The Ultimatemost High

Since 2008, The Ultimatemost High have been cruising around the golden horseshoe giving club goers a crash course in savage rock ‘n’ roll. The quartet hails from a dilapidated suburb just east of Toronto that they lovingly refer to as Bankrupt City. Of course, hopeless dirty environments are notorious for giving life to the rowdiest of rock ‘n’ roll bands and fans. These grim conditions have no doubt had a heavy influence on The Ultimatemost High – the band’s particularly raunchy brand of garage music seems tailor made to fill the dance floor and empty the beer taps. Upon perfecting every garage punk standard in circulation, The Ultimatemost High committed their sonic offerings to tape and proudly took on the grueling task of becoming a staple in Toronto’s music scene. While a cult following began to grow, college radio DJ’s across the western hemisphere began to rotate the band’s demos before a piece of vinyl was even a consideration. Thank you very much! As you rest your eyes upon this very text, The Ultimatemost High are writing and recording a debut LP fueled with the sort of excitement, decadence, and showmanship that rock ‘n’ roll was founded on. It won’t be available until later this year, but in the meantime, you can find The Ultimatemost High leveling any stage brave enough to hold them.

- Van Music

Remember, Remember…the fifth of November…



I couldn’t name a song. I couldn’t name anyone in the band. This doesn’t matter with The Ultimate Most High. Being there is fucking enough. A loud, raucous audio-visual spectacle that is best appreciated in confined, narrow, dive-bar type space (which The Bates Motel is to a t) with an above average speaker system that cares not a whit if someone close by is trying to sleep at quarter to one on a cool but not cold early November night/morning.

The Ultimate Most High was scheduled to play at one, but due to a mix up that remains a mystery, they went on – for possibly the first time in rock music history – fifteen minutes early. The band seemed a bit jarred by this temporal error, but that can be expected. Before they actually begin, little of the T.U.M.H. seems to make sense. The bass player looks like he should be in a metal band. The ever-jolly drummer in an amphetamine-driven jazz band. The guitarist in a business meeting giving third quarter profit projections. The singer on the phone with his stockbroker in a much swankier martini bar.

Appearances can be wonderfully deceiving.

The Ultimate Most High cares not a whit for breaking musical barriers. They will happily settle for the destruction of your eardrums. Outside of the odd, flash-less guitar solo, the entire band is one rhythmic hardcore punk organism. Even the singer. No, check that. Especially the singer. Here singing is barking, and only the small talk between the sonic pummelings are you reminded that he is not a man possessed. Don’t know the lyrics? Doesn’t matter, it’s your turn to sing, the man with microphone is stuffing it in your face imploring you to scream into the transmission device by first doing it himself.

He leaps off the stage seconds after the drums, bass, and guitar kick in for the first song because the stage is simply three four-inch risers in the back of the bar. Which is beside the unisex bathroom, that the singer used as another room, another place, another way out, another thing to smash into, like he used the floor, the top of the piano and the bodies of the five or six people milling around the front of the ‘stage’.

The rest of the band says more or less stationary, just trembling with the reverberations of the singular sound coming from their instruments. Riffs. Fast metallic riffs. Even from the drummer, I swear. The music is like an old school tightrope wire: taut, strong and powerful in the centre, but frayed at the edges.

The Ultimate Most High becomes the pulse of the Bates Motel. Taking out your neck, spine and quaking hips, one riff at a time. The singer by his actions is imploring us to fall out of line and into chaos. Kiss the ground, motherfucker, your salvation is moving around the room like a psychotic rubber ball; try to grab it for even a second.

There is scarcely room to breath between songs, to let out a scream that you approve or can’t take much more, but you find yourself putting together tattered questions in awe. Are punk drummers allowed to be this good, this on-point? Punk is supposed to hate the drum solo, but why does it work so well here? Why stop playing a song so everyone can get their wits about them if you could just let the seemingly indefatigable drummer pull a Bonham for a crazed thirty seconds? How can they all play ramshackle and scatterbrained and still punch out a sound that unmistakably comes from a tight, well-oiled machine?

It’s a fine fucking line that The Ultimate Most High has a knack for bashing its head against repeatedly.

Most importantly, you ask why you’re asking these questions at all, what the fuck does it matter. Besides, The Ultimate Most High doesn’t have time for your queries. It’s already on to its next three minutes of mayhem.

Punk lore isn’t like from pop music lore, which has a cast of thousands for things like Woodstock or Live Aid. People beating witness to something great is counted in the dozens. I was not in the Detroit biker bar where Iggy Pop got his ass kicked on that fateful night in 1973 that brought the second incarnation of The Stooges to a close, nor I was not in Manchester in 1976 when The Sex Pistols played to an audience of forty that contained the future members of the Buzzcocks and Joy Division, but I was at the Bates Motel on the fifth of November in the year of someone else’s lord 2010, and after seeing that show, I do believe that lightning can strike twice, that raw power equals pure sound, and that The Ultimate Most High is one of the best things in Toronto. - The Abandoned Station

"Brand new Toronto combo who take that high energy rock'n'roll up a notch! Are these the bastard children of The Purple Toads?!?" - Radio What Wave CHRW-FM (London, Ontario)