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I forget how to do this…

uhhhhhhh I made this half hour video where I talk into the camera about the Minneapolis indie rock band 12 Rods, who are releasing a NEW ALBUM, their FIRST in TWENTY-ONE YEARS, called IF WE STAYED ALIVE, this Friday!

the formatting is off, particularly in the literal like first minute of the video. I edited this on a laptop whose trackpad doesn’t work using an internet browser video editor. I used the touchscreen it’s a chromebook.

let me cook

On Thursday 8/11/22, the day after my mom’s 63rd birthday (and 11 days before my 27th (and 9 days before my sister’s 31st)), I flew from JFK to Seattle, arriving at about 8 p.m., to attend a three-day music festival called Day In Day Out. My brother lives in Seattle as a PhD student at the University of Washington, and I stayed with him, sleeping on the couch in his cabinlike one-bedroom apartment that is its own tiny building in which he and his girlfriend live for $1350 a month. I went back from Seattle to NYC on Monday, arriving at JFK at 10:30 p.m. I saw 14 bands that weekend, and missed Turnstile (whose Glow On I really don’t like), Julie (whose EP I really like), and Japanese Breakfast (which is a goddamn crying shame—don’t ask). Armed with the handy Pentax K1000 that my first girlfriend gave me for my 18th birthday, I ended up interviewing five of the artists—a member of the band I call my favorite ever, a favorite rapper of mine, and three artists I frankly didn’t know until seeing their name on the poster. (I didn’t know who The Kerrys were until the day before the first day of the festival, when they functionally replaced the COVID-troubled Soccer Mommy.)

For what it’s worth, barring the dreamlike All Tomorrow’s Parties New York festival that unfolded at Kutsher’s Hotel (?) in goddamn Monticello, NY around the turn of the 2010s, Day In Day Out was probably the…

Concerts have been a go in New York City for a little while now. Their return on an appreciable scale was first and quietly signaled by rough-and-tumble DIY venues (some of them really people’s backyards) throwing small shows in early June or so, often sheepishly asking for proof of vaccination at the door. Then, perhaps less than a month later, more sizable spaces like Brooklyn’s Our Wicked Lady and Elsewhere (both notably brandishing rooftops) and Manhattan’s The Bowery Electric started to let people into their 200+-capacity spaces, to let those people not wear masks, let them kiss and dance and whatever, usually but not always with proof of vaccination required as well. Fellow Sputnikmusic compatriot ArsMoriendi and I, neither of us from NYC but both sorta equidistant to it, had to check this new (but really actually old) phenomenon out.

Or, well, that’s kinda how it happened. Above all and in the first place, we were stoked to see a Facebook event advertising the first “post”-COVID show of a band whose hyperactive, glammy and psychedelic debut LP we together hawked on this very site, with some minor notable successes. The album is called Long Haired Locusts (2020); the band is called Godcaster. We had heard they were awesome live, and proof of their dominance in the arena of live performance was everywhere on the Internet (check out this clip, awesomely shot by one Santo Donia, of a 2019 show in New Jersey), and even felt like it inhered in the math-y, frenetic hooks that make…

Jacob Bannon of Converge performs at Roadburn 2018. Photograph by Wikipedia user Grywnn

Jacob Bannon of Converge performs at Roadburn 2018. Photograph by Wikipedia user Grywnn (Heiner Bach)

Alright, y’all, it’s time for one of Sputnikmusic’s patented giveaway contests. Let’s get down to brass tacks immediately.

THE PRIZE: Two tickets to the second day–April 4th–of the Decibel Magazine Metal & Beer Festival at the Fillmore in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. These are $35 each face value and $98.50 total if you purchase them online. Yeehaw. Who will be performing, you ask? Well, Converge is doing Jane Doe in its entirety. And Pig Destroyer is doing Prowler in the Yard. And then there’s fuckin’, uh, Satan, and Necrot, and Night Demon, and Haunt, and Un. Pretty sure that’s all. Please note a few things: this concert is absolutely 21+ no exceptions, so don’t enter this contest if you are under that age maybe. I dunno, can’t really stop you I guess. Secondly, these are not the “Metal and Beer” tickets that cost $85 each face value. If you’re a beer drinker you’ll have to stick with Stella Artois or whatever in this case: no unlimited half pours of Nightmare Brewing Company’s critically acclaimed SCAPHISM beer for you! Oh, and also obviously it’s on you to, like, get to Philly. Sorry everyone, when we’re flush (one day…) we’ll be able to fund the whole experience.

THE CONTEST: The year is 2021. The 20th anniversary joint (that’s right you’re getting them as a package) vinyl reissue of both Jane Doe and Prowler in the Yard is fast approaching, and Relapse Records or Epitaph or…

If you're thinking, "Hey, isn't this picture a little creepy?" please let me assure you that every picture of Ariana Grande is creepy. She's definitely like 8 years old.

Alright, folks, listen up, because I’ve got a cutting-edge pop music opinion for you all to devour and regurgitate elsewhere: Ariana Grande is awesome. She only has real two singles to her name: “The Way,” catchy and vibrant but with a bearable-if-you-sorta-just-ignore-him set of verses from Mac Miller, and “Baby I,” not completely new but still unreservedly awesome, the type of song so good it gets you pumped for an album by the girl from…Nickelodeon’s Victorious? Whatever: this thing sounds like Mariah Carey cosplaying as Sonic the Hedgehog, with mile-a-minute percussion, luxurious synths, and an astounding display of vocal agility from Ms. Grande herself, who may yet turn out to be the first new pop star worth the hype in quite a while.

Some background, if you’ll forgive me. In the early 1990s, a group of friends from Louisville, Kentucky, went to a Jodeci concert in their hometown. After apparently coercing a security guard into letting them backstage, the group met with Donald DeGrate, Jr., also known as DeVante Swing, the de facto leader of Jodeci. They came specifically to Swing to promote their R&B trio, A Touch of Class, probably hoping that he would like what he heard at least enough to pass their name on to one of his connections, if not take them under his own wing. It worked, and after coming off the tour for Jodeci’s hugely popular sophomore album, 1993’s Diary of a Mad Band (which peaked at number three on the U.S. Billboard 200 and would go on to sell two million copies), Swing contacted Jawaan Peacock, a.k.a. “Smokey,” a member of A Touch of Class, who had since restructured his group into a trio with Benjamin “Digital Black” Bush, another original member of the group, and Stephen “Static Major” Garrett, a high school friend with whom Smokey had reconnected at the University of Louisville.

Some time around 1994, Swing decided Playa, as they were now called, were worth his time, and he promptly signed them to his Swing Mob label—a subsidiary of Elektra Records in the U.S.–which placed them in the company of such heavy hitters as Missy Elliott, Ginuwine, and Timbaland. Swing Mob collapsed in 1995, but Playa were able to successfully jump ship to…

Ciara in her natural habitat

Okay, so is it just me or is R&B getting, like, too good lately? 2011 saw The Weeknd, Frank Ocean, Drake and others, but those were the “cool” artists who were primed, in a way, to release some deliciously trendy beats and hooks with the latest producer close behind them. But look at 2012: Miguel, always a fantastic singer but never a captivating artist, had both the catchiest single and corresponding album in “Adorn” and Kaleidoscope Dream, respectively. Then there’s Jeremih, the dude who wrote, uh, “Birthday Sex”–he showed up with his Late Nights mixtape, a mainstay in the car-playlist rotation for those lucky enough to have sought it out on Datpiff.

Now we have Ciara, of all people, releasing the jam of at least the first quarter of the year. I don’t even really know who Ciara is–I had to YouTube “1, 2 Step” to remember its melody–but this has to be the last straw. Produced by Mike Will Made It (who also took the reins on Jeremih’s similarly awesome “773 Love”), “Body Party” is so convincingly sexy and catchy and lush that I’m pretty sure all R&B artists are forming a cabal and want to demobilize me with an onslaught of jams or something like that (also: that new Justin Timberlake album). It’s a conspiracy, guys. But what a sexy conspiracy it is.

Listen to it here:

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