The premise of Interview Magazine has stayed the same since the days of Warhol - it’s all about matchmaking. Most publications focus solely on the subject, but Interview works to keep the art of dialogue alive by placing as much thought into the selection of the interviewer as the interviewee. For this pairing, long time critic and host of KCRW’s The Treatment, Elvis Mitchell, sits down for an afternoon with the one and only Jay-Z. Click here to witness the magic.
After missing the Echoplex “warm up” gig, I’m excited to get my Thom Yorke fix on Sunday night at Coachella. Not quite as intimate, but I’ll take what I can get. The solo project, billed as Thom Yorke????, now has an official band name - Atoms For Peace. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a track name off The Eraser. They also have a couple dates before Coachella, if you can’t make the festival. Flying Lotus will be opening all US dates.
Kanye West is never short on words. That combined with his desire to effect every element of popular culture, has made him a really great blogger. His site is now a hub for art, fashion, music and of course all his amazing rants. Unfortunately, the blog design was a bit of an eye soar, but now he’s switched locations and completely revamped the look. It reminds me of a gallery wall (aka blank) - allowing the photos to stand on their own. Check it out here. There are some hidden gems under the white background if you move your cursor around.
Joanna Newson is finally back, and she brought with her a 2 hr masterpiece. Have On on Me is chock-full of stunning vocal melodies and an array of instrumental accompaniment. The 3LP epic came out this week, and can be streamed in its entirety over at NPR.
Joanna will also be doing a small loop around the East coast before heading to Europe. Check out her tour dates here.
What happens when you mix the production of Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse with the visual genius of David Lynch? Well, unless you’re a fan of bit torrent you’ll probably never know. An audio/visual collaboration between the three masterminds (with a host of music guests: Flaming Lips, Shins, Julian Casablancas, Jason Lytle etc…) is sitting on the shelf at EMI caught up in “licensing issues,” and will almost certainly never see the light of day.
Because the project incorporated a 100 page hardback book of photos by David Lynch, the book and a blank CD-R (to put the stolen copy of the album on) are currently being sold. Good luck hunting down the album.
Dirty Projectors played an intimate apartment show in Brooklyn in 2007, showcasing their reworking of Black Flag’s Rise Above. Above is a video from that night.
Sunset Rubdown give us a taste from their new album, Dragonslayer,with a free track on LaLa called “Idiot Heart.” You can find that and the mp3 at Pitchfork.
I Guess I’m Floating has collected all the Grizzly Bear content on Youtube. Get your fill here.
My Bloody Valentine will play the El Rey Theater tonight as a warm up for their Coachella show this weekend. Photos and review to follow.
Randolph Chabot’s career is starting to look a lot like that of Conor Oberst. There are the obvious connections with their early musical starts (Randolph is 22), and midwest background; however, it’s more their approach to the creation of music as a solitary experiment. Chabot says that by 17 he’d written hundreds of songs, trying to find his sound. Maybe one day we’ll hear those early demos like we did with Bright Eyes.
I first discovered Keepers as an eMusic exclusive, and couldn’t believe how varied and flexible Deastro was in songwriting. You can grab a couple free tracks on his label site here. I didn’t hear much chatter online, but it felt like only time before this home recording blossomed into a musical career. Deastro’s first official LP, Moondagger, might be the release that does just that.
The first single “Parallelogram” does a good job of expanding on the concepts and sounds of his home recordings. When asked about the new record, Chabot references “a dream about a prince, a kingdom, an evil King of Darkness, and a search for the mythical “Moondagger,” the bearer of which wields ultimate power.” Sounds about right. You can grab this first song here, but you’ll have to wait until June before you hear the rest of the album.
South by Southwest (March 18th– 22nd) is one of the largest musical festivals in the U.S. and features what seems like a bazillion musical acts from around the globe. The bands perform on over eighty stages in downtown Austin, Texas, all hoping to generate buzz and make it big in the coming year… unless of course they’ve already made it.
To call is overwhelming is an understatement. I counted about 100 bands JUST listed under the letter A. To help wade through all that madness, here are a couple of links with great pre-festival coverage.
NPR listened to more than 1,000 SXSW bands. Then they whittled those acts down to their favorite 100 songs. You can stream or view that list here. You can also download a 10-song sampler.
I just noticed that Madvillainy came out over four years ago. That makes me feel old, so I can’t imagine how it makes MF DOOM feel. No one seems to really know where the masked rapper disappeared to over the past five years. He released a somewhat boring Danger Doom w/ Danger Mouse, and did a little touring (rumored to be awful and potentially not even him), but nothing to compare to the grandeur of Madvillain.
None of that matters anymore, because DOOM is back (minus the MF) with a new LP titled Born Like This, and potentially a return to form. From the two tracks floating around the web, “That’s That” and “Ballskin,” it’s definitely the DOOM we all know and love - full of inside pop and culture references, short blasts of raps and no regard for chorus. The album will drop on March 23rd. Pitchfork just reported that Thom Yorke will be remixing “Gazillion Ear” as a bonus track on the album. Sweet.
After a much buzzed about appetizer EP, Harlem Shakes finally returns for the main course. It’s called Technicolor Health, features kickass album cover art and some lineup changes. “Strictly Game,” the full length track streaming on their Myspace page starts off guns blazing from all directions. You get thick static, saxophone, vocal harmonies, old school Modest Mouse guitar hammering all coming together into a lean, kinetic tune speaking of how “this will be a better year.” I think Lexy is right about that.
Techincolor Health will be released on March 24th through Gigantic Music.
