Victorious Combinations

We've just done a serious reworking on our latest single "Brotherhood."  This new version is the result of several months of listening and pondering, as well as absorbing the comments of several producer friends of ours.  I'd like to thank everyone who's helped us so much over the past many months in the creation of this song, it really means a lot to us.  So big thanks to Justin "Juice" Kadis for his guitar playing and arranging, Misty Reid on drums, and Stefan Sigerson, Jimmy Zee, Jason Corbett and Jordy Birch for their assistance /comments with the production. And, of course, the wonderful Robert Edmonds for the cover art! Cheers to you all! Hope you enjoy the song.  I think it's one of our best to date. Mark Brotherhood by Combine the Victorious

Isabelle and I will be doing an acoustic performance at her new store at 4158 Main Street tomorrow.  In the spirit of Valentine's day we'll be singing in harmony with just a guitar and a few beats for a couple of our favourite songs.  Please join us before you head out on a romantic date!   We'll be playing at around 6PM. Here's a glimpse of the shop from the Vitamin Daily blog.

Isabelle and I took January to build her new clothing store here in Vancouver at 4158 Main Street.  As it took absolutely all our time we had no time for much else, even music!  However, the shop is open and looking great and we've got our eyes set on finishing the next album.  The past year was quite production in getting our live show together and writing new material so now we have to go thru all the various ideas and decide which of them fit well together as a full length. One idea that I've been throwing around in my head since 2012 was to combine the best tracks from our last ep with the latest and greatest of our new songs and press the entire collection on vinyl.  It would be our first vinyl album, and that alone is very exciting to us.   Additionally it would be brilliant to give artist Rob Edmonds a full sized cover to play around with.  We know it would be a stunning looking and sounding work. So over the next month or so we'll be debuting a...

We are very pleased to announce that our video for Smoke and Choke is #8 on the Totallyfuzzy.net site's Best of 2013 year end list.  It's with no small amount of pride that we join the likes of Katy Perry, Arctic Monkeys, Lorde and Die Antwoord and actually finished ahead of One Direction! We have to say another big thank you to our video's creator/director/editor/visionary Stefan Sigerson for his excellent work!  Check out the list.  there are a lot of good songs to be found (beneath our own we're proud to add!) ----- if you haven't seen the video yet you can watch it on Totallyfuzzy.net or the Boutique Empire Youtube channel. Here's to a brilliant 2014!  All the best to you, and thanks for reading! Mark

Brotherhood is a song that I started writing in response to a very dear friend taking his own life back in 2012.  Our friend Todd Simko , who I'd played in Pure with back in the nineties, and who later performed with Combine the Victorious for several shows in 2007 and 2008, left us in the spring of 2012.  His death created a disturbing wake of emotions that eventually found their way into this song. Back in January or February of 2013 I remember starting the core idea one afternoon and the song took shape quite rapidly.  The lyrics are personal but I tried to keep them open to interpretation rather than literal; it's been a sad realization that this kind of incident isn't as rare as it may seem.   The truth is all four of us: Juice, Misty, Isabelle and I were heavily affected by Todd's death, and it's been many months of processing.  We recorded this version back in the summer, on a beautiful day in Vancouver full of sunshine and laughs.  Misty is pl...

We had a great show on Sunday night performing at VALT2013 in the Centre for Digital Media.  The new five piece band, including Leigh Grant (former drummer of 90's alt rock band Pure ), sounded incredible.  I don't think we've sounded better in fact.  Here's just a few photos that have made their way to us from the show.  We had a digital media artist running extra images for us during the gig, which none of us actually saw while we were on stage, but in fact made for quite an interesting looking event! Thanks to Michelle Harding for sharing her photos with us!  

Juice has been editing some nice footage from a recent rehearsal and put this together.  The new five piece band has so much energy, and the sound is nicely rounded out, it's hard to remember when Isabelle and I were doing this as just a duo! Check out the clip, we are playing Glasgow with Leigh Grant (former drummer of Pure) on the drum kit, Juice on guitar, Misty and Isabelle handling the singing and me on keys.  The new band is amazing.  Our show last night at VALT2013 was a tonne of fun, and we reportedly have sounded incredible!  Got to find some footage from the night to share. In the mean time please check out this clip: