Phileas Fogg with a Guitar

To be blunt: either you love the Rheostatics, or you’ve never heard of them. There is a third possibility, one involving taste that I won’t get into.

With the release of their first album, 1987’s Greatest Hits, the Rheostatics became Canada’s pre-eminent underground phenomenon. Loved by critics and musicians but largely ignored by mainstream media, the Rheostatics entered the national music scene at a time when the hits of the 1960s and ’70s were on permanent repeat and Neil Young’s chestnut “Helpless”—with its invocation of “a town in North Ontario”—was the most Canadian song on the airwaves. While the Canadian music scene slept, dreaming of the past, the Rheostatics charged into the game with songs about hockey, beer and hoser history. The Rheos danced a limbo below the perceptions of the masses, producing strange and beautiful music for a small, appreciative audience. Over the years, the band released eleven studio recordings, a children’s book with...