Was Mia Farrow an obstacle to peace in Darfur?
Dream-pop, nature and nostalgia is in, raging against the machine is out. Just when did indie rock get so laidback?
The US music blogosphere seems to have been turfed of late. The general terrain has returned to nature: gone are the tacky, post-Justice mirrored surfaces of two years ago and in their place are lo-fidelity hillocks and dream-pop pastures.
Just take a look at the names of the buzzy bands of the past few months: from the mountains (Mountain Man, Mount McKinley, Speck Mountain), through to the woods (Tall Firs, Woods), and then down to the sea (Beach House, Wavves, Surfer Blood, Best Coast, Beach Fossils, Coasting). There's a Rainbow Bridge to a Summer Camp, and Silk Flowers and Blue Roses in High Places. And all of it set utterly outside the city, outside work, outside the America of healthcare debates and ongoing wars.
Their fascination with the pastoral and apolitical is augmented by the other major strain in the US underground: nostalgia. With their intoxicatingly naive, redolent and melancholic music, the likes of Ducktails, Julian Lynch and James Ferraro retreat from the realities of modern life to the rose-tinted and half-remembered plains of their childhood, scattered with the imagery of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Global Hypercolour T-shirts, and red Lamborghinis.
So why is this happening? Kevin Drew of Canadian band Broken Social Scene articulated the current difficulty in songwriting in a recent interview with Pitchfork, saying that post-Bush, "now we're in the 'yes, we...
1. Murderer by Low from Drums and Guns
2. Hotel Freund by Black to Comm from Alphabet 1968
3. If you go away by Scott Walker from Scott 3
4. Ancestors by Gonjasufi from 2010 from Warp Records
5. Turn it on (instrumental) by Mark Pritchard + Steve Spacek
6. These Words ft. dbridge by Martyn from Great Lengths
7. I think UR a Contra by Vampire Weekend from Contra
Thom
Jamie Lidell, the celebrated singer and electronic musician known for his unique, soulful voice and funky, improvisational live performances, has enlisted an all-star group of collaborators for his upcoming album "Compass," due May 18 on Warp Records.
Homepage photo by Autumn de Wilde
Update: In other Stripes news today, the band and its management's Third Man Records site is claiming that an ad that ran during the Super Bowl for the Air Force reserve is a re-recorded, unauthorized version of "Fell in Love With a Girl". Go to their site for a side-by-side comparison and the Stripes' understandable anger.
Chroma is a contemporary ballet by choreographer Wayne McGregor that features music by the White Stripes as interpreted by an orchestra. The award-winning piece debuted at London's Royal Opera House in November 2006, and now it's coming to Toronto as part of the National Ballet of Canada's forthcoming season. (Via CBC News.)
Chroma features five pairs in flesh-colored outfits artfully moving to White Stripes songs like "The Hardest Button to Button" and "Blue Orchid", according to a Guardian review of the London show.
The CBC reports that Jack White has been invited to the Canadian premiere, which takes place in November. And the Stripes love them some Canada, so a Jack sighting does not seem completely out of the question. Head over to the National Ballet of Canada's site for more info.
Thanks to reader Damien Ferland for the tip.
1. Murderer by Low from Drums and Guns
2. Hotel Freund by Black to Comm from Alphabet 1968
3. If you go away by Scott Walker from Scott 3
4. Ancestors by Gonjasufi from 2010 from Warp Records
5. Turn it on (instrumental) by Mark Pritchard + Steve Spacek
6. Homenagem A Unios do Viradouro by Macunaima from Sambas de Enredo 2000 Ate 2006
Thom
Photo by Napoleon Habeica
During a BBC radio session last week, chart-topping indie rock band Vampire Weekend played a cover of Rancid's 1995 pop-punk hit "Ruby Soho". (Via Abeano.) If you think about this for more than five seconds, it makes a lot of sense. And, unsurprisingly, the cover is a relatively tucked-in alternative to the spiky original. Check it out here.
As Abeano also points out, Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij compiled a mini-mix for Annie Mac's Radio 1 show, featuring Vampire Weekend's "Taxi Cab", the 6ths' "As You Turn to Go", and a Vampire Weekend remix of Lykke Li's "Dance Dance Dance". Listen to that over at Abeano as well.
If you've ever seen electro-soul whiz Jamie Lidell live, you know the guy can deliver ample amounts of ecstatic joy. It just feels good to be in the same room as him. So it makes a lot of sense that talented people including Beck, Feist, Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor, Daniel Rossen, and Chris Bear, Wilco's Pat Sansone, legendary R&B drummer James Gadson, soul belter Nikka Costa, Beck keyboardist Brian LeBarton, and producer/songwriter Gonzales would want to help out on Lidell's new album. That album is titled Compass and due out May 18 courtesy of Warp.
This isn't the first time Lidell has worked with Feist (he contributed to The Reminder sessions) or Beck, who got Jamie (and Feist and Wilco and Gadson) to sing and play on his most recent Record Club covers project. Compass was recorded at Hudson Studios in Los Angeles (where Beck and Lidell teamed up to write and produce some songs), Hollywood's Ocean Way Recording, New York City, and Feist's ranch in Ontario's Niagara Escarpment (where Feist helped write and sang background vocals, while Chris Taylor did some producing, mixing, and bass clarinet playing). Expect dates for a full-band Lidell tour soon.
Stream the album's title track below:
The White Stripes front man and his latest project, the Black Belles, should beware! Rock history is littered with manager-producers who got a little too hands-on
Alongside a wonderful version of Amy Winehouse's You Know I'm No Good by rockabilly legend Wanda Jackson, the latest batch of releases from Jack White's Third Man record label contains a minor mystery. Released in shops today on the usual extremely limited seven-inch is a record by The Black Belles, a group about whom little is known except that they were assembled by White, feature Nashville burlesque model Erin Belle and have a fondness for slightly medieval-looking wide-brimmed hats. As well as recruiting the Belles, Jack produced and wrote one of the songs on the record (the other is a cover of The Knickerbockers' great 1960s Merseybeat homage, Lies) and directed the accompanying video.
What is clear, however, is that The Black Belles mark another stage in Jack White's strange career. After being an upholsterer, actor and mogul (Third Man is the umbrella name for an organisation that includes a record company, pressing plant, photo studio and design agency in a building in downtown Nashville) it appears that White is now trying on the role of svengali for size.
Both White and the Belles themselves would do well to take a lesson from rock history, the pages of which are littered with stories of what happens when the manager-producer gets...
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Hey gang. Did you see this little blurb about us that is in Rolling Stone this month? Pretty cool, right?
Yeah, except for one thing - the actual lyric is "let IT BE on a stretcher if I get carried away," not "let ME PEE on a stretcher if I get carried away," even though that is funnier. Hopefully that bodes well for the critical response to the abundance of actual scatalogical references on the record. Anyway, just wanted to clear that up. Heh heh... let me pee.
Yr friend,
Patrick