Demonstrating yet again that us record geeks should give up attempts at socializing for good, this week s sees awkward resident robot Jeff interview mild-mannered main man Neil Halstead, following a five-song acoustic set from the former Slowdiver.
While he doesn t have anything terribly interesting to say, it s quite soothing to listen to chilled-out Halstead s voice as he speaks on a whole mess of topics, including Rachel Goswell s ear infection, producer Victor Van Vugt, a particularly memorable gig in the actual Mojave Desert, the allure of pedals and turning it up to 11 , his seaside dwelling place, and the possibility of a Slowdive reunion (not bloody likely, alas).
Plenty of fellow musical acts get love from Neil as well: Nick Cave, Primal Scream ( they just do it for the love of making music ), Camera Obscura ( my favorite record of the moment ), tour opener Brightblack Morning Light ( absolutely awesome ), and even Serena-Maneesh ( I really love them; I think they re great ).
Like Neil s chatter, his music is pleasant and calming, if hardly provocative. Here Halstead serenades us with Who Do You Love , Trying to Reach You , Hummingbird Song (Most Days) , High, Low and In Between , and Puzzles Like You .
Kudos to the for putting on a college show without the likes of Jason Mraz, Jack Johnson, and Kill Hannah.
including Joanna Newsom and her 11-piece orchestra, Bill Callahan (the man formerly known as ), Brother Ali, Ambulette, Hockey Night, and more. And did we mention that the entire thing is free? place at various venues around campus.
For a full artist roster, head . Wingdings? How about in red font, with no vowels, and/or bolded text only?
Sorry we re just not capable of that kind of customization. The band s forthcoming record, Friend Opportunity, is set for release on January for the album, and each one will be included separately in the album s package, giving listeners the option to send their favorite piece to the front. Just like Sonic Youth s Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star, remember?
store shelves, but fans are in for a mix n match treat upon purchasing the disc and bringing it home. cover, Shrigley has revealed two other paintings to Spin.com, and we have to say, they re right up Deerhoof s alley.
Meaning pretty effing neat-- especially the one that looks like some sort of beastiality is going on. Breaking news: loves him some Internet. We re talking codependent levels of love here, people.
How else can you explain why the genre-hopscotching rocker can t stop posting every random thing he lays to computer-tape these days? Dude s fast becoming the Jackson Pollock of rock in the cyber age, just splattering it all out there in an endless monsoon of unchecked creativity.
Which is, simultaneously, about as amazing and as awful as it sounds.
This time, along with updating his splash page with a new background ditty (a freeform jam that sees him ranting about witches again), Adams has uploaded even more new aural experiments to his -- and added wacky cover art. Including the , he s up to 11 new albums.
Alter egos DJ Reggie (fond of schizophrenic, lo-fi hip hop) and The Shit (fond of the rock) each contribute a host of new tracks , collected on albums like Holla Dayz Inn and Christmas Apocalypse.
Adams is still absolutely out of his mind, this time going on about Armageddon (the movie), Keira Knightley (if you re reading this, Keira, call Ryan!), and why unicorns aren t real ( nobody ever took a picture of them, see).
So what the hell s gotten into Adams lately?
Well here s a clue: as DJ Reggie wrote in a recent website posting, I have learned how to use a cool thing on my computer which basically allows me now to never ever stop recording music ever, which is going to be great news for all my adoring fans...
Those adoring fans will likely fill New York City s Town Hall to the brim next week as Adams plays three consecutive shows at the venue. I like . I like cute, happy penguins.
But like Jandek and Christina Aguilera, the two should never, ever meet. Ever. EVER.
Unfortunately, they did. And the result is the for Song of the Heart , Prince s musical contribution to the blockbuster family feel-good movie . Oh, Prince.
Every time you whip out something like Black Sweat and get me all hot-and-bothered again, you turn around and do something like this. Or . Stop it!
Unfortunately named yet pleasant sounding are kicking off December with a short tour. They will play with the Stills and Au Revoir Simone tonight in New York before joining in Washington, D.C.
on December 5 for most of the remaining dates.
The band have also graced us with a video for Pangea , a low-budget, stop motion affair that reminds us of the McDonald s breakfast commercials where people enter lying down and leave all refreshed and woken up from whatever magical ingredient is in the coffee, except that this video substitutes boys with guitars for McGriddles. Hey, if this indie rock thing falls through, Boris Yeltsin can always get into advertising!
The Changes have a few extracurricular activities outside of the tour, including recording a session and performing on on December 6.
Now that new rave is all the rage in the UK press, there s never been a better time to embrace an old rave touchstone: London electronic duo , who ve been making you gyrate for nearly 20 years now.
You ll probably want to keep your hips in check, however, while viewing the Underworld co-scored drama in movie theaters this winter.
, Underworld s Karl Hyde and Rick Smith teamed up with film composer Gabriel Yared to compose the score to the film, the latest from director Anthony Minghella (Cold Mountain, The English Patient).
The Underworld/Yared soundtrack hits shops December 5 via V2, while the corresponding film-- which stars Jude Law, Juliette Binoche, and some other pretty people enduring conflict, rising action, and resolution in London-- lands in New York and L.A.
cineplexes on December 9. The rest of us uncultured Americans will have to wait until January 19 to throw popcorn at it.
Given the setting, Law s presence, the poster portraits, the trailer s allusions to infidelity, and the press release s claim the film explores the darker side of relationships and human emotion , this thing looks an awful lot like Closer lite.
Check out the trailer and stream two soundtrack selections by tapping the links below.
We ve been jamming here in Abbey Road [studios] for a while now and having a really good time, producing some very different music, Hyde told Pitchfork late last year regarding Underworld s collaboration with Yared.
Minghella can dig it: Witnessing Gabriel, Karl and Rick in a room together was a revelation, said the director in the aforementioned press release.
Aw, group hug! performing at Boston s Middle East, as well as New York s Irving features include interviews with , , , , , , , and Dinosaur Jr. themselves.
DVD, due May 8 via , was directed by , a company run by Mascis brother-in-law . , Dinosaur Jr. plan to release a currently untitled album in Spring 2007.
The trio has spent the last month recording at Bisquiteen, Amherst, MA home studio. Mascis will produce the album, and will mix and engineer it (not produce, as incorrectly previously reported). Justin Pizzoferrato will help out with the engineering.
three-piece will make the rounds from February to April, but specific that Dinosaur Jr. are currently on the road in the U.S.
with UK for a handful of performances, some alongside Sonic Youth (like . Come mid-December, the boys will break for the holidays.
Eh, college?
Who needs it? Got a little extra cash from mowing lawns this summer? Or from, say, a massive inheritance, a game show victory, or the child labor racket?
If not, you may as well stop reading now, because the following is directed solely at the fiscally well-endowed.
The interweb, as it s known to do, has been positively buzzing today with reports of an online auction for an insanely, absurdly, preposterously, unfathomably, overwrought-modifier-of-your- choosing-ly rare slab of test-pressed acetate from the one and only Velvet Revolver.
Oh wait, scratch that-- the one and only .
Seems that while in NYC s Chelsea hood in September 2002, a serendipitous young man from Montreal stumbled across an original 1966 test-pressing of an early version of The Velvet Underground Nico, featuring alternative takes and mixes of nine of the uber-classic s ramshackle jams.
ARGUABLY THE RAREST MOST IMPORTANT ROCK N ROLL AND POP-ART ARTIFACT IN THE WORLD , as the auctioneer subtly puts it, the record has been for the to . It s believed to be , part of the storied , and .
Best of all, our little Chelsea crate-digger bought this thing for 75 cents. It s a captivating tale of dumb luck and triumph in the face of-- er, mostly dumb luck, and you may read about it in the auction listing .
As of press time, the record s going for , and the auction ends December 8 around dinnertime (central)-- so if you don t want some chump bidder named emoscreamo to get his/her grubby hands on the most precious piece of plastic since Barbra Streisand s fifth nose, .
Though MC, producer, poet, and Paris resident is working on his currently untitled fifth solo album, the third in his / trilogy (this one will go under the name The Domesticons ), his first priority at the moment is his art. Performance art, that is.
Ladd will perform as part of s at the BAM Harvey Theater from December 6-10.
The piece he will perform is the Still Life With Commentator: An Oratorio , a collaboration with composer and pianist (who, in the past, has worked with dead prez, DJ Spooky, and Amiri Baraka) and theater director Ibrahim Quraishi.
These performances will be the New York debut of Still Life With Commentator , which is an evening of propulsive music, spoken texts, digital interactivity, and movement performed by an eight-member ensemble of musicians and actors [and] a darkly lyrical and sometimes comic portrayal of our media-filtered encounters with war and atrocity, with songs such as Jon Stewart on Crossfire and Blog Mom s Anthem , according to a press release. John Darnielle, El-P Guest on Aesop Rock LP
Also, mystery project sort of maybe kinda announced When we saw chief John Darnielle rapping along to s lyrics at the MC s Pitchfork Music Festival set, we were rather pleased.
However, we were still a little surprised to find out that Darnielle will appear on Aesop s new album, which the rapper described as having a more diverse sound throughout the record than anything I ve done and lyrically is all stories in one way or another, in a recent update on his . He has titled the album None Shall Pass and says it is scheduled for a release on Def Jux sometime in the first half of 07.
None Shall Pass will feature production from Blockhead (seven tracks), Aesop himself (five tracks), El-P, and Rob Sonic (one track apiece).
DJ Big Wiz adds scratches and turntable trickery to every song (some a lot some a little, but every one), and other voices you will hear on the record in one form or another and some more than once (be it in verse, talking, singing, yodeling, ad-libbing, chorus-ing, etc.) include: El-P, Cage, Camutao, Breeze Brewin, Rob Sonic, John Darnielle. One of these things is not like the other / One of these things just doesn t belong.
..
Aesop added, Most of [the album] is recorded, though a few [tracks] are still a bit in demo form and need some fine tuning and re-kicking.
All of this is with the exception of this me-and-El joint, which I m currently writing. I had to wait til he was done with his [album]. I ghost wrote all his shit for it.
No I m kidding. I didn t do that. Combine all that with whatever last minute song(s) I write that I deem a necessity for the record (which usually somehow happens starting the day after you should have stopped working).
.. Mixing in Jan.
or Feb. probably.
The Damien Rice poster behind drummer Brann Dailor as he talks about the band s activities (shows, interviews, eating bad Indian food) in the first segment of this video tour diary from the group s current makes for a pretty hilarious juxtaposition, but that isn t even close to the funniest part of the video.
That would be Dailor s tongue-in-cheek insistence that Mastodon s partying consists of eating cookies and drinking milk, followed by a bartender telling a minute-long story to bassist Troy Sanders explaining how Mastodon got him fired from London s Crowbar. The guy doesn t seem the slightest bit mad, probably because he s as charmed by those friendly Georgia accents as we are. Do you have a news tip for us?
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