Contact: Jason Evans at 604-874-6264.

Some music just wasn’t meant to be listened to sitting down. Freeflow plays that kind of music. A lot.

Formed in Vancouver in 2001, Freeflow started out as a five-piece band with Jason Evans on vocals, Reece Worth on guitar, Wilson Padmos on keyboards, Ryan Davis on drums, and Simon Davies on bass.

In 2005, they bumped up their front line by adding a second vocalist, MC E-Spliff, a major player in Vancouver’s underground scene whose feet were firmly planted in dancehall and hip-hop.

Together, they create a highly energetic fusion of reggae, funk, R&B, hip hop, and rock that goes straight to your feet. FreeFlow has drawn comparisons in some quarters to Sublime and The Roots and those comparisons are not without foundation.

There are some very good songwriters in this band with some very diverse influences, but they seem to have no difficulty finding common ground on their records –of which there are now three, the most recent of which is last year’s Night and Day EP.

There are some very solid players in Freeflow and the vocal harmonies are right on the money. The band’s live show is supposed to be a very hot ticket.

After listening to tracks like “Feeling You,” “I Can Do,” and “Sunshine,” I suspect that would be the case.

Contact: Brad Bissett, Quadraphonic Entertainment, brad@quadraphonicrecords.com.

The release of Sproll’s initial offering, Kelly’s Hill, in 2003 generated more than a little interest in this Moncton, NB act.

Soft Science, released two years later, confirmed initial predictions that this New Brunswick power pop quartet just might have a future. Turn On Your Radio, released in January, removes any doubt this band is going somewhere. The only question is just how far will this album take them.

If it gets the kind of exposure it deserves, national chart action for Turn On Your Radio and possibly some international attention is not at all outside the realm of possibilities.

“Radio,” the album’s first single, generated a big buzz and no doubt factored into the decision by regional CBC offering Atlantic Airwaves to donate an entire hour to the album the month of its release.

Recorded at Signal to Noise and Sunnyside Studios in Toronto, the new record was produced and engineered by Laurence Currie, the same producer who helmed Soft Science.

Currie appears to have a certain affinity for East Coast acts, having already worked on records by two very successful acts from Atlantic Canada, Sloan, and Wintersleep, who just earned a Juno for New Group of the Year.

Sproll spent more than a year writing and recording this record, a major commitment of time that required them to scale down the number of live shows they undertook in order to focus their sights on the project at hand. It was the right move.

This record is a sonic gem – bright, brash and bold, with a big guitar sound that evokes comparisons to bands like U2, Oasis, and Travis.

Keyboards are used much more effectively on this album as well.

Vocalist Corey Hachey, whose delivery was most certainly influenced by the sounds of the aforementioned bands, save possibly for Big Country, which is a little before his time, has a major league voice and the band’s vocal harmonies are solid.

There are 11 brand new songs on Turn On Your Radio, just over half of which were co-written by the band. The five remaining tracks were collaborative efforts involving the band and friend Mike Goyette who also sat in on keyboards for three songs.

Don’t be surprised to hear some of this music make its way to film and TV.

Material from Soft Science found its way to the CTV hit series Whistler and onto several compilation albums including the Atlantic Film Festival’s Music and Image Take IV.

This album could very well be a career maker for the band.

Listen to Sproll’s Radio

Contact: info@jaggercook.com.

Singer-songwriter Jagger Cook, based in St. Catharines, ON, has already experienced a level of success beyond the reach of many artists in this country. He has worked with some very serious talent and seen his debut album, All Our Hands Are Dirty, earn accolades both at home and abroad.

Earlier this year at the 2008 Niagara Music Awards, he took home two awards: Songwriter of the Year and Album of the Year. “Nostalgia,” a song from All Our Hands Are Dirty, earned an Honor Award at the Great American Song Contest.

Another song from that album, “The Light of Mississippi,” written as a dedication to Oprah Winfrey, was nominated for song of the year at the Los Angeles Music Awards in 2007 and was runner-up at this year’s We Are Listening World Singer/Songwriter Awards.

If Cook has another album in him as solid as All Our Hands Are Dirty, I suspect we’ve only just begun to see his star rise. No one who hears this record would be surprised by the reception it has received. Track for track, this is one of the strongest Canadian debut album’s I’ve heard in a while.

Cook writes powerful lyrics about the human experience, sets those lyrics to great melodies and drives the whole package home with emotionally charged vocals. Having people on board for the record like bass player Adam Kury (LA Guns, CandleBox) and guitarist Jason Orme (Alanis Morissette, Daniel Powter) doesn’t hurt you either.

He also had a stellar engineer serving as his producer, Frank Gryner, who’s worked with Train, Bon Jovi and Rob Zombie. All Our Hands Are Dirty is a textbook example of go big or stay home. Expect good things down the road from Cook.

Listen to Jagger Cook’s The Light of Mississippi