We ve got another live one for ya. Pull out those summer music festival maps and add Cincinnati, Ohio s to the list. From June 23-25, the not-so-lil Midwestern town will be home to a big fat weekend of rock (and electro and hip-hop).
Taking place right on the Ohio River at Sawyer Point Waterfront Park, the brand new fest features performances from Ghostface Killah, the Walkmen, Fiery Furnaces, Annie, Apples in Stereo, Stellastarr*, the Stills, Mates of State, Radio 4, Enon, Heartless Bastards, We Are Scientists, Rogue Wave, Northern State, Richard Swift, Saturday Looks Good to Me, the Double, Au Revoir Simone, Aberdeen City, and many more. All that, and kids under 10 get in free! Britney and K-Fed!
Brangelina! Bennifer! Bring Sean Preston, Shiloh, Maddox and co.
along! Introduce a young child to indie rock-- it s the right thing to do, sez the Desdemona website. True dat.
According to the man behind the fest, organizer Nick Spencer, the event is a non-profit effort driven by Cincinnati Tomorrow, an organization Now this sounds like a recipe for disaster. According to Billboard.com, have enlisted Pearl Jam s Eddie Vedder and Queens of the Stone Age s Josh Homme for an all-star cover of Marvin Gaye s 1971 song Mercy Mercy Me from his What s Going On album.
Homme shares drum duty with the Strokes Fabrizio Moretti on the track, while Vedder and lead Stroke Julian Casablancas take equal blame for desiccating the memory of Gaye s vocal performance. Mercy, indeed. Mercy Mercy Me will appear as the B-side to the Strokes forthcoming single, You Only Live Once , which is due out in the UK on July 10.
Meanwhile, the Strokes will bring their message of environmentalism to various European festivals throughout the rest of the summer:
For one day, Camden relinquishes America's Most Dangerous City title What have members of the now-defunct been up to since their final release, 2003 s R.I.P.
? No, they haven t escaped into total post-break-up oblivion, but they have played in Broadcast Oblivion (drummer Coady Willis, now also in Big Business and the Melvins), performed in bands with really long names (vocalist Spencer Moody, now in Triumph of Lethargy Skinned Alive to Death, and Smoke Smoke), toured modestly with mice (guitarist Dann Gallucci, also in Triumph as well as A Gun Called Tension), created graphic art (guitarist Nate Manny), and prettily made graves (bassist Derek Fudesco). Well, get ready, Devil-worshippers: it s time to clear away those empty bottles and heal those broken hearts, cause the quintessential Seattle punks are reuniting for one quintessentially Seattle event-- the .
The two-day fest, which celebrates music, art and progressive causes, takes place July 28-29. Besides MCD (who announced news of the reunion show on their page and appear to be soliciting ideas for the perfect set list ), other hometown favorites will rock the Block, including: Pretty Girls Make Graves, Band of Horses, Schoolyard Heroes, Minus the Bear, and Big Business. Even more will be announced on June 15.
Ah, summer. But don t get too excited: the Murder City Devils maintain that this is a one-off event. And given how busy the band s members are, we believe them.
has been around for a long time. She played strings for John Mellencamp (!) in the late 80s and into the 90s, and toured and recorded with the Indigo Girls (!
!), David Bowie, Simple Minds, Iggy Pop, and Sheryl Crow (!!
!). She also put out several albums on both Capitol Records and 4AD, as well as collaborated with Giant Sand in the side project OP8.
But this is (relatively) common knowledge. What s not so well-known, however, is that Lisa Germano can suck you into her dreams. Just ask ex-Swan/current Angel of Light Michael Gira.
She seems to play violin, piano/keyboards, and guitar with equal authority, Gira claims. As well as producing her own records with No one sounds like her. You get the feeling you re walking through her dreams as you listen.
The intensity of feeling in her singing is a your ear, leading you through her world. It s a place I very much enjoy visiting, and I hope you will too.
Does that sound a little creepy to anyone else?
At any rate, Gira was impressed enough with Germano that his label will release her new album, In the Maybe World, on July 18. This is Germano s first since 2003 s Lullaby for Liquid Pig.
Earlier this week, we told you that the new Decemberists album, their Capitol Records debut, now has a title (The Crane Wife) and a release date (October 3).
Overwhelmed with excitement, we called The title track, a three-part epic that makes up the heart of the working in a bookstore. The folktale is about a peasant in, I assume, Meloy said. He s walking in the woods one day and he finds a crane that is wounded, injured with an arrow in its wing.
And he kindly removes the arrow and revives the crane; the crane flies off. A couple days later this woman appears at his door, and they fall in love and get married. But they re really poor, so she suggests that in order for market.
She goes off into this room and closes the door and makes him swear never to peek in, and if he does then some terrible thing will happen. So each day she goes in and makes this beautiful cloth, and he sells it for a lot of money, but he never quite knows what s going on inside the room. Until one day his curiosity gets the better of him; he peeks in and sees that she is a crane in fact, and has been picking out her feathers and putting them into the cloth, and she s bleeding.
So away, and that s the end. I always thought that it would be a good idea for a song cycle, or at least a challenging one, and it proved to be that, I think. I first started thinking about that idea two or three years ago, and immediately started working on some stuff with it, but it never really came together.
I was having a hard time piecing it together, until after the last record I really set my mind to it. The Crane Wife isn t going to be the only multi-part song cycle on the album, though. There s also The Island , which is in the 12-minute range and not so cohesive, story-wise, according to Meloy.
But it will nicely offset the linear narrative of The Crane Wife . It s kind of a piece showcasing the rest of the band as well, which is exciting. We re starting to delve more into British folk, especially from the 60s and 70s.
Like Shirley Collins and Ann Briggs and Fairport Convention and things like that. And it s really sort of come to a head in preparing for this record. So there s a lot of exploration about where British folk met prog in the early 70s, late 60s.
So [ The Island ] is definitely heavily influenced by that era. familiar, bringing to mind the band s 2004 eighteen-minute, five-part The Tain EP, well, there s a reason for that. Half of [2005 s] Picaresque, maybe even more than half, had already been written by the time The Tain came about, Meloy said, So I almost feel like this record has more to do with The Tain than Picaresque was.
Because most of the material had already been written. That often happens, you kind of skip generations. The influence of a certain record is always coming from two years prior.
The band has been holed up in Kung Fu Bakery studios in Portland, Oregon since mid-April, with Tucker Martine and Death Cab for Cutie s They re currently choosing between 22 new songs for the album. Those particular fascinations, I guess you can t really get away from them-- wars and soldiers and ghosts, things like that ) featuring an as-yet-undetermined female vocalist duetting with Meloy, as well as was recorded live a couple days ago after an absinthe binge, probably It s hard to totally say what the record is going to be like, Meloy said, since we re still in the beginning stages of it, and especially since there s so many songs that need to be trimmed down into a record, it s hard to say what the shape of the record will be. But for the most part, it feels like it s going to be kind of strange.
And there will be Decemberisty tint to them. But for the most part it feels like-- it s kind of clich e , but-- exploring new territory, which is exciting. Vocalist/violinist Petra Haden, who has been touring with the band, has not joined the Decemberists in the studio.
Petra Haden is not involved, for a number of reasons, Meloy explained. One being that tour, and now we re done with that and working on new material. We still will absorb musicians on the road, but we wanted to wait and see what the material ended up like before we made any decisions.
The major label experience has been going smoothly so far. Meloy said, We ve had the Capitol Records A R people come in, which is kind of terrifying because as long as I ve been a fan of music, and been aware of the differences between independent labels and major labels, that and shake their heads and say they need to hear more singles, that was So they came in, and we had strategically put together the two obvious Decemberists idiom and played them for them. And they liked them.
And they asked what else we were doing, and then we started playing the long proggy song cycles, and that s when they got really excited. So it was kind of a positive bit of reinforcement, that they actually support the fact that we re moving in a relatively strange direction. stage presentation on the tour in support in the album, which will begin this fall.
It s going to be playing bigger places, and there s always bigger ticket prices at those places, so we really want to make an extra effort to make it a good show. The best that we could do is to offer a better show I guess. So there will be some funny stuff I m sure, to be determined.
The Decemberists plan to lay low for most of the rest of the summer, with only three shows scheduled. And they are: With their debut LP St. Elsewhere continuing to find crazy (sorry!
) success on the Billboard charts, reaching #14 on the Top 200 and #1 on Top Electronic Albums (it s an electronic album?!), Gnarls Barkley s gotta be feeling rather saint-like these days.
My message is being embraced by the world, said Gnarls in a recent press release, and I could not be happier. Glad to hear it, even if you re not a dates, including stops in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and sunny Baltimore, in between appearances at Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits, and, like, every single European festival. Are they going to continue wearing different outfits at every show?
That s gonna get expensive. Playing here, not elsewhere: In the UK, where the Crazy single was so popular it was deleted after nine weeks at number one, Gnarls will unleash the single for Smiley Faces on July 17. On June 12, Gnarls Barkley bring their jams to The Tonight Show.
And you can watch their Star Wars-inspired performance on the MTV Movie Awards on reruns all weekend. Or you can Pops in April. It rules.
Summer s heating up for !!!
, and not just because those crazy Chili Peppers at the end of the month. !!
! also recently added a host of festival dates all over Europe, as well as a few warm-up gigs here in the States this weekend. Get ready for the stadium insanium!
As for the band s forthcoming third album, well, they re still working on it. According to their website, they re hoping to have the LP finished in June. If it s any later than that, just blame Giuliani for Gather round the dinner table, kids, cause it s time for a little Akron/Family meeting, and there s news to share!
The band has just announced that they re preparing a new album, titled Meek Warrior, on Young God this September. Recorded primarily at Chicago s Shappe Shoppe, the forthcoming LP was produced by Akron/Family and Michael Gira, and engineered by Griffin Rodriguez (Need New Body, Icy Demons, Bablicon), who also plays bass on one song, No Space in This Realm . The album will feature songs mostly written on the road, in the van the few weeks prior to the studio time, while we were all freezing in the wintery hinderlands of middle Canada, wheezing with bronchitis, according to Family man Seth Olinsky.
Drake, said Olinsky, was a total dream and pleasure to work with in the studio, as he helped bring the music to life. Charles Waters of Tonic in New York City, followed by an appearance at the Pop Montreal Festival in, uh, Montreal, as well as a few other dates in Canada. A West Coast tour is on the agenda for December, as is the recording of yet another new album in October in November.
As they say, the family When we think Bob Mould, we think punk rock, buzzsaw guitars, Minneapolis, SST, Our Band Could Be Your Life, trucking across the country in a beat-up van, etc. In other words, we think H u sker D u . However, when Bob Mould thinks Bob Mould, he thinks shiny dance-pop.
Or rather, when Bob Mould thinks Blowoff, his collaborative project with house music vet Richard Morel, he thinks shiny dance-pop. Blowoff has been blowing the roof off (sorry) the Washington, DC club scene for a few years, and now they re ready to expand their boundaries. On September 5, the duo s own Full Frequency Music label will release Blowoff s self-titled debut album.
According to a press release, the album is a total 50/50 collaboration and a merger Hey, sounds like 1997! You can hear for yourself at Blowoff s website, where new songs are currently streaming. On June 13, avant-country duo the Handsome Family are poised to release their new Carrot Top Records album, Last Days of Wonder.
It s the seventh record from the husband-and-wife team of Brett and Rennie Sparks. The inspiration for many songs on Last Days of Wonder come from the tragic life of Nicola Tesla, the misunderstood inventor renowned for developing the namesake Tesla coil, devising plans for an Earth-destroying death ray, and for providing the name for the hair tragic, we don t know what is). The Sparks couple recorded the album at home, but thanks to the magic of email, Stephen Dorocke (Freakwater, Jesse Sykes) and David Coulter (Test Dept.
, The Pogues, Tom Waits) were able to contribute pedal steel and musical saw, respectively. In addition to the guest instrumentation and the Sparks standard guitar, bass, and drums arrangements, Last Days of Wonder augments the Handsome Family sound with mellotron, ukulele, banjo, bowed wine glasses, and trombone sections, as well. Do you have a news tip for us?
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