Just over a minute into Yeezus , Kayne West is riding the malfunctioning-star-destroyer glitch-screams of "On Sight" when he poses a rhetorical question: "How much do I not give a fuck? Let me show you right now, 'fore you give it up." He repeats the question, as the screaming robots underneath him disappear into empty black space. Then, welling up like a chorus of angels, we hear a classic-level Kanye soul sample, one of those things that once made his music sound so life-affirming. It's actually a gospel sample, a full choir pleading that "He'll give us all we [...]
Despite an initial April release date, M.I.A.'s fourth studio full-length, Matangi , has been temporarily shelved for allegedly being "too positive." Over the weekend, we heard a snippet of skittering but spritely and "Me And Bobby McGee"-referencing new cut " Bring The Noize " but it was debuted in full on Zane Lowe's BBC 1 show this afternoon. She told Lowe on-air that she keeps handing in her album, but the label will not accept it. It is, however, slated for release in the fall. Check out "Bring The Noize" below. Read More...
This year's Bonnaroo curators covered important bases in terms of top-level talent: from iconic boomer-fare like Paul McCartney and Tom Petty, to iconic R&B fare like R. Kelly, to iconic hipster/hippie fare (a Bonnaroo speciality) in Animal Collective. And the undercard was ripe, too, with strong names from most every genre over four days on the 'Roo family farm. You could focus on bands like Baroness, or Death Grips, or Nas, or Edward Sharp. Which is not to say you should focus on every band, but as a New Yorker once said, the world is yours (is yours [...]
It's here ! If you're a certain kind of internet music dork (guilty), you've been practically holding your breath all week waiting for this moment. Up until now, we hadn't heard a single finished CD-quality studio track of any song from Kanye West's new album Yeezus . Now, we get to hear all of them , if we're willing to click around the lawless internet hinterlands. And if you live in a major urban center, there's a decent chance you can just open your window or walk out your front door and absorb it that way. Either way, [...]
This week, Queens Of The Stone Age scored their first-ever No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 with ...Like Clockwork , the first album Palm Desert native Josh Homme has released with QOTSA in six years. It's a richly deserved honor, and one that had been long overdue. With a host of different bands - and different lineups within those bands - Homme has now presided over, and provided for us, a vast catalog of energetic rock music dealing almost exclusively in hooks and distortion. Read More...
There’s a scene in the trailer for the 2010 Magnetic Fields’ documentary Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt And The Magnetic Fields where a cab driver asks Stephin Merritt, “Why are they making a documentary about you?” Merritt replies slovenly, “I write wonderful music.” The cabbie says, “What’s your name? Merritt? Never heard of it.” Read More...
Legendary sloppy-transcendent Minneapolis punks the Replacements broke up in 1991, and they haven't played any shows since then. But last year, frontman Paul Westerberg and drummer Tommy Stinson got back together to record Songs For Slim , a benefit EP that raised money for former Replacements guitarist Slim Dunlap, who recently suffered a stroke; we posted their cover of Gordon Lightfoot's " I'm Not Sayin' ." (Guitarist Bob Stinson died in 1995, and drummer Chris Mars opted not to participate.) And now a version of the Replacements with Westerberg and Stinson will get together to play at [...]
The idea of "music video" can mean a lot of things in 2013. On the internet, many of our most memorable experiences involving music and moving images have been fringey delights: An art-stunt of a late-night performance , a commercial that aired on a Coachella jumbotron , a spectacularly flubbed awards-show dive rendered in gif form . But the year has also been kind to the traditional music video, with directors like Nabil and Luke Monaghan coming further into their own and Western pop and rock music doing so well that I didn't even see fit to [...]
2013 isn't technically half over yet, but we're deep into the part of the year where you start sweating the instant you leave your door, and that means it's a good time to take stock of all the disco robots, frantic rap nerds, and metal boundary-crushers who have thus far delighted us. It's impossible to pick a narrative out of this year's crop of great albums, as we've heard beautiful things from just about every corner of the music multiverse. But perhaps more than usual, our favorites of 2013 (so far) marry precise studio craft to open-hearted [...]
Any time a metal-curious friend asks me to explain the distinctions separating different metal subgenres - most often re: death metal vs. black metal - I tell them to start by focusing on the vocals. This is by no means the only fundamental difference, and it's by no means an absolute, but it's a pretty handy rule of thumb: To my ear, death metal vocals are warm; black metal vocals are cold. Death metal vocals tend to take the form of a loud bark or a low rumble; they're roiling, thunderous, guttural - intestinal, really. Black metal vocals, [...]
Thanks to the thundering two-drummer onslaught of their live shows and the basement-punk fury of their 2009 album Static Tensions , Savannah's Kylesa were probably already my favorite active metal band by the time they released Spiral Shadow two and a half years ago. But that album only deepened my love of this band, since it took what they were already doing and pushed it toward a hugeness that I hadn't allowed myself to imagine. The band's big trick was the way they fused bleary post-hardcore catharsis and speed with the bleary-eyed grandeur of doom metal. But [...]
Where are you, Fiona Apple? After a banner 2012, the singer-songwriter recently cancelled her only scheduled appearance for 2013, at Barcelona's Primavera Sound festival; she also torpedoed a slew of South American tour dates late last year with no signs of rescheduling on the horizon. Of course, we shouldn't be surprised - disappearance is part and parcel of Apple's career trajectory. Apple says she rarely ventures outside her Los Angeles home, except when visiting the L.A. club Largo, where she occasionally hops on stage with pal and resident performer Jon Brion. She doesn't drive and claims there [...]
Last June, we published a feature called the Top 20 Albums We've Been Waiting For Forever , counting down a bunch of our favorite artists from whom a new full-length was: (A) long overdue; and (B) not totally unrealistic. Coming in at No. 19 on that list was Queens Of The Stone Age. As we wrote in that space : Read More...
Kanye West took the stage at Saturday Night Live last night to debut an aggressive new track, "Black Skinhead". He also performed "New Slaves", a song West debuted on Friday. The songs will appear on his next record , Yeezus . Dressed in a studded leather jacket, West's stage presence on SNL was full of rage. He performed in front of a projection flipping through images reading "Followers", "Special!" and "Discount Price" but always returning to the same statement: "Not For Sale." His new song begins with some screams. It [...]
Tonight Kanye West premiered "New Slaves," the first single from his forthcoming LP, by projecting a video on buildings across the world. His site includes a map of times and locations for those projections, 66 in all. It's the same song Hudson Mohawke spun in Poland recently. Earlier this month, the rapper previewed new material at the Met Ball and Adult Swim's upfront , but decent recordings from those events have been scarce. Tonight's launch was better documented. Watch the full video (as it appeared on a building in Brooklyn) and a Vine [...]
Daft Punk's new album Random Access Memories is a lot of things: A masterful years-in-the-making publicity campaign set to music, a showcase of hellaciously expensive decades-old studio craftsmanship, a stunt-casted absurdist music event on the level of the Coachella Tupac hologram, a fascinating example of what happens when pop-star robots go to disco fantasy camp, a reminder that it's bee too long since you played Off The Wall front-to-back, an example of a hype-wave so deafening that you can almost forget there's an album behind it. But more than anything, it's a deeply silly piece of [...]
It's kind of a stretch to connect James Murphy's most recent dismissal of an LCD Soundsystem reunion with the release of “ Get Lucky ", which happened within a few days of each other, but it's still worth noting. After all, it has now been seven years since Murphy waited "seven years and fifteen days" (another reference from a self-consciously referential band, this time to German trance outfit Groove Coverage's "7 Years and 50 Days" from the year before) to play Daft Punk at his house party. Even if Murphy says, once and for all, that [...]
It's finally here! Daft Punk's long, long-awaited Random Access Memories is finally streaming online. Up until now, the great " Get Lucky " has been the only song we've gotten to hear, but now, the whole gleaming precision-engineered LP is streaming at iTunes . Listen to it and let us know what you think below.
At this point, six albums in, the National are practically a genre unto themselves. On Alligator , the first album that many of us noticed, they had a dark and driving intensity that didn't seem too far removed from, say, Interpol. As little as two albums ago, they seemed to share a lot of musical ideas with the Walkmen. These days, though, they've followed their inward journey, building on the things that made them special in the first place, turning their hungover throb into an intricate, debonair form of chamber-rock that ebbs and swells on its own tidal swagger. [...]
The title of Modern Vampires Of The City , the third album from Vampire Weekend, seems like it riffs on the band's name and on its members' status as sharp and witty New York men-about-town, guys who play punny word-games on their Twitter accounts and make cameo appearances on Girls and maintain none-too-serious Soundcloud side projects. If that were the case, it'd be perfectly in keeping with the band's beautifully manicured persona; no other band has come anywhere near their grasp of the Whit Stillman/Noah Baumbach universe of idle and well-heeled and overeducated young [...]
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Lana Del Rey – Young And Beautiful (No Pets Allowed Remix)
