Frank Yang If anyone were to ask - and really they're not - this long weekend jaunt to New York was most definitely not a music trip. It was a shopping/eating/visiting/just getting out of Toronto trip, yes, but not a "music" trip as so many of my getaways tend to be. So that I ended up at shows the first two nights I was in town was purely mostly coincidence. I mean, I hadn't even thought about Denver's Dressy Bessy in the better part of a decade. I saw them at The [...]
Part 1. N'dea Davenport by N'dea Davenport (1998) How can you tell an album is a timeless classic, transcending time, place and chart performance? Every time you listen to it feels like the first time. Fourteen years after the then-former Brand New Heavies frontwoman released her self-titled solo debut, every time my iPod stops on one of its songs (and it seems to happen at least once a day, thank God), I'm transported back to 1998. The reason for my near-daily time travel? It's certainly not that the album is [...]
Liz Flyntz If we can regard Beach House literally as their namesake, which is to say as a holiday getaway, a reliably stolid place to escape from the real world, then the amount of adoration they've gotten for largely sticking to their skeletal formula through four albums now is understandable. Their fans don't want them to reinvent themselves with each outing; they want that comforting blanket of Victoria Legrand's narcoleptic vocals and whirring keyboard interwoven with Alex Scally's languid slide guitar, and across their first two records - their 2006 self-titled debut and [...]
Filed under: News Kevin Winter, Getty This is hard to believe, but there was actually a time when people didn't take Radiohead seriously. Shocking, right? But back when their first album was named after a Jerky Boys reference ( Pablo Honey , look it up ) and their first hit was about being a weirdo ("Creep"), it was pretty easy to box Radiohead in as slacker Brit Beck / Pavement [...]
Brian Vander Ark & Lux Land - Sweetness Follows [R.E.M.] | bx . watch the original
Third/Sister Lovers es uno de los álbumes más populares de la banda norteamericana Big Star . Lanzado en 1978 con muchas dificultades de por medio, ha sido un disco esencial y de gran influencia para una cantidad enorme de bandas y artistas. Es a raíz de esta relevancia musical, que varios artistas se reunirán para recrear en vivo Third/Sister Lovers . El próximo 28 de mayo en el Barbican Hall de Londres, Jody Stephens (integrante original de Big Star) junto con Mike Mills (R.E.M.), Alex Taylor (Hot Chip), Ira Kaplan (Yo La Tengo), [...]
Frank Yang Maybe listening to Jesus Of Cool and Labour Of Lust weren't the best warm-ups for Nick Lowe's show at The Phoenix on Monday night. After all, he was many many years removed from being the young pub-rock firebrand who recorded those first two records, having settled comfortably into the role of professorial pop singer-songwriter - a guise that's suited his still-potent pen quite nicely, as last year's The Old Magic proved. But if you [...]
Experimenting with more illustrations and pastels than Picasso himself, Deepal Bhambra (aka DPaul ) carries on the expert tutelage in full care of his latest booty session - timetabled as 'SING2MyReligion.' Mingling the inspired licks of Thomas Gold's 'Sing2Me' and R.E.M.'s 'Losing My Religion' into a new-fangled luxury , it is all about the emotion and tension on this one people. A reverberating, golden Jam! Thomas Gold vs. R.E.M. - SING2MyReligion (DPaul x ftb BootUp)
Frank Yang If you thought that any combination of it being a Sunday night and Easter would result in a lightly-attended Perfume Genius show at The Drake on Sunday night, you'd have been wrong. Which is to say that I was wrong; the handful of tickets remaining were snatched up when doors opened and by the time I got there, it was officially sold out. And with good cause - Mike Hadreas' second album under as Perfume Genius - Put Your Back N 2 It - is a [...]
Back in the early '80s, Late Night with David Letterman would book up-and-coming acts that the 11:30 shows wouldn't take a chance on. One of these groups was R.E.M. who made their U.S. television debut on the NBC program on October 6, 1983. The Georgians sat for an interview and played Radio Free Europe and So. Central Rain. Take a look at the best quality clip of the spot to surface yet... R.E.M. - Radio Free Europe and So. Central Rain
When people talk about great bands from the 1980s, everyone (myself included) seems to go on and on about the Smiths, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, the Cure, and R.E.M., before they were famous. But what about the post-punk band from London that may have had the best name assigned to any group to emerge from the Reagan/Thatcher years? I have a few theories as to why the Psychedelic Furs didn't/don't get enough love: 1) The members weren't cute enough to be pin-up idols, which, let's face it, great as Duran Duran's music may have been, was a [...]
Considering how incredibly brilliant they are at so many things (like becoming epoch-definingly rich, for example) Google is remarkably awful at email spam. Awful to the point that their spam folder is an active nuisance, and the messages they divert into the damn thing seem to be entirely random. Senders I have marked as spam don't always go in there, personal emails - even those sent to one recipient only - occasionally do end up in there, and the rest of them seem to be just a random selection of stuff people send me, with no rhyme or [...]
My good friends and my Union Square apartment aside, I can't say there's much that I miss about living in New York City, particularly in the post 9/11 years. Occasionally, usually while I'm watching a rerun of Sex and the City on TV, I get a little nostalgic for the good old days, circa 1994-95 -- Monday nights at Sugar Babies, Tuesdays at Jackie 60, Wednesdays at Flamingo East, Thursdays at Bowery Bar, Fridays at Sound Factory Bar, Saturdays at the Roxy and Twilo, Sundays hungover in bed with a cheese omelet and fries. But I dry my [...]
Words // Scott Pingeton Criminally overlooked in their own time, Big Star will be remembered as one of the most influential bands of the last 40 years. They may well be the center of my personal musical universe, the sun around which most of my musical tastes orbit - power-pop, garage rock, soul, folk-rock. Paul Westerberg famously dubbed Alex Chilton "a man who could sing in a visible voice" , the phrase that gave this blog its name. One of the very first posts on VV back in March 2010 was [...]
More Seattle goodness, this time from the friendly neighborhood Neighbors who are about to release their second album on Lost Sound Tapes. The easy reference point of Neighbors is Pavement , and I'm sure the band intend it, but their new album John In Babeland is not just paint by numbers. Pavement weren't created in a vacuum, and Neighbors have more than just one single influence. Since I don't personally know them I couldn't tell you what they are, but bands like Firehose , REM , Camper van Beethoven [...]
Peter Buck , ex guitarrista de R.E.M. , lanzará el primer álbum solista de su carrera, aunque sin embargo no se trata de la primer obra que el músico realizará por fuera de la legendaria banda de Georgia: anteriormente había publicado material junto a Baseball Project y The Minus 5 entre otros. Uno de los colaboradores del disco, Scott McCaughey (quien también trabajó junto a Buck en Baseball Project y The Minus 5 ) le contó [...]
La separación de R.E.M. a finales del año pasado fue una de las noticias de 2011, y mucho se habló de los planes de sus miembros e incluso de una posible reunión en caso de que la sus miembros necesitaran dinero. Si bien Mike Mills y Michael Stipe hablaban de que no tenían intención de emprender una carrera en solitario , parece ser que Peter Buck si lo haría. Los datos vienen de Scott McCaughey , amigo del guitarrista, que asegura que Peter está trabajando en su debut en solitario , [...]
Uma das marcas registradas do estilo do influente e agora extinto grupo R.E.M. era a harmonia criada pelas vozes do frontman Michael Stipe e seu fiel escudeiro Mike Mills . Curiosamente, uma voz pouco ouvida do grupo de Athens, Georgia, terminará o seu silêncio com o lançamento de um álbum solo. É o que anunciou Scott McCaughey , guitarrista que colaborou com Buck na banda The Baseball Project , ao Seattle Weekly . McCaughey , que está colaborando com Buck nesse novo trabalho, afirmou que o [...]
Hands up: Who had Peter Buck as the first R.E.M. member to go solo after last year's breakup? It's true! As Michael Stipe hangs with Muppets and Mike Mills perfects his golf swing , guitarist Buck has been in the lab, working on a debut solo album. As Seattle Weekly reports , longtime R.E.M. buddy Scott McCaughey recently appeared on a Seattle radio station and claimed that he's been helping Buck work on a solo album. He doesn't yet know what form that album will take. Buck may put the album out exclusively [...]
Chromewaves
THEME FOR GREAT CITIES
Spinner.com
The Cover Lovers
noiselab
aerial noise
The Noise Collective
Hidden Track![R.E.M. - Radio Free Europe + So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry) [Live ~ 10-6-83].m4v](http://cdn.elbo.ws/youtube/z5KGun05lwg_130.jpg)
Song, by Toad
Visible Voice
the finest kiss
indieHearts
Cuchara Sónica
Rock 'n' Beats
Stereogum
Video: 2:54 - "Creeping"
Sleeve: “1991″ by Azealia Banks
Tango In the Attic: "Sellotape"
Sleeve: “Summertime Sadness” by Lana Del Rey
