Tagged: topstories

We got our first real taste of the new Queens Of The Stone Age album, ...Like Clockwork , a couple weeks ago, when video emerged of the band playing single " My God Is The Sun " at Lollapalooza Brazil. Today, that the studio version of that song got its official debut. It's a pretty straightforward rocker, with a hard-charging rhythm and sharp, slashing guitars. It seems a bit minor to qualify as the lead single from the band's first new album in six years (and their first for Matador), but it represents a welcome [...]

Given the amount of press that Jessie Ware has garnered over the past few months, it seems kind of insane that her breakthrough debut album, Devotion , is only just now seeing a U.S release. When the album does appear (on April 16th) it will arrive with two new tracks (a "Wildest Moments" remix and a new track called "Imagine It Was Us") and a brief run of U.S. tour dates. If there is any justice in the world, the extra push for Devotion will bring Ware the kind of megasucess that she rightly deserves. But even [...]

The National have announced the existence (and the extensive guest list ) of Trouble Will Find Me , their new album, and they've played a bunch of its songs live. But this morning marks the first time we've heard a final studio song from the LP. Its called "Demons," and it sounds very much like a National song - a moody, slow-building, intricately orchestrated depression-anthem with a deep-baritone Matt Berninger chorus that already sounds pretty indelible on first listen. Listen to the song, paired with time-lapse video of an artist drawing the Trouble [...]

MCD have announced additional acts and confirmed the current running order for the inaugural Longitude festival. Foals , Django Django and Jake Bugg will now precede Phoenix on the Friday, while Villagers , Local Natives and Kodaline are set to support Vampire Weekend and Kraftwerk on the final night. Also joining the Marley Park festival are the Maccabees, Laura Mvula, Wolf Alice, Gold Panda, Dutch Uncles, Matt Cotby, Marcus Foster, King Krule, Japandroids, Hudson Taylor, East India Youth, London Grammar, [...]

Welcome to this week’s installment of The Week In Music Writing. Every Sunday, we’re gathering an unranked list of five recommended music-related pieces from the past seven days. We’re bound to miss an excellent article from time-to-time, so definitely leave links to others in the comments. This week, check out five pieces from Style.com, SPIN, Pitchfork, Billboard Biz, and Maura . "True Grimes: The stranger-than-fiction story of the girl rewriting the sound of pop music from a laptop somewhere in Western Canada" by Jonathan Durbin for Style.com As Grimes [...]

When Tool headlined 20092s Lollapalooza in Chicago, they were the most popular act on the bill by several light years. Hours before they started playing, people started filling up the field around their stage, politely ignoring whoever happened to be on before them. That year, Animal Collective, fresh off of Merriweather Post Pavilion , were the darlings of virtually every music critic in America, but when their set on an adjacent stage went a minute or two over and threatened to cut into Tool's time, that crowd got tense . And when Tool came on: Instant rapture. A [...]

Rock and roll has never lacked for singular characters, and amongst that cavalcade of the insanely great and greatly insane, Lewis Allen "Lou" Reed takes second chair to nobody. Lou is an artist who tries you, beguiles you, dares you to dislike him, wins you over, makes you laugh, and expands your imagination. His multitudes contain multitudes. He is baldly transgressive and romantically nostalgic for bygone eras. He is cynical, belligerent, and arrogant, and also capable of articulating stunning empathy toward society's greatest outcasts. He can seem like the smartest songwriter in the world in one breath and Spinal Tap stupid in the next. He has been imitated [...]

You know how I've been threatening to get weird with this column, to start including late-night performances and whatever other random bits of music-related video that might find their way on this site? This is the week the universe decided to call my bluff, since the one of the best pieces of music-related video, if not the best, was Deerhunter's broken-down and instantly iconic performance of "Monomania" on Fallon , a performance piece done with more flair and attention to detail than most music videos. But I still made a list of five music videos. Inertia [...]

DJ Koze is part techno shaman, part dancefloor therapist. In his earlier years the Germany-based musician was a hip-hop DJ (more recently, a DMC competition title-holder) and uses his technical skills behind the turntable to turn his brand of fantastical, dreamy techno into subtle, nuanced emotional storylines. "I prefer it when music becomes slower and sexier the longer it goes," he once explained. Sometimes sadder, too. With the recent release of his LP Amygdala - named after the part of your brain that controls fear, anxiety, and depression - Koze has reached beyond his bag of tricks for [...]

On "Raging Lung," a little more than halfway through the Knife's gargantuan new album Shaking The Habitual , a few familiar words show up: "What a difference, what a difference a little difference would make." Those words are familiar because Guy Picciotto groaned them on Fugazi's "Blueprint," a track from Repeater , my favorite album ever. With apologies to the little kid rocking the bootleg T-shirt in the Matthew McConaughey arthouse movie Mud , this is the most unexpected Fugazi reference I've come across lately. It's unexpected because the Knife have spent an entire career building a [...]

• Rabid Records - Shaking The Habitual

The soundtrack for new Tom Cruise sci-fi vehicle with original score by M832s Anthony Gonzalez and composer Joseph Trapanese is available to stream in full. We've already gotten a preview of the cosmic concoction via instrumental " StarWaves " and its title track featuring vocals from Norwegian songstress Susanne Sundfør. Check out the album below. Read More...

• M83 - Oblivion: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

The January announcement that the Postal Service would be reuniting for this year's Coachella has been followed by snowballing PS news: a Give Up reissue, the celebration of the album's 10-year anniversary, a full reunion tour, replete with album guest Jenny Lewis. As such, it's the rare indie-rock enthusiast who is not plagued with Ben Gibbard On The Brain. But 2013 is not just a big year for Gibbard's digital side project. In October, Death Cab For Cutie's Transatlanticism turns a decade old. That album is arguably the record that transformed DCFC from Barsuk all-stars into [...]

Sometimes I think I hate Silkworm. Firewater , which is largely regarded as their greatest album in a catalog that's full of as many great moments as overlooked ones, is a difficult, confrontational, awkward, lumbering bible for being a good drunk and living well in shitty circumstances, or failing that, at least coping with them enough not to go crazy. It oscillates wildly from of-the-moment grunge pastiche to sloppy but often transcendent guitar solos, from flat vocals about life and death to flat vocals about the ethics of being drunk. The album cover looks bargain bin ready, a [...]

At a time when so many new bands explode out of the gate on the strength of a debut EP and a wave of Internet buzz, only to fizzle into the painful obscurity of no longer being the hot new thing by the time they get around to making a sophomore album, the success of Phoenix is a ray of hope. Though they'd achieved a fair amount of success and fair to favorable reviews for most of their nearly decade-long career, the band didn't properly blow up until they released album number four, 20092s monster hit Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix [...]

The first time the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played Baltimore, they played first on a four-band Ottobar bill, one headlined by skronk-punk out-of-towners Milemarker and Arab On Radar. The only locals on the bill were League of Death, the mutant hardcore band whose two-man core went onto become the two-man core of Double Dagger. A year or two later, I interviewed the incipient Double Dagger, and Nolen Strahls, Double Dagger's singer, was still fuming about how much he hated the Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Her whole thing, like, 'Oh, look at me, I'm so crazy because I'm spilling beer on [...]

Sometime in the second half of 2011, I took a chance and ordered a number of cassettes, sound-unheard, from a new cassette-only record label that had made an announcement on a black-metal message board saying they were ready to start shipping their first batch of releases. It wasn't a huge risk: Priced at five or six bucks apiece, it seemed like a good way to hear some new music and support underground metal. I picked up tapes (each pressed in a limited edition of 100 copies) from Aksumite , SADOS , Obliti Devoravit , and A Pregnant [...]

• Stereogum - A Pregnant Light - "Death My Hanging Doorway"
• Stereogum - A Pregnant Light - "Live To Tell"
• Stereogum - A Pregnant Light - "Skin Code"

Credit Bradford Cox with knowing how to seize a moment. Last month, Cox's band Deerhunter announced the impending release of their new album Monomania , recorded on eight-tracks in Brooklyn earlier this year. Last night, they posted a stream of the album's title track, a supremely catchy piece of dessicated but jangly garage rock that devolves into a feedback tape-loop freakout before sputtering to a close. And soon afterward, the band played the song on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon , turning in the sort of performance that's going to linger around in our [...]

Seminal post-punk band Echo & the Bunnymen are set for their first Dublin show in two years with the news that they are to headline this year's Camden Crawl . The Scouse legends, led by Ian McCulloch, will perform at the Button Factory on Saturday, 4th May as part of the festival which takes places on the May bank holiday weekend (3rd-5th May) this year. Also confirmed for 2013 are nu-rave stalwarts New Young Pony Club , who will now perform at the event's launch party at Whelan's on [...]

When people describe Olympia, Washington, they usually talk about it as a deep-wooded, weeded-out hippie enclave, but I'm not sure they get across how much of a deep-wooded, weeded-out hippie enclave it really is. I spent a week there with friends nearly a decade ago, and by the time I flew back to Baltimore, I felt like I'd met the whole town. Everyone I met had some kind of menial, possibly dehumanizing job - kitchen work, phone sex - but none of those jobs seemed to run their lives the way jobs ran people's lives back east. I [...]

The cover art for Small Black’s forthcoming sophomore album is a pretty clever indicator of what kind of subject matter the record has in store. The photo, created by Dutch artist Scarlett Hooft Graafland, features a naked man and woman attempting to embrace while perched on top of a ladder. Lurking in the void beneath them is an alligator, presumably waiting to eat them. It’s a fitting visual metaphor for a record that seems primarily concerned with examining the myriad ways that the modern world strives to keep us from properly connecting with each other (or something like [...]