Star Fish

How the West was won plus one plus one: meet Belle Starr, the talented new trio of Stephanie Cadman, Kendel Carson and Miranda Mulholland. The band's namesake outlaw is a stereotype-flaunting renegade who did hard time for horse theft.

Perhaps the fugitive Belle Starr is an extreme role model, but for a group that spent one of their first music video shoots learning how to hotwire a car, the Bandit Queen provides a certain kind of rebellious inspiration.Make no mistake: Belle Starr is a band that defies expectations.

Jim Cuddy has written many of the songs that have become indelible in the soundtrack of Canadian lives. With the release of his fifith solo album, Countrywide Soul, he continues to contribute to that extraordinary songbook and on this record, Jim continues to find new ways to balance personal reflection and plainspoken storytelling, remaining both intimate and accessible.

One part stomping songs that echo early country and rock 'n roll, the other gritty ballads that sound sweet and haunted, Harrow Fair is a Canadian powerhouse of hoof-thumping, soul-wrenching, transcendent Americana. No strangers to the music scene, Miranda Mulholland (Great Lake Swimmers, Belle Starr) and Andrew Penner (Sunparlour Players) began writing music together and quickly discovered they shared a unique vision.

Without doubt or qualification, The Sadies are one of this continent's greatest extant rock 'n' roll bands - just as they have been for the last quarter-century. Versatile and imaginative, they skip from astral psychedelia to shuffling bucolics and leap from puckish pop to righteous garage-rock without losing momentum or mastery.