Powder Lines

This elegant band called Foster The People has everything you want when you listen to some Pop Rock. Great beats, nice lyrics to sing a long, and an ambient sound à la The XX . Torches is gonna make you dance all night and sing all day. The next great pop rock band comes out every month but only the best ones stick around. I hope this will be the case for Foster The People .  

The music of Opeth has evolved since day one. Heritage , their tenth opus, literally and figuratively translate the groovy-rock that Mikael Akerfeld, lead guitarist/singer, has been listening since four to five years. Prog Rock masters like Camel , Genesis and 1970’s-1980’s bands like Scorpions , Judas Priests , Alice Cooper and many more are the influences felt while listening to this album. Anyhow, Opeth manage to still hold its own edge without copying their heritage. Don’t look for growls here, there aren’t any. Just beautiful guitars, clean vocals, progressive rhythms, and a very organic natural feeling to top it all. Heritage is an album that will transcend time and it might be too early to say this but anyway I will, it is a masterpiece.

First, there are many ways to buy a new or a first “stick” and there are many snowboards that can fit you well. But, many factors will enter in line and minimize the actual number of boards you can actually buy. Shopping for snowboards is actually the thing I like the most to shop, after shoes of course! Money isn’t everything but... Beforehand, you must check your wallet and see what’s available and what is a reasonable price so that you’ll still have the money to actually ride the board of your dreams. Don’t worry if it isn’t that much there are always many solutions. You also have to think if you have to buy bindings and boots. This has a huge side effect to your budget and the board you’re gonna ride. Paying a board 600$ and putting “shitty” 70$ bindings on it isn’t the right solution. Board, bindings, and boots are the holy trinity of your riding. So if your budget is low consider paying less for a board and balance your money on good bindings and comfortable boots. *I will be gi...

Even if this album isn’t as new as this chronicle is entitled, the music of The Naked And Famous has this fresh, breezy, and deep sound that reminded me of The XX , Metric , The Killers’ premier effort Hot Fuss , and the capable superb MGMT . This is Rock with an electronic touch, or indie pop electro, call it what you want but this band has a sound that stick in your ears and gets you into the mood to work or to ride. The Queboarder page of Facebook used Punching In A Dream to mix the footage of a demo of ULC in the new Skatepark of Quebec City: it fitted really well. I think this band is gonna be in my ears to get me pumped up to shred this winter. Their 80’s sound, well it’s been a while since this sound as been revived, however it is not too quirky nor too nostalgic; just well balanced and addictive.

Since their first release, Remission , Mastodon have evolved faster than any other band of the first decade of the 21st Century. Hard to define, their sound is a modern mix of Sludge/Hardcore/Metal/Psychedelic/Prog-Rock. The Hunter is an intriguying album in its simplicity and beauty of production. The raw aggressive sound is still there but the structure of the songs matured in a good way. Another interesting aspect of their music is the fact that there is always place for experimentations, listen to The Creature for example. An album that grows stronger with every new listen and that is definitely Mastodon ’s most atmospheric offering to date.

Wow, surfing on dist made me realise that I completely forgot about many important titles going out this Autumn! I’m sorry for those omissions here’s the deal: *Please take note that all of these titles are available thru Platinum Dist in Canada and most of them thru KidsKnow in the USA . Alpenhoff Filmed almost entirely in Switzerland. Take a wild ride on trains through the Swiss Alps with some of the most epic snowboard legends on the planet. Starring Kurt Wastell, Chad Otterstrom, Adam Dowell, Nico Muller, Freddy Kalbermatten, Chuck T, and a special celebrity guest. Text from Platinum Dist Bottom Line This seasons production called Bottom Line is a remarkable version and shot sharp in 16:9. Europes finest riders with Europes biggest production is claiming the next decade of Snowboarding with this flick. This is the 10th year of the PirateCrew and theyre right now preparing the cake. You can expect a nice action movie with impressions from our travels. The movie won’t be the t...

My Favorite Board by Michaël Parent It was in the fall of 1996, I asked my parents to receive a snowboard for Christmas. I never played Hockey and I finally was living in a city where resorts were near. I also bought my first Transworld Snowboarding magazine at that same time; it was the Buyer’s Guide Issue. I still own it somewhere in my stuff, it has many pages cut and pinned on my bedroom walls. This sport meant more than just slide on fresh snow. For this 11 years old boy it meant freedom, lifestyle, and infinite fun. So, in November we took the car and started bargaining with the local shops of Quebec City. The final bargain was at Québec Sportif (R.I.P.) for an orange K2 HC 149 cm, with black plastic bindings, and Crank boots for 430$. A great deal at the time since there wasn’t many shops selling snowboard goodies around. I kept this board for 3 years until it got too small for me. I sold it to a friend of a friend for 80$. When I got rid of it I was tired of it and I just want...

 Probably the most respected snowboarder of all time since Craig Kelly in a great interview with Russel Winfield for YoBeat . Follow the link.

With the new releases this year and the multitude of offerings, more than a dozen I calculated from the ads in Snowboarder and Transworld Snowboarding, I will try to do an overview of them all. Don’t worry you will find the links to their official websites and sometimes later I will review each of them properly. Feel free to add other films if I made an omission. I will also try to indicate when a film is available on iTunes and with which distributor you can purchase it. The movies are sorted by alphabetical order and I won’t be “selling” one more than another it depends on how much info I can get for each release. 20 Tricks Video Vol.5 (TransWorld Snowboarding) iTunes The fifth offering of these “educational” videos from TransWorld Snowboarding feature trick tips from: Seth Huot, Sage Kotsenburg, Tim Humphreys, Nico Cioffi, Cam Pierce, Joe Sexton, Scotty Arnold, Charles Reid, Johnny Lazz, Forest Bailey, Scott Stevens, Will Lavigne, Louif Paradis, Jeremy Thompson, Eric Willett, Mark...

The Resistance (Mike McEntire, 2000) Released the year after the acclaimed Technical Difficulties , The Resistance is the first Forum snowboards video of a great series that is still going on today with the recent release of Vacation . In 1998, Peter Line, one of the most influential freestyle snowboarder of all time recently started his own brand of Snowboards: Forum. He put together his dream team of progressive freestylers: JP Walker, Jeremy Jones, Devun Walsh, Joni Malmi, Bjorn Leines, Chris Dufficy, and Wille Yli-Luoma also known as the Forum 8. They were the stars of The Resistance, and needless to say that it was one of the most anticipated videos of its time. The combination of the Forum 8 and Mack Dawg productions was already a success with Technical Difficulties and Decade . But now, they were alone in this release and every rider had to put a strong and longer part to fill the thirty minutes or so of riding. It was also a hard task for the riders to assemble well bala...

That’s It That’s All (Curt Morgan, 2008)   With the release of the new feature by the BrainFarm films production, The Art of Flight , I wanted to get back and catch-up with their previous offer That’s It That’s All: this is a marvellous film to get pumped to. Well, this is the first of a series of Sports related media releases I will be reviewing on Le Mot du Cinephilaque . My major concern on this modest Blog is to talk about films. Snowboarding is a big part of my life since 15 years or so. The commercial vehicles that are the snowboarding movies took many looks during the latter years of this somewhat young sport. Directly related to its bigger brother Surfing, snowboarding followed some of the paths of the sport of The Beach Boys . Surfing was the first sport to actually shot videos of professional athletes and release them to promote their brands. Then skateboarding, another part of my life, followed and then snowboarding also did. The latter sport is an hybrid of sur...

Technical Difficulties (Mike McEntire, 1999) More than a decade after the release of Technical Difficulties this Mack Dawg productions still holds the run pretty well. It was the film that pushed us to do more rails, go higher and try corked spins and flips. With the dream team that Forum snowboards (read Peter Line ) put together: JP Walker, Jeremy Jones, Wille Yli-Luoma, Bjorn Leines, Joni Malmi, and Devun Walsh and the top riders of the time: Chad Otterstorm, Kevin Jones, Jason Brown, and many more Technical Difficulties had to surpass the success of its predecessors of the same production company: Decade . TD had to be even more progressive while presenting new tricks with an even greater approach. Well, for this blogger it hits its goal with great fashion. This is the snowboarding video I watch the most often. When I received it at Christmas of 1999, I remember that I used to watch it every time I’d go out and ride, which was every day at that time. The cinematography l...