The Pitchfork Music Festival is strange. It’s strange because unlike so many other festivals around the United States, the organization behind the festival has its own ideas and its own opinions – opinions that are widely known. Indeed, Pitchfork could be considered the MTV of the 21st century blogosphere, a tastemaker and a major influence on the popularity of bands in the indie scene and, increasingly so, in the hip-hop scene. Whereas a Lollapalooza or a Coachella will book a group based on the number of fans it can attract, Pitchfork looks to not only attract visitors, but also showcase their taste. It comes as no surprise that a vast majority of the artists playing at Pitchfork have received the publication’s coveted “Best New Music” tag, either on an album, track, or reissue. So when multiple acts thanked Pitchfork for their “generous support” or “continued enthusiasm” or what have you, the gesture seemed a bit stranger, and it seemed that the artists had a more intimate relationship with the publication that they might have with Bonnaroo’s organizers.
Pitchfork’s opinions have not gone without criticism and controversy. Anti-domestic violence demonstrators picketed outside of Chicago’s cozy Union Park, where the festival is held, to protest the appearance of rap group Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. (In response, Odd Future gave them cupcakes before their show). Pitchforkreviewsreviews.com, a website cryptically run by a guy named David, used to review the reviews that Pitchfork posted everyday. Now, David has taken to analyzing Pitchfork…
Two things unsettled me before I listened to “Vomit”: firstly, it’s title and secondly, that it was the first single off an album called Father, Son, Holy Ghost from a guy whose famous indie breakout Bon Iverism was that he’d spent the formative years of his life in a religious wacko cult. Creepy.
As it turns out, there was very little reason for my trepidation.
“Vomit”, besides a rather harrowing first minute, is more of the lovelorn classic rock wallowing of Christopher Owens, picking up nicely where the band’s Broken Dreams Club EP last left us. Crafted in the “Hellhole Ratrace” mould, it builds into a wonderful choir-backed climax, outrageous soul-singer and all, and shows off the leaps and bounds bandmate Chet Jr. White has made in composition since their charmingly raw debut.
Father, Son, Holy Ghost will be released on September 13th.
TV On The Radio’s Nine Types of Light, released this year, was not ambitious.
This was odd. What have we come to expect from TV On The Radio if not ambition? Each record before this one seemed to give us another reason to call them ‘art-rock’, be it for their crazy musical ventures (to think they had the nerve to sample Metal Machine Music) or for their lyrically cryptic nature. Nine Types of Light, then, saw a band happy to slow down and ready to lose whatever “edge” was elevating them above the rest. You have to be pretty confident to do that, or at least very content indeed, and to me Nine Types of Light celebrates losing its higher calling as “art.” There’s no denying, however, that it doesn’t try to carry a statement as dark as “DLZ” or to look at an issue in the way “I Was A Lover” did.
So it feels brilliant to have the Nine Types of Light film as an accompanying piece, no matter how satisfied I am with the hour of music. To me, it feels intriguing to see a band re-imagine their music so immediately. There are other forums to offer a second interpretation on your music, but most of them feel a little more distant than this; the Flaming Lips, for instance, dedicated a musical to Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, a record already surreal as hell, but it was released after the fact. Others would prefer…
TV on the Radio covered one of the greatest songs of all time, ‘Waiting Room’ by Fugazi, at the Pitchfork Festival over the weekend. Here’s a good-quality video of the performance, though it cuts out about halfway through.
It sounds more than a touch lightweight to me. Then again, my favourite part of the original is Ian MacKaye’s raspy vocal and Tunde Adebimpe’s shrill singing doesn’t really measure up in my eyes. Check out this live recording of Fugazi performing ‘Waiting Room’ and compare.
I rarely refer to press releases when writing about music: it’s bad practice and they rarely contain much information that’s useful to me anyway. Occasionally though, I’ll read a line that instantly hooks me, like this one:
†HYMNS† is a 2 piece atheist rock band comprising of Samuel Manville and Peter Reisner.
The phrase “atheist rock band” distills more or less all of my main interests into one manageable cocktail. What’s more, it’s the new project of Samuel Manville, the former frontman of tragically short-lived English math rockers Blakfish, who broke up last year just as I was getting into their music.
The three remaining members spun off to become &U&I, leaving Manville to team up with former SOS drummer Peter Reisner. †HYMNS† appear, superficially at least, to exist mainly for the purpose of poking fun at religion and promoting the godless lifestyle, both causes to which I will happily lend my support.
Their first release, a four-song live DVD, is scheduled for release on August 22 with a full-length album to follow in October. Here’s the video for the first studio recording, ‘A Punch to the Temple,’ a tight angular number with echoes of Modest Mouse and Nick Cave and a typically sardonic take on the politics of strangling people.
Apropos of yesterday’s finger-wagging blog, I should point it’s almost two years to the day since Thrice’s last album Beggars leaked almost three months before its scheduled release. Follow-up Major/Minor is penciled in for a September 20 release and has yet to leak – it’s almost as if leaks are bad for business!!
But no sooner have I opened that can of worms than I will slam it firmly shut.
For today saw the premiere of the delightfully-titled ‘Yellow Belly,’ the first single from Major/Minor. ‘Yellow Belly’ continues the group’s slide towards mainstream rock as featured on Beggars with more melody and lush layers, and less dissonance and abrasion.
As a lead single, it lacks the immediacy and distinctiveness of ‘All the World is Mad,’ opting instead for a Tom Morello-style stripped-down heavy metal riff. As the handy little Soundcloud visual demonstrates, it’s not a particular dynamic track, though the morose middle eight beginning around the 1:36 mark offers some degree of variety.
People like me will be hoping this is just fluff, and that the album proper veers more towards the Radiohead-inspired electronic tinkering of ‘Circles’ and ‘Doublespeak.’
I know a lot of people around don’t believe me when I occasionally argue that leaks – and the culture whereby people think they’re entitled to all the free music they want – are bad for musicians so don’t take my word for it. Take the word of the head of a independent label that sinks all its money into promoting some of the most innovative hip hop and electronic music around.
It was with considerable disappointment that we learnt in the last week that two records we have been working on have been leaked, despite the use of watermarked CDs. Toddla T’s Watch Me Dance(Ninja Tune) and Thundercat’s The Golden Age of Apocalypse (Brainfeeder) were both leaked from copies sent to the journalist Benjamin Jager at the offices of Backspin magazine in Germany.
The availability of these records online for free has meant a rush release of the digital version of Toddla’s record, which, after the years of work put in, will seriously affect the ability to make any kind of financial return from commercial release. No one at the magazine has yet taken responsibility for uploading these records to the internet, but until the situation is resolved, we will no longer be servicing Backspin with promo copies. It’s very hard for young, up and coming artists to make a living from their music. People uploading their music months before it is commercially available are not doing them any favours.
Everybody has their own views on how music should…
Attach whatever tags please you, but Kashiwa Daisuke’s Program Music I stands as one of the previous decade’s must haves. A clear feature of tracks like Stella,April #02 and Write Once, Run Melos are their seeming limitless bounds, free running through magnificent and sprawling soundscapes. Yet his latest upcoming album, 88, marks an attempt to express himself utilizing the keys of a piano. Though talented as a composer, the shift towards minimalist instrumentation is likely to factor heavily into the album’s outcome. Early signs are, well, let us just leave that to Kashiwa himself to show.
London Elektricity’s latest album Yikes! received pretty decent feedback upon release. But the music world moves fast, and Drum and Bass fans will now be gearing up for the Yikes! remix album, due later in July. With big names from the Hospital Records label like B-Complex, Danny Byrd and Logistics making an appearance, hopefully there’ll be something as stunning as Apex’s remix of Just One Second, High Contrast’s version of Remember, or his own acoustic version of Elektricity Will Keep Me Warmwith Elsa Esmeralda.
A remix by the very promising Med School recruit Lung certainly offers one reason why the album is likely a must have for fans of Drum and Bass. The remix even receiving the praise of the Colminator himself via his twitter feed. For those wanting more previews, check out the album’s page on the Hospital Record’s website.
“I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.”
Jorge Luis Borges
Memory is nothing if not a collision of creation and fact: the perpetual struggle between actuality and imagination. There is always something tangible and factual at the heart of each memory, but the contextual world is one of modality. Ever changing: the colour of that car, what that person was wearing, minute details that ebb and flow. These things are all subject to change over time because they are overcome by imagination. When my Grandmother was in the hospital, for example, she remembered meeting my brother’s fiancé on a bus a few years prior—but to her that bus ride was from Clyde Bank to Glasgow and not the city bus in London (where the meeting actually took place). These details are an extension of imagination and how it corrupts memory. In many ways this is how nostalgia works. Avoiding a purely clinical, Freudian framework, nostalgia is the erosion of actuality in favour of compartmentalized emotions. Over time we elude precision of memories in favour of a broader spectrum of general feelings that umbrella over periods of our lives.
Music plays an important role as an agent of nostalgia; platitudes such as “the soundtrack of our lives” are not entirely without merit. As we compartmentalize our more nostalgic memories, so does it seem that we compartmentalize the music…
What happens when reggae and ska meet jazz and afrobeat?
This, apparently.
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Perhaps what best sums up Eprhyme’s two passions are his synagogue performances. Signed to Calvin Johnson’s insanely DIY K Records, Eprhyme attempts to blend firm Jewish faith with a love for the traditions of hip-hop, and his strong affinity with the depth of Jewish stories finds an unusual home on his newest record, genuinely titled Dopestylevsky. It plays with both components: it is, at times, perhaps too good at honouring its musical influence (“Let’s Build” shows itself up with its whacky, somewhat cartoonish chorus), but its strongly conscientious focus fits snugly into the unusual backdrop: the lyrics on Dopestylevsky range from issues of religious identity to the strong environmentalism found here, but it never quite feels like a lecture buried in gimmick. Instead, Eprhyme’s music is created interestingly enough- and with two palettes from which he clearly draws inspiration- that his record works both as slightly over-indulgent hip-hop and a good natured show of faith.
Kristian Matsson, The Tallest Man on Earth, released a new single on Friday through the Adult Swim singles series entitled “Weather of a Killing Kind”. It’s what you might expect from Matsson – a wistful folk song that beautifully weaves it way from start to finish with sweeping vocal melodies and gentle, finger-plucked accompaniment. Matsson has a style, and he’s not ready to let go of it just yet.
But the song is also something new for Matsson; it’s topical. “Weather of a Killing Kind” makes no particular dedication, but you have to believe that Matsson had at least one of the recent natural disasters on his mind when he penned the song. The earthquake in Japan, the Las Conchas wildfire in Santa Fe, or the floods in Pakistan, perhaps. What came to mind for me, perhaps because it hits closer to home, was the tornado in Joplin, MO; today, authorities announced the 159th confirmed death to come of the disaster. “I see the clouds, I see the shadows/It’s rainin’ wolves outside our door/We stand and watch through hesitation/’Cause they’ll be spread out there forevermore,” Matsson sings in the first verse, announcing the impending doom.
But it wouldn’t be a TMoE song without everything turning despairingly personal: “And I feed the clouds, they are my shadow/’Cause I have raised the cubs myself alone.” In the final chorus, the lyrics are transformed: “Here is my weather of a killing kind.” The song is full of beautiful poetic twists and turns, and while…
When Pat Grossi, the man behind Active Child, dropped Curtis Lane into circulation in mid-2010 it marked something determinedly different from the rest of the pack still hung-up on replicating the chillwave sound artists like Washed Out and Toro y Moi were perfecting. Even though he’d been lumped by association into the genre, Grossi’s gorgeous falsetto and sun-stroked harp melodies were much more direct and in many ways much more beautiful than anything his peers were doing and were strung closer to dream pop than anything else.
Now with his debut LP, You Are All I See, ready to go, Grossi has released a track off the album as part of the Adult Swim Singles Program and it’s absolutely beautiful; one of those songs that’s sure to get the hype steamroller into motion, sounding like the r&b vocal sensibilities of How To Dress Well layered over much brighter, more operatic melodies than anything Love Remains could conjure. Listen to “Hanging On” here:
