It’s pretty hard to believe that any Pitchfork approved indie band would ever see the top of a Billboard chart, but Arcade Fire did it this week with their third outing The Suburbs. 156,000 copies were sold, which is about 1.56 million in 2010 indie terms.
The band has also announced a barrage of tour dates. I was one of the lucky few to get pre-sale tix on their site, but check Ticketmaster if you missed out on the first round.
Love him or hate him, this guy sure knows how to make an entrance. Isn’t this what we want from our celebrities? Drama, raw talent, controversy, tragedy, boldness… Kanye West is a blend of all those things, and I’ll be buying his records until those ingredients change. So it’s only par for the course that Kanye would jump up on a folding table and lay down new songs acappella at a venue like Facebook.
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.
