Brooklyn's People Get Ready are about to digitally release the Zelda Marina EP, a follow-up to their 2012 self-titled debut. "Zelda Marina" was the album's second single and the EP that it is being re-released on will sort of function as a companion piece to understanding the band's process as musicians and performers, including demos, remixes, and instrumentals. For the title track, the group has crafted an experimental visual, heavy on movement and image-manipulation. The dancing was choreographed by Guggenheim Fellow Tere O'Conor, while PGR founder Steve Reker worked with video artist Ty Flowers to edit the images. [...]
The 17th Annual Webby Awards went down last night at Wall Street's cavernous Cipriani's. Hosted by Patton Oswalt, the ceremony featured a performance by Tanlines, who played their song "All Of Me," as well as the presentation of awards to the previously-announced winners, including Frank Ocean and Grimes. Ocean was unable to attend, so he accepted via video while Grimes's was given to her by a fawning Fred Armisen. Watch Tanlines' performance and check out Ocean and Grimes accepting their awards below. Read More...
For Beacon's track "Drive" from their debut full-length The Ways We Separate , the BTW alumni enlisted 101lbs. Pictures to create a smoky, dark clip. But instead of crafting something run-of-the-mill, they drew from another genre's tropes. Says Will Joines of 101, "I was interested in taking elements of a R&B video and making something darker and more mysterious. The goal was to suggest and imply while leaving room for the audience to insert their own story and ideas." Check out the video and fill in the blanks below. Read More...
Oh hey, new Daft Punk! The French robots spent so many years putting together the immaculately crafted new album Random Access Memories that it only stands to reason that there would be material left over. And a Japanese edition of the album has a bonus track, called "Horizon," that points in a couple of the directions the album could've gone. The track is a meditative, instrumental, half-acoustic reverie that recalls nothing so much as Daft Punk's onetime French contemporaries Air. It's awfully pretty, if entirely baffling, and you can stream it at t he [...]
Last year, the Los Angeles singer and producer Julia Holter released Ekstasis , an album of gauzy and elliptical and weirdly comforting experimental pop music. That LP turned out to be very valuable in helping some of us slow down and breathe and chill the fuck out from time to time. Later this summer, she'll follow that album up with a new one, her first proper studio effort, called Loud City Song . And now she's shared the slow, warm, beautiful opening track "World" in the form of a flickering, elusive video from the [...]
The pioneering Italo-disco genius Giorgio Moroder, currently going through a popular renaissance thanks in part to his appearance on Daft Punk's Random Access Memories , is 73, and he came up in the era when producers weren't also expected to serve as DJs. But last night at the Brooklyn club Output, Moroder played his first-ever DJ set. The set was part of the Red Bull Music Academy series, and Moroder had the younger DJ and "musical director" Chris Cox helping him out; he wasn't doing it all himself. Together, they played many of Moroder's greatest [...]
The four-guitar Nashville punk monster Diarrhea Planet has lately cultivated a rep as one of the best, most fiery young live bands on the touring circuit. If their revolting band name is still (understandably) putting you off, their live cover of "Born To Run" with Titus Andronicus frontman Patrick Stickles might be enough to change your mind. And later this summer, they'll release the sophomore album I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams . The first single is the ragged, anthemic "Separations," and you can hear it below. Read More...
If you've got a gift for metalworking and/or LED-light programming, you may be missing your calling; you could be raking in a ton of money by helping people realizing their dreams of transforming into Daft Punk robots. A new Wall Street Journal article explores the secondary market of artisans who are making facsimiles of Daft Punk's robot helmets. According to the piece, there's now a small but dedicated circle of fans willing to drop four figures on eBay for the privilege of looking like the two members of Daft Punk. From the article, it's pretty clear [...]
The Backstreet Boys' luminous ballad " I Want It That Way " is almost indisputably the single greatest song to come out of the teenpop era, and if you're still resisting its charms 15 years later, this is a pretty good morning to reconsider. Yesterday, during an in-store performance at Chicago's Borderline Music, the British singer Charli XCX, who released her own album of pretty amazing pop songs just last month, busted out a charmingly low-key synthpop cover of the song. There's nothing ironic about this particular cover; she's radiating pure love the entire time. Also, I love [...]
Words like "party metal," and "beer metal" come to mind when talking about Kvelertak, Norway's black 'n' roll export, but a more accurate descriptor would be "sweat metal." Or, if we we're really going for accuracy, "fluid metal," because it wasn't just sweat that was soaking the stage and crowd at the Kvelertak show on Friday night. The band played the Studio At Webster Hall, a claustrophobic basement under Webster Hall Proper in New York's East Village that always seems to be more packed than any fire marshal could ever allow. They were in town for a sold-out show in [...]
The first time I ever saw Jacques Greene DJ, he spun Mya's overlooked, Nicki Minaj-featuring slinker "Ponytail." Throwing that out there made it clear he had been committed to pop-R&B at a young age, but is also ordained to keeping things on the dancefloor vibe sultry but still party-primed. Tom Krell, bka How To Dress Well's work is also clearly indebted to a youthful eduction in Tevin Campbell, Whitney Houston, and the like. And while the electronic elements of his output tend toward the more experimental side, this is a union that works because it's hinged on their shared interest [...]
Wes Eisold describes the new Cold Cave A-side as, "Cool nihilism. Existential, groovy, psychedelia." I think the former term fits "Black Boots" pretty well, insofar as it means anything at all. The latter, though? Sorry, but "existential, groovy, psychedelia" this is not. Maybe "DeLillo-esque, urban, goth"? Or "violent, subterranean, death-rock"? Or "pale, rigid, post-punk"? I dunno, I think I'm being thrown by the word "groovy" or something. Anyway, Eisold is back with another self-released 73, which appears to be his chosen form for new Cold Cave material at present. It's a good look for him: Such "bleak, focused, minimalism" is [...]
The enigmatic Californian rap producer Madlib is exactly the type of person to make a new track, put it on a 73 single, only make 300 copies of that single, and then only sell those copies to the people who show up at one specific show. His new two-track single Rock Conducta is only available at a forthcoming San Francisco show, and one of songs is "The Mad March," which chops up a funky marching band stomp into a time-stretching ripple. Listen below. Read More...
As far as we know, the great inward-looking indie singer-songwriter Cass McCombs has no plans to drop a new album on us anytime soon. But this summer, he will release a split 73 with the veteran folk-music outsider Michael Hurley. McCombs's contribution is a warm and buoyant shuffle called "Three Men Sitting On A Hollow Log," and you can hear it below. Read More...
Apologies for those who already know, but before "Crazy" and "Fuck You" and The Voice , Cee-Lo was one fourth of the ridiculously great Atlanta rap group Goodie Mob, whose first two albums are indisputable essential classics and whose third album is kind of sneaky-great. Last year, the group reunited on (of course) The Voice and released a somewhat perplexing new song called " Is That You God ." They've now announced plans for a full-on reunion album with the kinda-hilarious title Age Against The Machine , and its new single is a [...]
You never, as a music dork, stop learning this lesson, but the truth behind it stands: It's always, always a bad idea to dismiss an artist based on a terrible name. That rule is right up there with "horrendous rappers get better all the time, so stop believing it can't happen," and we break the rule just as often as that one. Case in point: Majical Cloudz. And, I mean, holy gods what an awful name. It's name that conjures Trapper Keeper designs and rap-metal fake-toughness (that Z!) at the same damn time, and it makes the group [...]
If you're heading to The Gorge for Sasquatch! this weekend, you probably already know to check out Sigur Rós, Vampire Weekend, Tame Impala, and other live favorites. But, as with Coachella , there are some hidden gems of the festival that you need to check out. Some are groups on the verge of breaking through, some are already great bands that just got a bum set time, and others are already popular artists who are going to have some special things in this setting that you may not have realized. So click here to start [...]
From a distance, the title track from Deafheaven's sophomore LP, Sunbather , sounds like a particularly harrowing and intense act of God - a tornado leveling a concert hall, maybe, or an avalanche burying a valley. But in the lovingly crafted details, the song is all about dynamics: George Clarke's raw shriek is pure urgency and desperation; percussionist Daniel Tracy's rhythms vary from hailstorm to sunshower as the movements progress and demand; and Kerry McCoy's guitars ring out from a din of reverb and noise, bringing melody and muscle, guiding the song through clouds to Olympian heights, and then [...]
The Vancouver duo Lightning Dust is a side project of the great Black Mountain, and their new single " Diamond " is the romantic soft-focus new-wave jam that nobody ever expected them to write. With the song's video, director Helen Reed tells a nice story about using art to overcome mundanity. It shows us three women who bust into a seemingly spur-of-the-moment synchronized swimming routine in a dingy public pool. Watch it below. Read More...
I used to work in an office with a guy who played drums for the band Asobi Seksu. When he told me the name of his band, I found the moniker to be strange, inviting, and enchanting ... till he informed me it was a Japanese translation of the English-language term "sport fucking" (which the band had lifted from Fight Club ). Ann Arbor quartet Pity Sex have chosen a handle that is no less dubious in origin than Asobi Seksu, and it's made doubly so by the fact that the band doesn't even bother [...]
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