I’ll drop some further notes on this in the morning, but for now I’ll invite you all to tune in to the live broadcast of the sixth annual Choice Music Prize (the Irish Mercury Prize/Polaris/Triple J awards) ceremony.
The show has already been in progress for a little over an hour, with Halves and Fight Like Apes having already completed their sets. James Vincent McMorrow is performing as I speak and the rest of the nominees, with the exception of Imelda May who’s otherwise engaged, will take to the stage as the night progresses.
Today FM DJ Paul McLoone will be interviewing the performers between sets and chairman Tony Clayton-Lea of the Irish Times will announce the winner at around 10.45 GMT. And Morrissey is there! You can read some of my more detailed thoughts on this year’s prize here.
A full list of nominees can be seen here:
Adebisi Shank – This is the Second Album of a Band Called Adebisi Shank The Cast of Cheers – Chariot Cathy Davey – The Nameless Fight Like Apes – The Body of Christ and the Legs of Tina Turner Halves – It Goes, It Goes (Forever and Ever) Imelda May – Mayhem James Vincent McMorrow – Early in the Morning O Emperor – Hither Thither Two Door Cinema Club – Tourist History Villagers – Becoming a Jackal
Previous winners include Jape, the Divine Comedy, Super Extra Bonus Party and Julie Feeney. Adrian Crowley won the 2009 gong.
I think it goes without saying that when it comes to the indie music universe, there was no more celebrated reunion in recent memory than that of seminal Canadian post-rock ennead Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The announcement that they were going to be curating the 2010 All Tomorrow’s Parties Christmas event in Minehead, England created such a wave of excitement that when Godspeed You! Black Emperor expanded their comeback to include a series of tours in Europe and North America tickets sold out almost as soon as they went on sale. On February 22nd, 2011 their reunion tour made its way to Pomona, California, the first of two stops in Southern California (the other being at the Music Box in Hollywood a day later).
Joining Godspeed You! Black Emperor for the night was the stoner-drone band Om. Om took the stage right before nine o’clock. Consisting of bassist and vocalist Al Cisneros (the name should be familiar to anyone who has listened to the pioneering sludge band Sleep), Emil Amos on drums (who also plays in Grails), and multi-instrumentalist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Om’s spiritual bass grooves entranced the crowd at the Fox Theater for a solid forty minutes. Playing a set consisting mainly of tracks from their God Is Good album, Cisneros’ rolling bass grooves and zen like vocals had the audience hypnotized, but this was the calm before the storm, as when it became time towards the latter half of their set, things became more ferocious,…
There’s a hell of a lot going on in “Don’t Stop”, the latest teaser off The Dodos’ forthcoming No Color. It’s instilled with the groups typical energy, tightly wound around masterful finger-plucking and pitter-patter percussion, and I’d dare say it might just be one of their best songs to date. There’s still no sign of Neko Case’s reported contributions to their 4th LP but it’s safe to say my interest in the rest of No Color has hit a fever pitch.
It’s fair to state that most of my previous gig attending experiences have been relatively limited to the rock / pop-punk / post-hardcore spectrum. I’ve never really considered going to too many indie gigs (how UnSputnik of me), despite liking my fair share of bands that could loosely be categorized as such. Most indie music seems best enjoyed via headphones when in a certain mood, rather than in a live setting… So I’ve always imagined if I did attend such a concert, I’d just be one of Win Butler’s friends standing there with my arms crossed, drinking one beer per song. I’d need something extra to be entertained; a strings or horn section, a crazy front-man or a stage invasion! English band Foals seemed the perfect (pardon the pun) antidote for my situation; a group whose debut LP was filled with catchy & energetic math-rock, and whose follow-up was simply too f*cken fantastic to ignore.
On an extremely humid Thursday night when floods were ruining cities to the north & bushfires were ravaging cities to the west (seriously, our climate is screwed), Mr & Mrs. Boy wandered on over to The Palace Theatre in downtown Melbourne in order to witness the aforementioned Brits. First up however were Brisbane indie-poppers Last Dinosaurs, a quartet who initially did not seem like a good match for such a gig. Having heard all of 4 tracks from the band prior to this night, I had pegged them as more of the Vampire Weekend style…
I’ll let this video speak for itself, however, for reference I suggest you listen to the original track before listening to the orchestrated transposition of “Jane Doe.” The maker of the video used a program called Symphobia to create this: needless to say, it sounds incredible.
Amid all the excitement generated by Odd Future pair Tyler, the Creator and Hodgy Beats’ show-stealing appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, nobody seems to have noticed that they sold out.
Not that there’s anything expressly wrong with that – it’s just interesting to note when a group that have built their reputation on the uncontrolled, self-consciously offensive speech abandon that schema at the first offer of a plush TV spot. With little or no material in their armoury that would be deemed suitable for network television, Tyler and Hodgy took to the NBC stage with an altered version of new single ‘Sandwitches,’ minus the four f-words contained in the first line and numerous instances thereafter.
In spite of Tyler’s liberating use of the entire set during his performance and an unusual diversion involving a gnome, the duo’s performance was notable for how tame it was in comparison to the group’s deliberately provocative material. Tyler’s debut mixtape, 2009’s hugely promising Bastard, runs the gamut of hip hop clichés from misogyny, homophobia and rape fantasies right through the trite devotion to his mom. The beats are simplistic and undeniably raw, but there’s an obtuse sense of melody on tracks like ‘Odd Toddlers,’ ‘French!’ and ‘Bastard’ that hint at the potential of this 19-year-old, husky-voiced artist.
The concept of a hip hop collective is one that is alien to most rock critics who are wedded to the ideal of the nuclear four- and five-piece rock band, but the…
I’ve listened to a lot of mashups in my day. Normally they are party tracks that take a popular club beat and superimpose the vocals of a top 40 track of the moment ala Girl Talk or sometimes they tend to dig a little bit deeper to give us something like last year’s Kids and Explosions or the noted Jay Z/Linkin Park collaboration, but every once and a while I’ll stumble upon a mashup that truly leaves me floored. Four Tet’s mash up of Nas’ “It Ain’t Hard to Tell” with Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “Sleep” is simply mesmerizing. The ebb and flow of Nas’ rhymes and the gentle swell of strings that build and build come together so flawlessly that it was almost as if they were made for each other.
This has been everywhere on the Internet today, but for those who, for some reason, have missed out on what will almost certainly end up as a defining moment for hip-hop in 2011, then watch the video below. Unbelievably, OF manages to scare the fuck out of old white people in middle America, make Fallon watchable (and even sorta cool), and make Mos Def go totally insane, in less than four minutes. These guys are so totally gonna blow up like crazy. Swaaaaaaag
There’s a lot of great sites out there offering interesting, artistic and often unique videos of the artists you love talking, creating and playing music. Here are some you should definitely know about:
I’ll say this straight away: The Take Away Shows series produces some of the most consistently incredible videos of any of the sites I’ll post in this blog. Started in 2006 as an expansion of La Blogotheque, director Mathieu Saura (under the pseudonym Vincent Moon) began filming one-take videos of artists playing songs in completely regular settings (someone’s apartment, taking a walk down the road, on a park lawn) and often stripped down and/or acoustic. He has since gone on to film music documentaries for The National, R.E.M. and Beirut amongst others, but it’s his Take Away project that really shines, having now produced over 120 videos.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you guys can rip on the Fork all you want but the .tv side of the site compiles some of the best music videos out there. From the Daytripping sessions with artists like Bon Iver and The Black Keys, to the Tunnelvision live series, and not least of all, the Special Presentation videos featuring…
Dan Mangan’s Nice, Nice, Very Nice was shortlisted for last year’s Polaris Prize. Unfortunately, it didn’t win, Karkwa (who?) did with Les Chemins de Verre, beating out Mangan and other big names like Broken Social Scene, Caribou, Shad, Tegan and Sara and the Sadies.
So basically the Polaris Prize is kind of a crock, but if you’re from Canada you probably knew that already. But if you’re from Canada and don’t know Dan Mangan, well, you’re kind of a crock, too.
Maybe Nice, Nice, Very Nice isn’t the best album on last year’s short-list, but fuck if it isn’t close to it. “Robots Need Love Too,” the album’s second single, is a lot of fun, but as fun as “Robots” is, it’s nothing compared to the album’s third single.
“Sold” is everything that makes Dan Mangan stand out in an increasingly oversaturated market of quirky folk pop—namely, it’s really good. The track adds a bit of Barenaked Ladies into one of Mangan’s twangiest songs, and it’s all nicely carried by his somehow gruff-yet-boyish vocals.
And the video’s kind of cool, too. So watch it—and listen to the song—here. Pretty please?
Sometimes history is hard, you guys. I mean big history. Like, Hegelian sized history. History that spans across entire civilizations and generations. It’s hard for us because sometimes that historical meta-narrative is forever just out of each. There are moments, though, when we are thrown a little bone by the gods; we are given a fragment in time that simply defines a generation, nay, an entire civilization. Roman antiquity had Caligula naming his horse as his consul, Early Modern Europe had the Defenestration of Prague, The Victorian Period… was just depressing, and the 1990’s had Sockem Boppers with arguably the greatest commercial jingle of all time.
But what about our generation? Where’s our summarizing event? Sure, some might argue it’s Radiohead’s Kid A in long, pretentious, essayist reviews. Others might even claim this war, or that war, or the internet, or other such fads. I will not mince words: these are all horribly inaccurate. I know these suggestions are inaccurate because I myself have seen the very moment that defines our generation.
It has a little bit of everything: fat men breakdancing, rastlin’, grown men in silly costumes, historical inaccuracy, hypnosis, hillbillies, borderline mental deficiency, music that isn’t even from our generation, overzealous commentators. In so many words, this is our generation in a nutshell. A glorious, glorious nutshell.
Roland Barthes theorized that there are two types of text: the text of pleasure and the text of bliss. The text of pleasure is simply that which washes over you in an aesthetically pleasing manner; the text of bliss, however, forces you to question your very…
This weekend is a bumper one for fans of egg-chasing on both sides of the Atlantic.
For the Yanks among us, Sunday night is the big day on the football calendar (of which more later in the weekend). But for we Europeans of the oval ball persuasion, the first weekend in February ushers in the beginning of the Six Nations rugby union championships, fought every year between England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France and, since 2000, Italy. It hasn’t got the popularity of real football (and by “real football” I mean Gaelic football, of course), but it is a unique event on the sporting calendar here since the demise of soccer’s Home Nations Championship.
As 2011 is a World Cup year, the championship comes packaged with an extra bite this year. As with the round-ball game, the English have taken it upon themselves to set aside the pessimism of the past three years, disregard all form and logic to install themselves as favourites to win everything in sight. It’s a lovable trait that only the English seem to possess and,with the tournament due to kick off in just under half an hour with England facing arch-rivals Wales in Cardiff, it’ll be interesting to see just how long it lasts.
For the time-being, we’ll have to make do with a comparison of the two countries’ respective singing prowess. Rugby is the closest thing Wales has to a national sport, but singing is not very far behind, and Katherine Jenkins’ regular appearance at the…
It all started as a joke; a suggestion on Twitter that people should go out and send “Pow”, arguably grime’s premier posse cut (and certainly its most famous), to the top of the Christmas charts in the UK. Lethal Bizzle – the man who enjoyed top billing on the original track – couldn’t have predicted the reaction to his comment, but at least he was smart enough to harness its power and set about recording an updated version straight away.
Problem is, he rushed it.
“Pow 2011” is still pretty good – P Money, Wiley, and Ghetts absolutely kill their verses – but it’s not hard to listen to it and think about how much better it could have been. Kano completely fluffs his bars (and takes 16 to everybody else’s 8 too), JME’s attempts at singing are just awkward, and Chipmunk brags about having written “Oopsy Daisy” – trust me son, that’s the kind of thing you should be letting people forget. Most worryingly, it just feels like, for the most part, everybody is trying to upstage all the other MCs on the track – Face, especially, taints his own verse by doing this, as do JME, Chipmunk, and Kano, and even Lethal B’s chorus, noticeably more aggressive than the original, just sounds like he’s trying to shout over the crowd. As if that wasn’t disappointing enough, it’s even been revealed that some MCs were denied a spot on the track because they took too…
After three long, agonizing years of stark Robin Pecknold demos and hit-or-miss J. Tillman solo albums, Fleet Foxes as a whole finally return with their announcement of a new album, Helplessness Blues and stream of the album’s title track, which hints at an album that sticks to the sound that brought Fleet Foxes to their indie stardom in the first place. Part “Ragged Wood” and part “Mykonos”, the song divides evenly into two sections: a pastoral acoustic section and a more grandiose rock section. The song’s weakest point is the transition between these two sections because, frankly, there isn’t one. The acoustic strumming slows a bit, and the second section enters with the bluntness of a sledgehammer. The mixing between these two sections is pretty awful, so hopefully, Helplessness Blues won’t have these same issues throughout the album, considering the brilliant production that characterized the group’s self-titled debut.
