black Flag’s fuck-off attitude. These eight tracks pack enough piss and vinegar into 25 minutes that you will be hitting repeat. This is one for the crust punks that tire from waiting for Tragedy to play again. Or the metal kids who are tired of hearing the same boring breakdowns.

Black Ships - Bang Bang

ALEXI CHARLEBOIS LAURIN - 11 novembre 2008

We are not a d-beat band:

BLACK SHIPS interview


So you’re now in the middle of a really long tour. When a band decides to go on tour for so long, is it just a question of «promoting» or «pushing» his new record or it’s also a lifestyle the band as chosen? A way to escape the 9 to 5 lifestyle?

We have always wanted to do a long tour. We were supposed to do one a couple of years ago but we blew up two vans before leaving. This time around, we got a good working van and decided that we were going to do all of North America. Obviously, it’s great to do a tour like this when you have a new record coming out, but we probably would have done something like this regardless. The 9 to 5 lifestyle is mundane, and touring offers a way of life devoid of having to follow any sort of set schedule every day.


What have been the coolest and most frightening states so far in the US? Can you feel the actual campaign being something very important for most of the people there?


Any city around the Great Lakes is definitely different than what we are used to in Montreal. The people from around that area refer to it as The Rust Belt. We went to Gary, Indiana and it is like hell on earth. Apparently they film post apocalyptic movie scenes there because there is so much decay. It was the only place in the very religious State of Indiana where they are letting the churches crumble. Florida was a pretty cool State as was Texas. Campaigning isn’t the same here. The american legislating system is different than in Canada so it is a lot different. There aren’t a million fucking campaign signs everywhere cluttering the skyline with smiling faces promising a better future for all of us. The politicians do a lot more live rallies and it seems like citizens do a lot of promotion for the political parties as well. You can definitely feel a difference here. People want change. Obviously, in the scene that we play in, people normally don’t even bother to vote because every option is the wrong one, but for this election, there is a lot more people getting involved and wanting to actually vote, which is something drastically different than in Canada.


What is a good day and what is a shitty day on tour? Best turnout so far?


Shitty days are when you find out that a show has been cancelled, or when you play a really shitty show and then you can’t find somewhere to sleep. Some of the best turnouts have been in all of the shows in Quebec and Ontario, Boston, Cleveland, Hammond Indiana, Brooklyn and Fort Worth, Texas.


You earned the reputation of being the loudest band in Montreal. Your music is heavy that’s for sure but do you make sure that things are really fucking loud at your show or it’s just something that happen?


It seems like these days, everybody that plays in a heavy band feels like they need to have the most amps they can fit into a van. We decided that instead of doing that, we might as well buy really good amps and get rid of the 4 other shitty ones. We are still a loud band, but it is a good sounding loud, not an abrasive «I want to stuff as many earplugs as I can into my ears» type of loud.


OMENS. What’s the meaning behind this title? What should we get from the artwork of your record? Is it your perception of where the world is going or a way to show how the human race is a destructive one?


We came up with the title because of all the bad luck we had been experiencing during past tours, etc. It just seemed like an omen that something would fuck up during or even before leaving for a tour. The artwork was done by Ryan Patterson, who fronts the band Coliseum from Louisville, Kentucky. It is more to show how something that was once beautiful can quickly turn into ruins. It just so happened that the imagery was that of a war torn city.


Do you feel this record is definitely a step forward compared to your Low EP?


Definitely! We took more time to record it and didn’t feel like we were racing against the clock to finish it. We recorded it with our good friend Julien Brousseau and he did a great job. He knew exactly what we were trying to do and really listened to what we had to say and added in little things here and there that we completely agreed on as well. Everything came together really nicely in the end. We also took a longer time writing the songs since last winter was so shitty in Montreal and we had nothing else to do.


Favourite TRAGEDY song?


This is probably the oddest question we’ve ever been asked. I like all of them, but I like His Hero Is Gone more…


Does playing in a D-Beat punk/hardcore band necessarily equals being a negative person in life?


I’m glad you asked this question. I’ll answer it in tow parts. First, just to clarify things since we’ve been asked it a bunch of times; we are not a d-beat band. We don’t play one d-beat on any of our songs. D-beat is a certain type of drum pattern which you would find in any Tragedy song. I can see how people could make the mistake but I would like to think that we shouldn’t be classified as a d-beat band. Being in a band like this doesn’t necessarily equal being a negative person in life. The world is a fucked up place and pisses all of us off to a huge degree but what the fuck are we going to do about it? So instead of sitting at home and feeling sorry for ourselves we sit in a van for hours on end and let out all the negative energy we accumulate in a 25 minute set every night.

www.myspace.com/blackships

Black Ships enter (loud) top 10

Loud
For the Week Ending: Tuesday, November 11, 2008

TW LW Artist Title Label
1 3 Misery Index Traitors Relapse
2 1 Amon Amarth Twilight Of The Thundergod Metal Blade
3 6 Unearth The March Metal Blade
4 8 Gojira The Way Of All Flesh Prosthetic
5 -- Darkthrone Dark Thrones & Black Flags Peaceville
6 2 Bison BC Quiet Earth Metal Blade
7 -- Black Ships Omens New Romance For Kids
8 7 Enslaved Vertabrae Nuclear Blast
9 -- Metallica Death Magnetic Warner
10 -- Toxic Holocaust An Overdose Of Death Relapse