THE PLAYLIST
Dylan Hudecki is a Canadian indie-rock vet having played in many different bands, including By Divine Right, Cowlick, Slow Beach and The Dill. He’s a proud Hamiltonian who covers local album releases for HAMILTON CITY Magazine.
COTS – Disturbing Body & Moonlit Building
Hamilton has long been fertile ground for artists who thrive in the in-between. Between genres, between moods, between colours, like Steph Yates, who was born and raised here (and now lives in Guelph), who records under the name Cots. Her 2021 debut album Disturbing Body introduced a sound rooted in intimacy and longing, while her 2023 EP Moonlit Building pushed into darker, more experimental, artistic territory. Together, they sketch the story of an artist steadily expanding her reach and discography without losing the hushed vulnerability that makes her music so magnetic. So let’s dive into both, (because they’re THAT good).
Released in 2021 on Boiled Records, Disturbing Body immediately marked Yates as a songwriter to watch. The album’s 10 tracks drift across jazz, folk, bossa nova, and indie weirdo minimalism, all anchored by her nylon-string guitar and soft, deliberate, delicate vocals. From the first notes, the record creates a sparse yet absorbing world, one where every instrument feels carefully chosen and placed: brushed drums, hushed trumpet, glimmers of piano.
The title track frames human attraction through the language of astronomy, comparing desire to the gravity that binds planets in orbit. That blend of science and poetry defines the album’s emotional weight, offering metaphors that feel both cerebral and deeply personal. Songs like “Flowers” and “Last Sip” confront mortality and finality head-on, yet the delivery makes them strangely comforting, as if beauty can be found inside grief. Not every track is cloaked in sorrow and melancholy. “Bitter Part of the Fruit” carries a subtle bossa nova sway, while “Sun-Spotted Apple” sparkles with jazzy brightness. “Midnight at the Station” closes the album with unresolved mystery, leaving listeners standing in the dark, waiting for a train that may or may not come.
It’s a dreamy and soothing record, helmed by producer Sandro Perri encouraging her toward simplicity, and a group of Ontario jazz and experimental musicians fleshing out the arrangements. The result was an album that feels intimate and expansive. In Disturbing Body, Yates transformed longing into sound, whispering secrets that linger long after the last note fades.
If Disturbing Body was about gravity and stillness, Moonlit Building is about shadow and movement. Released in 2023, the five-track EP feels like a walk through the city at night, lit only by street lamps. Working with producer Olivier Fairfield (Andy Shauf, FET.NAT), Yates leans into experimental textures: warped rhythms, droning layers, sparse electronics. The result is hushed but sophisticated, quiet and commanding.
The title track sets the mood with loose rhythms and a sense of unease, retaining the fragility of its first take, while Fairfield’s production adds tumbling percussion and circling ominous synths that sometimes sound like distant thunder. Elsewhere, “Flowers,” an acoustic track from Disturbing Body is reimagined as “Flowers (Fresh Cut),” transforming the tender original into an upbeat, driving, samba-inflected shuffle. “The Woman With No Face” veers into spy-thriller territory, with vibraphone and spectral strings conjuring a ghostly femme fatale. The EP closes on “No Way No How,” a drifting sound collage that leaves the listener suspended in mid-air, as though the ground has disappeared beneath the music.
Where Disturbing Body introduced Yates as a songwriter of hushed intimacy, Moonlit Building pushes her into more cinematic, surreal landscapes without losing her warmth. It’s nocturnal music: strange, vulnerable, and quietly daring. At only five songs, the EP is brief, but it glows and lingers. Taken together, these two records feel like companion pieces. Disturbing Body drew listeners into Cots’ delicate world of longing and gravity, while Moonlit Building pushed deeper into shadow and experimentation. Both works affirm what audiences already know: Steph Yates is an artist of rare subtlety, one whose music rewards those willing to lean into silence, shadow, moods and everything in between.
RIYL: Bebel Gilberto, Aldous Harding, Lhasa de Sela, Beta Band, Feist, Kings of Convenience, Stereolab
THE VAUDEVILLIAN – Selling Jelly
The Vaudevillian released a new album Sellin’ Jelly in June, recorded at the acclaimed Boxcar Sound Recording beside Gage Park in Hamilton.
The old-time jugband ragtime blues duo, made up of Jitterbug James and Norah Spades, are known for their playful energy, vintage authenticity, and dedication to Prohibition-era sounds. With instruments like washboard, resonator guitar, banjo, harmonica, and musical spoons, they bring the spirit of early 20th-century blues to modern audiences, and this record captures that atmosphere with conviction.
The record feels almost like a time capsule. The choice to record on tape with live, off-the-floor techniques adds a warmth and grain that fits their material perfectly. Rather than polish away the rough edges, the duo embraces quirks and imperfections, which makes the music feel alive and true to the era it evokes. The production is scrappy, raw and real, but there’s also care and attention to avoiding sterility in favour of vibrancy. Songs like “Play With Your Yoyo” and “Salty Dog” have a ghostly, radio-box quality that heightens the sense of stepping back in time.
A major theme in the commentary is the duo’s embrace of hokum, the cheeky, innuendo-laden style of blues once popular in the early 1900s. Titles such as “Sweet Honey Thighs,” “Wet Your Whistle,” and “Your Biscuits Are Plenty Big Enough for Me” reveal the playful lewdness and bawdiness at the core of the record. The lyrics are saucy without being crude, delivered with charm and humour that makes audiences laugh, dance, and lean into the fun. Tongue completely in cheek. This willingness to celebrate the mischievous side of the genre is part of what sets The Vaudevillian apart.
Live, the duo is known for turning festivals and theatres into old-time dance halls, often running spoon and washboard workshops that have drawn thousands of participants. They’ve most recently toured with American indie legends Modest Mouse, and Americana stalwarts Old Crow Medicine Show. That crowd-pleasing energy translates onto Sellin’ Jelly. It’s easy to say they’re a concept band making albums that make people smile, tap their feet, and feel like they’ve stumbled into a speakeasy in a bygone time. There’s room for novelty in our music landscape, especially when it’s authentic and earnest. For some listeners, the heavy vintage immersion and bawdy humour may be too specific a taste, but most see this commitment as the record’s greatest strength.
Overall, Sellin’ Jelly is being received as a bold and joyful celebration of ragtime blues. It balances authenticity with theatrical flair, proving that The Vaudevillian aren’t simply reviving old styles but bringing them to life for new audiences. The album is both a tribute to the past and a lively, good-humoured soundtrack for today.
RIYL: Joseph Lamb, Joe “Fingers” Carr, Memphis Jug Band, Frank Stokes, C.W. Stoneking, Pokey LaFarge
ATOMIC BIRDS – Pissing Off the Kids
Atomic Birds’ debut album Pissing Off the Kids is a ragged, raucous 24-minute debut ride that is a pleasing jangly collection of jams that feels mature and scrappy simultaneously.
The Hamilton duo of Jon Daly and Greg Preston, longtime collaborators and co-conspirators, has carved out a sound that’s got you covered if you like rock and roll grit, grunge fuzz, and psychedelic shimmer. It’s a record that spits colour and chaos, sometimes all at once, yet somehow lands with a strange, woozy coherence.
The band calls their style “cacophonous and shaky pop standards for your parents’ basement’s tube television or radio,” and the description isn’t far off. Songs lurch and bend, half-drenched in fuzz, held together by hooks that emerge through the haze. It’s still rock: raw, noisy, but unexpectedly melodic, where the jagged edges become part of the appeal. One minute you’re blasted with a wall of garage noise, the next you’re pulled into a swirling psych detour that resolves just when you think it might collapse.
Part of the album’s charm comes from its homegrown process. Recorded over several months in makeshift home studios and finally in their newly built Hamilton space, called Thrills, Daly and Preston wrote, played, recorded, and mastered everything themselves. That DIY approach shows, not in a lack of polish but in the unfiltered energy coursing through every track. Nothing feels overthought. Standout tracks include, “Aim for the Lake,” “Friday Afternoon,” and “Parkdale Jesus” to name a few.
The band’s inspirations are as much about their environment as their record collections. They’ll cite grunge, garage, and psych touchstones, but also the art they consume and the city itself. As they put it, “the sound of people screaming on James Street is always a good light bulb for ideas.” That kind of chaotic urban inspiration runs through the record as the songs tumble forward like late-night downtown wanderings, stumbling past neon signs, loud dive bars, and alleyway echoes.
Pissing Off the Kids is noisy, weird, and unapologetically off-kilter, but that’s exactly the point. This is garage indie rock that embraces its own roughness, retools it into something alive, and spits it back out with a smirk. For fans of blown-out basement shows and fuzzed-up guitars, Atomic Birds have just released their first statement and it’s one worth turning up loud enough to annoy the neighbours (and piss off the kids).
RIYL: Guided By Voices, Wavves, Limblifter, Flaming Lips, Sunglaciers, Supergrass
