With Sonic Youth on
indefinite hiatus, the band members are keeping themselves busy with other projects. Thurston Moore is playing
solo shows centered around his latest solo album, the Beck-produced
Demolished Thoughts, with a band he jokingly(?) referred to this past Friday night as "
Dush Krew" in honor of his crush on actress Eliza Dushku. Kim Gordon recently
designed clothes for French brand Surface to Air, is currently playing shows with Bill Nace as part of the noise improvisation duo
Body/Head, and was kind enough recently to share
her favorite taco recipe. Lee Ranaldo is poised to release his first song-oriented
solo album on Matador Records; he debuted
the music video for the first single ("Off the Wall") today on his website. Steve Shelley played drums on Lee's new album, recently
collaborated with Pete Nolan of Magik Markers (Sonic Youth's most
interesting protégés) on Nolan's side-project Spectre Folk, and is currently drumming for Chicago's
Disappears whose
new album is out via Kranky records in March. Meanwhile, Jim O'Rourke is preparing to curate the All Tomorrow's Parties
I'll Be Your Mirror Festival in Tokyo this April, where he will also perform his 1999 album
Eureka in full with a 12-piece band.
posted by Houyhnhnm
on Feb 7, 2012 -
53 comments
"We were so dumbfounded at the noise that was coming out of our instruments it took us a while to get a handle on what we were hearing, let alone thinking in terms of how any records would be structured." Music journalist Ned Raggett assembles the oral history of British experimental rock group
Disco Inferno's five EPs.
posted by Houyhnhnm
on Jan 23, 2012 -
17 comments
Screaming Females are a 3-person self described "rock/rock/rock" band from New Jersey featuring Jarrett Dougherty on drums, King Mike Abbate on bass, and Marissa Paternoster on guitar and vocals. They're not incredibly famous and they're probably not on the cusp of a string of number 1 hits, but they put on a
mean show and they've got a
new album in a couple of months if rock/rock/rock should happen to be your thing.
[more inside]
posted by sandswipe
on Jan 17, 2012 -
33 comments
...there’s some desperation to this junk version of “Dancing in the Street,” with both parties trying to affirm their A-1 celebrity status. One of the more pernicious effects of the whole Live Aid/Farm Aid/Band Aid spectacle was to cement the hierarchy of the “legend” rock acts and a smaller tier of anointed successors from the slightly-younger generation (Tom Petty, Sting, Dire Straits, U2). It was the height of the Boomer Counter-Reformation. The late Eighties would see the over-publicized returns of everyone from Steve Winwood to the Monkees to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, to a revamped George Harrison to a MOR version of Pink Floyd to Robbie Robertson pretending that he was Peter Gabriel (a version of Gabriel who couldn’t sing) to an all-star Yes and a Zeppelin-sampling Robert Plant, culminating in the return of the “revitalized” Stones in 1989, the touring company now reincorporated into a gleaming multinational. As Marcello Carlin said back when Popular covered this single: “Suddenly we were once again reminded who in pop and rock mattered and who didn’t…With their massacre of “Dancing In The Street,” Bowie and Jagger seemed to relish rubbing it in.“
-
The Annotated Jagger/Bowie "Dancing in the Street"
posted by anazgnos
on Jan 17, 2012 -
180 comments
It Nova Scotian Rich Aucoin's video for "It" directed by Noah Pink. SLYT worth clicking on. You may recognize a few scenes.
posted by Ironmouth
on Jan 7, 2012 -
16 comments
After 30 years, Peter Frampton had been living without 2 critical pieces of his legacy: 1) his hair and 2) the Les Paul that he used in Humble Pie and on the (in)famous Frampton Comes Alive album. But now Frampton can rest easy, as one of those things
has been returned to him.
posted by spicynuts
on Jan 4, 2012 -
110 comments
New Year's Eve is fast approaching, and for lots of folks that means... drinking. Plenty of drinking. And since there's no shortage of singers and songwriters who've had a little something to say about that particular topic, maybe some of the following tunes can serve as an appropriate soundtrack to your own joyous (or not?) imbibing of spirits. For example, there's... Jimmy Liggins with his succinct rendition of
Drunk, and there's...
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Dec 30, 2011 -
67 comments
Back in Town is a song by
Izia, a French rock band fronted by and named for Izïa Higelin. Even though she comes from a showbiz family, the band initially found little favor on French radio. But after a string of
blistering live performances all over France, the self-titled first album became a hit and won a couple of awards at the prestigious Victoire de la Musique ceremony, where Izia performed the song
Let Me Alone. There are a bunch of live performances online, including of
Life is Going Down, a cover of AC/DC's
Touch Too Much and a
duet with Iggy Pop. This past November, sophomore album So Much Trouble was released, featuring such songs as the
title track,
On Top of the World, and my favorite,
Baby.
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 16, 2011 -
9 comments
On August 19, 1969, the (prime time ABC version of the) Dick Cavett show featured several popular musicians.
pt 1 -
pt 2 -
pt 3 -
pt 4 -
pt 5 The Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby and Stephen Stills had rushed back from a show they did at a festival. Jimi Hendrix couldn't get back in time, but
appeared later. The third guest, Joni Mitchell, skipped Woodstock to make sure she was on time for
this broadcast, but a month later she wrote
a cool song based on what she saw on TV and heard from friends.
[more inside]
posted by msalt
on Dec 7, 2011 -
16 comments
The most vivid figure in Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields's End of the Century was the least articulate and most archetypal of the Ramones: Johnny, the right-wing prole whose hard-ass sense of style the others nutballed and softened and accelerated and above all imitated. ... Exciting and absolutely right though their '70s sets always were, the film establishes that they kept the faith live till the end, lifted by Joey's goofy dedication and powered by the chords Johnny thrashed out like they were why he was alive. As unyielding in his aesthetic principles as he was in everything else, this reactionary was an avant-gardist in spite of himself. -
Robert Christgau
posted by Trurl
on Nov 9, 2011 -
17 comments
After 44 years, The Beach Boys'
SMiLE, the
most famous unreleased album of all time, has finally been released.
Even at its most remorselessly upbeat, the Beach Boys' music was marked by an ineffable sadness – you can hear it in the cascading tune played by the woodwind during Good Vibrations's verses – but on Smile, the sadness turned into something far weirder. All the talk of Wilson writing teenage symphonies to God – and indeed the sheer sumptuousness of the end results – tends to obscure what a thoroughly eerie album Smile is. Until LSD's psychological wreckage began washing up in rock via Skip Spence's Oar and Syd Barrett's The Madcap Laughs, artists tactfully ignored the dark side of the psychedelic experience. But it's there on Smile...
The first of a ten-part web series on the making of the album and the new reissue has been posted on youtube, featuring new interviews and rare archival footage. The full-length 2-CD version is
streaming at AOL.
posted by anazgnos
on Nov 1, 2011 -
162 comments
There's a new crop of Australian bands that take inspiration from old blues, but twist the music in a strange fashion. The trend may have started with
CW Stoneking (Jungle Blues,
Love Me Or Die), who channeled the old bluesmen despite being a
young man. Its continued on to Sydney's
Snowdroppers, who started out as a
house band for burlesque shows and kept that dirty sensibility up with songs like
Rosemary ,
Do The Stomp, and their signature tune
Good Drugs, Bad Women (lyrics NSW). Frequent Snowdroppers touring partners
Gay Paris add a Southern horror twist (
House Fire In the Origami District, My First Wife? She Was A Foxqueen! ) and an antic stage energy. Some of the bands relay on gimmicks, like Adelaide's
The Beards, who sing about how
you should consider having sex with a bearded man and point out that
if your dad doesn't have a beard, you've got two moms. The Beards recently performed at the
World Beard and Mustache Championships. Horror-country-rockers
Graveyard Train have picked up the torch dropped when Sydney psychobilly masters
Zombie Ghost Train (
Graveyard Queen) disbanded. Graveyard Train tunes like
Mummy,
Ballad for Beelzebub ,
Tall Shadow and
Dead Folk Dance combine cheerful Misfits horror theming with stompy country. Most of the singers from this loose scene are joining forces in Sydney this week to
pay tribute to Tom Waits.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn
on Oct 4, 2011 -
32 comments
A lady, back in 1957, addressing the camera in an elegant evening gown, fit for some grand society ball, had this message for the oldsters: "Now, whatever you think of rock and roll, I think you have to keep a nice, open mind about what the young people go for." She then proceeded to announce Buddy Holly and the Crickets, who obligingly performed their hit
Peggy Sue for the ballroom dancers' pleasure and edification. That same Buddy Holly would've been quite the oldster himself, had he lived to see today, his 75th birthday. So, if you have a little time on your hands today, you might like to learn more about Buddy by viewing
The Real Buddy Holly Story 1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9 and
10. Cause, hey, Buddy was not only one of the most unique and vital voices of the early days of rock'n'roll, but he wore the same glasses that every other hipster in Berlin is wearing
right now.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Sep 7, 2011 -
60 comments
Live from 1999, it's
the unaired pilot for The Jon Brion Show! With special guests Paul F. Tompkins, Grant-Lee Phillips, Mark Oliver "E" Everett, Greg Behrendt, Elliot Smith, Rickie Lee Jones, Robyn Hitchcock, Cheap Trick, and Mary Lynn Rajskub.
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Sep 6, 2011 -
13 comments
Modest Mouse play a 25 minute set in September 2001 in front of Criminal Records in Atlanta. The songs they play are Paper Thin Walls, Third Planet, Trailer Trash, Lives, Diggin' Holes (later released as an Ugly Casanova track) and I Came as a Rat.
posted by Kattullus
on Aug 31, 2011 -
14 comments
"I decided I wanted to buy the Dorsey Brothers’ mambo record. However, I did not have the required 39 cents." Over at
The Comics Journal, cartoonist
Kim Deitch (previously), son of animator Gene Deitch
(previously), has been posting a wonderful, rambling memoir about the music in his life.
Part 1: The Dorseys and Beyond "Watch for Russ Columbo playing some hot violin in
this one."
Part 2: An Early Education - Jazz, folk and the ’40s - Alan Lomax, Jelly Roll Morton and jazz fandom
Part 3: Our hero stumbles on the birth of television, specifically,
music on televisionPart 4: Rock ‘n Roll - "
For a lot of Americans it was like the whole damn African jungle had landed in the middle of Ed Sullivan’s stage"
Part 5: Rocking Forward [more inside]
posted by mediareport
on Aug 7, 2011 -
3 comments
A corpus analysis of rock harmony [PDF] -
The analyses were encoded using a recursive notation, similar to a context-free grammar, allowing repeating sections to be encoded succinctly. The aggregate data was then subjected to a variety of statistical analyses. We examined the frequency of different chords
and chord transitions ... Other results concern the frequency of different root motions, patterns of
co-occurrence between chords, and changes in harmonic practice across time. More information, analysis, and explanation
here.
posted by Wolfdog
on Jul 29, 2011 -
33 comments
Chuck Klosterman
breaks down Edgar Winter Group's 1973 Old Grey Whistle Test performance of Frankenstein. Unlike
zzazazz's previous post, there is no bonus, because
"Edgar Winter's finest nine minutes" is its own crazy good reward.
posted by davejay
on Jul 27, 2011 -
82 comments
"I was unaware, in my awe of adults playing folk songs, that they would push me into a different world altogether, a world in which only some would ultimately be deemed worthy to publicly perform music: those who were ‘musically talented’. And that talent was determined by one’s ability to imitate, precisely, music written by others."
How I Learned To Play Guitar
posted by mippy
on Jul 26, 2011 -
48 comments
Music fans have known for a long time that Ian MacKaye's post-hardcore group
Fugazi and the members of Shaolin-based hip-hop collective
The Wu-tang Clan were really just two sides of the same awesome-sauce coin. So enter the mash-ups of -- wait for it --
WUGAZI! [more inside]
posted by bardic
on Jul 6, 2011 -
27 comments
Chuck Klosterman
breaks down Led Zeppelin's 1979 Knebworth Festival performance of In the Evening. Bonus: Led Zeppelin when they were
crazy good in 1970.
posted by zzazazz
on Jun 29, 2011 -
43 comments
Such Hawks Such Hounds explores the music and musicians of the American hard rock underground circa 1970-2007, focusing on the psychedelic and '70s proto-metal-derived styles that have in recent years formed a rich body of unclassifiable sounds.
posted by mhjb
on Jun 28, 2011 -
17 comments
Star of the popular sitcom
30 Rock, Tracy Morgan, allegedly told a Nashville audience
during his comedy routine on June 4 that " gay is a choice," "there is no way a woman could love and have sexual desire for another woman, that's just a woman pretending because she hates a .... man", and that "gay was something kids learn from the media and programming, and that bullied kids should just bust some @## and beat those other little fuckers that bully them, not whine about it. "
Truth Wins Out, a self-described "a non-profit organization that fights anti-LGBT religious extremism" is calling for Morgan to respond to the allegations
posted by roomthreeseventeen
on Jun 9, 2011 -
230 comments
People, Let Me Get This Off My Chest is a 65 minute compilation of stage banter by Paul Stanley of KISS.
Paul repeatedly reminds the Army that they’re getting their money’s worth... , that the next tune is the first time they’ve played it on tour, that he was talking backstage to someone... about what kind of alcohol that people in the area like to drink, that they’re just getting started, and that he’s got an “uzi of ooze” in his pants.
posted by Trurl
on Jun 4, 2011 -
69 comments
