thetwilightsad.com As I mentioned in my review of The Twilight Sad's new record No One Can Ever Know , the band have never tried to hide their influences. But for everything that has gone into their sonic stew, the jangle-pop art-pop of The Smiths doesn't come immediately to mind as you work through their discography... or does it. James Graham may not aspire to be as deft a wordsmith as Morrissey, but whether it's buried in the the white noise of their debut [...]
Amazon Flashback: 2004. Ottawa singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards has made a bit of a name for herself with her debut album Failer the year before, and perhaps seeking to solidify the lucrative "people-who-buy-their-CDs-whil e-buying-coffee" demographic, contributes a song to the Starbucks/Hear Music-assembled Sweetheart: Love Songs compilation. This places her alongside artists like Aimee Mann and Josh Ritter in recording love songs covers, just in time for Valentine's Day. Edwards chooses to reinterpret a Tom Petty song from his 1989 solo album, Full [...]
Wikipedia I was having a little trouble coming up with something to say about this week's selection by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and taken from the 1991 Leonard Cohen tribute album I'm Your Fan , but happily a little plumbing around the tubes of the internet turned up this little piece at chromehorse (chrome solidarity!) that corroborates the bit at Wikipedia on the song. Which is basically that Cave and company got wrecked before recording a marathon-length jam on "Tower Of Song" [...]
War Child When The Hold Steady get likened to Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band , it's usually in reference to the big, raucous, arena-sized bar-rock that the latter invented and the former aspire to. So it kind of made sense that the two would be paired up for the 2009 War Child: Heroes benefit compilation wherein artists covered their inspirations, but the song selection was a bit curious. "Atlantic City" comes from Springsteen's 1982 record Nebraska and being a [...]
Wikipedia Folks of a certain age got an unexpected thrill this past Thursday night when on Parks & Recreation - assuming they were home watching television (or torrenting it for later) - Adam Scott showed up on their screens wearing a Letters To Cleo t-shirt. LTC were never amongst the A-list of the '90s college rock scene, or even the '90s Boston college rock scene, but they held a special place in the hearts of fans of scrappy power pop and to see them getting name-checked out of the [...]
Ten Man Records Today is David Bowie's 65th birthday; traditionally, this would be the age where he could officially retire from the workaday world and spend his golden years tending to his garden and doing the daily crossword. Of course, one of the perks of being rock music's most influential artists is that you can take early retirement and that's what Mr. Jones has done since approximately 2005, making only sporadic guest appearances on others' records and certainly not doing anything of his own - his final release of new material is almost a decade [...]
Frank Yang When Guided By Voices hung it up with a final show in Chicago on New Year's Eve, 2004, I rang in 2005 with a farewell post . Well not a post, reading back over it, but a (salty) salute. This followed a covers post from the Summer of 2004 when they announced they were calling it a day, and then another in October 2010 when they were gearing up for their reunion show at Matador 21 (the MP3s for the second one are still up). [...]
Wikipedia Good: the holiday season is just lousy with cover versions. Bad: they've all been posted by every blog under the mistletoe ad nauseum. So while in past years I've done mini-omnibus holiday mixes - 2010 and 2008 are still up - this year I'll just focus on one song, Darlene Love's most famous contribution to the classic Phil Spector -assembled A Christmas Gift To You , and four diverse covers of it. Slow Club do the most faithful [...]
Frank Yang One of the music stories of 2011 was the return of Kate Bush from whatever misty English castle she'd been hiding in since releasing her last album, Aerial , in 2005. It began with the curious remix/renovation project Director's Cut in the Spring, but was followed by a proper collection of new works this Fall in 50 Words For Snow . And there was much rejoicing throughout the land. To mark this - and also [...]
Wikipedia There's not a whole lot to recommend Burning London , the 1999 tribute album to The Clash . The lineup is mostly '90s-vintage acts who've not aged well and the performances are by and large unremarkable - certainly not a compilation worthy of one of the greatest rock bands ever. But there's one standout - to me, at least - courtesy of The Afghan Whigs , and not just because they were far and away a better band than most of their peers on the comp. [...]
D.L. Anderson It's all a little bit of serendipity. Justin Vernon brings Bon Iver to perform at the 2010 edition of the MusicNOW festival in Cincinnati. Cincinnati is the hometown of The National , in which one Aaron Dessner plays guitar. Dessner joins Vernon onstage for his set and together, they cover the song "Love More" by up-and-coming New York singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten . Van Etten hears (about) it and contacts Dessner and asks to work with him. With Dessner as producer and guest musician, Van [...]
Exclaim I am old enough to remember when "Islands In The Stream" was a hit for Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton back in 1983 (though probably more for Rogers as was taken from his Eyes That See in the Dark album), and the variety show performance linked below is really all you needed to know about it. So clean-cut, family-friendly and catchy as hell. The version recorded by Feist and The Constantines for a limited-run 73 in 2008 certainly turns down the glitz and turns [...]
Frank Yang Not that he's looking to abdicate the title of one of the most multi-talented - if, er, a bit eccentric - artists of our time, but if you were to nominate heirs apparent for Prince , then Janelle Monáe would have to be right at the top of the list. I don't know how her guitar chops are, but as far as being a singer/songwriter/visionary who effortlessly blends soul, funk and rock and outrageous showmanship at a ridiculously young age - she's just 25 - Monáe has got the goods. [...]
Frank Yang I opened the year with a Decemberists covering R.E.M. post, and oh what an 11 months it's been for both bands since then. Back then, Colin Meloy and company were readying the release of their sixth album The King Is Dead , while R.E.M. were known to have finished their fifteenth album Collapse Into Now and would eventually put it out at the start of March. And in February, while touring and promoting The [...]
Frank Yang Montrealler Béatrice Martin is also known as Coeur de Pirate but is best known for her lovely, piano-led Francophone pop, the likes of which populated her 2008 self-titled debut and made her a bit of an international star in the process. But if you've seen her live, you'd know that she's fluently bilingual and that she likes to show off both her English skills and knowledge of contemporary pop music with covers. Lots of them. From the stage she's offered her take on the likes of Rihanna, Katy [...]
Frank Yang Oasis had more than a few hits back in the day, but if you were to have to pick a signature tune - for all the rock and bombast in their repertoire - you'd probably have to pick their acoustic 1995 single, "Wonderwall". And yet its been a rather mutable song; never mind the million versions that've graced coffee houses and open mics around the world, even Oasis fans would be split between favouring the original (What's The Story) Morning Glory version with Liam Gallagher on vocals or the Noel-sung [...]
Wikipedia As recently as a year ago, it didn't look like this cover would ever get a chance to be aired out again in a legitimate manner. Sure, I posted it back in 2007 when Sebastien Grainger's new band The Mountains opened up for Bloc Party , but that was tenuous at best - Death From Above 1979 had been inactive since 2006 and Bloc Party were formally on hiatus as of Summer 2009. And yet here we are, with both sides of the equation back in action. DFA19792s [...]
Sub Pop Everything about Dum Dum Girls is pretty danged American, from their California garage rock-meets-'60s girl-group sound to their vintage biker pin-up aesthetic, but hearing them take on arch-English mope-masters The Smiths as they did for the closing track on their He Gets Me High EP earlier this year, you can easily imagine an adolescent Kristen Gundred swooning over romanticized notions of rainy Manchester as much as SoCal's sunny beaches. But maybe it shouldn't be any kind of surprise - their band name does come half [...]
radiohead.com The key to being a brilliant British band circa 1997 was, clearly, to have "head" in your name somewhere. What other explanation could there be for Radiohead and Portishead to each release career highwater albums OK Computer and Portishead within four months of each other? Probably about as good odds of both band choosing to follow said successes up in decidedly unconventional fashion - Radiohead by basically abandoning their sound by going experimentally electronic in time for the new [...]
Wikipedia Greg Dulli has the sort of voice that you can't help but want to hear your favourite songs played through, if just so you can hear them seasoned with the distinctively whiskey-soaked, cigarette-stained blend of soulful seediness and fiery longing that's his trademark. Happily, he's never been one to shy away from doing covers from all over the musical spectrum - the Afghan Whigs' takes on the likes of The Clash, TLC and Barry White are some of the favourite reinterpretations I have in my collection. After putting the Whigs to bed [...]
Chromewaves
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EARMILK V2.0
