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[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 25, 2010 by admin in Music
Saturday, December 25th, 2010
Composed on the road with the iPad as a key instrument, the Gorillaz new release “The Fall” is their Christmas gift to you.
A few months ago we pondered the iPad as a musical instrument, but while we were sitting around on our butts pondering, apparently Gorillaz
was busy making an album – while on tour no less – using the iPad as a key instrument. And for an added layer of coolness, they’re giving it to us all as a Christmas gift. Just go to thefall.gorillaz.com, provide an e-mail, and voila! You’re listening to the latest Gorillaz release. Recorded as a “musical tour diary” during last fall’s 32-day North American tour, the album doesn’t feel or sound quite like a full-blown Gorillaz release, but it really isn’t meant to. On their site Damon Albarn says “…I literally wrote everything on the day in each place and there’s a strange sort of sound of America and its musical traditions that comes through. It feels like a journey through America“. And it does indeed capture some ups and downs of the feelings of being on the road. I have to admit I’m a little partial to “Amarillo”, “Bobby in Phoenix”, and “Hillbilly Man”, which all suggest some sort of 21st century vibe loosely reminiscent of “Madman Across the Water” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bookends”. Which is really a horribly inaccurate description in the end; this is Gorillaz, and it’s a quirky release. But good quirky. The song “Detroit” is for instance probably one of the happiest tunes you’ll ever hear called “Detroit”, which is a little atmosphere inversion the album repeats with the moody “Shy-Town”. But I’m not going to bore you with a tune-by-tune opinion of the whole release, it’s available right now and for free, for cryin’ out loud. So go unwrap your little Christmas present and decide for yourself. A little side note: The page that streams the tunes wouldn’t work in Firefox on my system, and crashed Chrome on the first try, but worked just fine on the second try. Don’t give up right away if you have any glitches; it may in fact just be a load problem on their server. Read the rest of this entry »
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 9, 2010 by admin in Music
Thursday, December 9th, 2010
Sometimes the only thing you get for Christmas is your freedom, and the only thing under the tree is you, passed out drunk. Yule get over it. In the meantime, here’s some melancholic music to help you wallow.
 
The perfect tree to pass out drunk beneath. |
You have to dig pretty deep to dig up weirder Christmas music ideas than we did over the last couple of years with Generation Triple Xmas – Holiday Songs For Millennials, last holiday season’s Oye To The World, our tribute to the non-Christian menorah-ty , and our mashup roundup of 2008, Generation X-Mas, but this year we’re digging deeper. Or lower, as the case may be. Yeah, yeah. Christmas is a time of joy and celebration, blah blah blah. Face it. For much of the world, Christmas is only a few days after the longest night of the year, and unless you live in southern climes, there’s a good chance it’s cold and dreary during those few hours of daylight that do exist. No wonder we string lights all over the place, eat ourselves into oblivion, and try to cheer each other up with presents wrapped in shiny paper. So this year, why not just roll with it, and ball your eyes out with some awesomely depressing Christmas music. We’ve rounded up a few tunes below to help bring you down, but got so depressed in the process that we couldn’t go on. Feel free to share some suggestions. We’ll post them in a followup, that is, if we can read your comments through the tears that are freezing our eyes shut
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[ 1 Comment ]Posted on November 29, 2010 by admin in Music
Monday, November 29th, 2010
Two pop legends succeed at being themselves musically, and even seem to sort of get the hang of that whole “internets” thingy, with lots of barnyard puppet sex and nocturnal urban hillbilly parkour. And the Dick Flash interview with Eno.
I have some compassion for the Thomas Dolby and Brian Eno fanboys of the world today. In fact, I might have to confess (as I did back in May with He Blinded Me With Silence) to being one of them. Both artists were a major influence on my early songwriting and recording work, and coincidentally, both announced special releases today. Brian Eno, with his “Seven Sessions On A Milk Sea”, and Dolby with “Oceanea”. Eno’s release is actually a series of videos of live sessions playing music from his release “Small Craft On A Milk Sea” (available for download on iTunes or as vinyl, CD, or download
on Amazon). Dolby’s release is the second of three EP’s to be rolled out before his 2011 release A Map Of The Floating City, and is only available by going to his site and registering. So what’s a media overloaded pop sycophant to do? Well, download everything of course, and worry about grocery money later! I must confess that as much as I respect both artists, I find Eno’s marketing methods a little off-putting compared to Dolby’s. For me it’s interesting to be in the position of watching pop legends whose musical accomplishments I once aspired to duplicate now attempting to market their material in a rapidly evolving environment that I’m confident I understand better than they do. I’m quite happy with music they’re both producing; Dolby has shown that he still has some of that pop-smart Thomas Dolby-ness in him; his first two EP’s – “Amerikana” and “Oceanea” – reflect his quirky, catchy pop and sonically somber reflective sides respectively. And Eno has managed to imbue Small Craft On A Milk Sea with a nice balance of various aspects of the familiar Eno palette in a way that should please lifelong Enophiles like myself. But I have to tip my hat a bit to Dolby on the marketing. Ever since the announcement of Eno’s first release in five years, tidbits have been released exclusively here and there. I would receive e-mails announcing some news about the release, and as even this exclusive Wired piece points out – arrive at a page that didn’t even have a preview snippet. And while today’s announcement of Seven Sessions On A Milk Sea was originally intriguing, Eno’s site sends you to seven different other sites (including the Guardian and the New York Times, for instance) to watch a video of three guys bent over their gear “jamming”. And then you find that the embedded videos themselves are “Private” Vimeo clips that aren’t shareable. Way to use the video sharing service, marketing people! Dolby, on the other hand, announced a free song download early on, and then announced the two EP’s at a discounted price to subscribers with a painless payment and download process. And any videos he’s sharing are all on YouTube, and readily embeddable. I snagged all three Dolby releases right away, but in spite of originally being anxious to pick up Eno’s release, forgot all about it until another artist I admire (Christen Lien) mentioned it on Facebook and with a facepalm and a “DOH!” I finally bought it. Both artists are releasing a lot of “making of” clips; Dolby’s can be found on his YouTube page if you’re interested. Me, I’m more interested in the music or the music videos themselves. I”m pretty partial to Dolby’s “Toad Lickers”, featured below. Although he talks in the Toad Lickers Dissected video about how it was inspired by the toad smoking research of anthropologist Wade Davis in his book Shadows in the Sun
, I personally hear it as a tale of deluded tea party rednecks taking over America. Clip below, but we don’t recommend watching it if you’re disturbed by barnyard puppet animal sex or nocturnal urban hillbilly parkour. Read the rest of this entry »
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 18, 2010 by admin in Music
Thursday, November 18th, 2010
The long and winding road to digital music sales for the Beatles began with one Apple, and ends with another.
The word is that the day before yesterday, after a decade long wait, the Beatles catalog finally became available on iTunes. Should we care? Well, Todd Martens of the LA Times has some reasons why we shouldn’t. Personally, you won’t see me rushing to download a bunch of Beatles songs for a price 30% higher than anything else on iTunes. But I’m not trying to persuade anyone one way or the other; I prefer you think for yourself. Except you may have noticed I’m playing a little game of trying to sprinkle Beatles song titles into what I’m saying, because I’ll make money if you follow the links and buy something. After a few sentences, you’d think I’d be getting better at it, but clearly I’m not. So I will stop now. But that silliness I just engaged in is an example of something you might want to ponder. Releasing this material on iTunes really means only one thing. Revenue. And for whom? Certainly not the two Beatles that many would agree were the cool ones. And certainly not Michael Jackson, who owned half of the publishing rights. No, in my opinion, this is the big lumbering thud of the money tree of the old music industry falling. It’s ironic to ponder that without the business model that devoured the Beatles’ profits as artists and fueled the decades of legal wrangling over them, the Beatles would probably not have even existed, let alone become the legend that they now are. And then, you wouldn’t be able to buy every song over and over and over in endless re-re-releases including absurdities like a $299 Apple-shaped USB stick. Which, for the record, is probably better than a $149 Box Set that doesn’t come with a box. It’s a little sad, and at the same time rather telling that the Beatles are always touted as sacred icons of popular music, and then immediately pimped out in a different (often less-than superb) format. At one point I had every one of their LP’s in my vinyl collection. That overlapped with owning cassettes of a few releases, and later various CD’s. I don’t think I’ll be buying any of these songs yet again on iTunes, but I want you to. Because then I can make money like everyone else who isn’t the original artist. And feel good knowing that the estates of three pop legends get some more loot to pay off the lawyers, and that the executives at both Apple companies can make more money. And when I make that money, I can support a new indy act that sells direct. Ironic, isn’t it?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on November 7, 2010 by admin in Music
Sunday, November 7th, 2010
I’m glad talented violinist Joan Wasser took the instrument off her chin to demonstrate what a magically brilliant songwriter and singer she is.
The only thing stranger than the fact that I hadn’t heard of Joan Wasser and her band Joan as Police Woman until the other day is the fact that I feel like I’ve known her and her music for years. Or maybe the latter is not really so strange, considering the fact that after her tune Start of My Heart (video below) literally made me cry the first time I heard it, I immediately bought her 2008 release To Survive, and in the 48 hours since, have listened to it like, four times. And in between listens, have read about her career and listened to or watched anything by her that I can find. But even if I hadn’t so instantly fallen in love with her work, there’s an intimate intensity and emotional depth to most of it that would have eventually had the same effect. One imagines that some of the incredible depth and “realness” of her expression is informed by the loss of her partner Jeff Buckley back in the 90′s, and more recently her mother (the inspiration for the title track of “To Survive”) but her talent as an arranger and songwriter is remarkable in itself. Listening to her work one is slowly struck by its subtly. I say “slowly”, because her impeccable arrangements allow horns, backing vocals and other instrumentation to weave through the tunes so effortlessly that one barely notices their coming and going until repeated listens. It’s almost hard to believe that she is – as she implies at one point in this interview – an “ear musician”, saying that music theory “is just like math to me“. Although Wasser only has a few solo releases as a songwriter and vocalist, her resumé as a violinist extends back to the 1990′s and includes work with the likes of Lou Reed, Sheryl Crow, Sparklehorse, Elton John, David Sylvian, the Scissor Sisters, Antony and the Johnsons, Joseph Arthur, and Rufus Wainwright. I love that ex-Fishbone member Chris Dowd apparently praised her as a “soulful mothafucka” in the liner notes of a Seedy Arkhestra release. It’s that kind of reference that makes me hope Wasser finds the broader recognition that she deserves without a major label deal; I don’t think they’d know what to do with her! While her music has a mature honesty that is easily understood, there’s an intense beauty and strength in her face, her persona, and her work that defies definition, and would almost certainly be diluted and destroyed by the pop music packaging process. In spite of the fact that so far I’ve only picked up her 2008 release, I’m looking forward to her upcoming 2011 release “The Deep Field” (see clip below). Partly because the title references a place where galaxies are born, and partly because at this rate I will have listened to everything she’s done a couple hundred times by then. Read the rest of this entry »
