With the events of last week still fresh in my mind, I’ve been able to reflect on the contrasting Guns N’ Roses-related experiences the past couple of months have thrown my way.
Last Wednesday, I was treated to the most bizarre concert-going experience of my life, as Axl Rose showed up an hour late for the fourth show running, got pissy with the audience for booing him and subsequently left the stage when a water bottle was thrown limply in his general direction from the crowd. A third of the crowd had left by the time he returned, 45 minutes later, to sleepwalk through his contractually obligated set. I’m still not entirely sure what to think of it all.
Compared with my experience when Slash came to town in June… well, there is no comparison. The man took to the stage on time and blasted through a mix of cuts from his recent solo CD, old Guns and Velvet Revolver hits and even a couple of Snakepit songs for the diehards. Frontman Myles Kennedy (better known for his work with Creed offshoot Alter Bridge) was a bit of a let-down… at least, it seemed that way, until Slash belatedly revealed that Kennedy had been suffering from flu and had barely been able to speak all day.
It’s an interesting contrast: the self-absorbed rock star who can’t even bring himself to show up for a $10 million-dollar gig on time, and a true professional who will play…
Having already broken out in his native England, Frank Turner is a rising star in the US punk community as of late. As if his signing to Epitaph for all his releases stateside wasn’t enough of a sign that the British singer-songwriter has been gaining his footing in the states, successful tour spots with The Offspring and Social D on top of a number of headlining runs all across the country have exposed Frank to thousands of new fans. Last night at the Troubadour, located in the west-side of Los Angeles, a sold out crowd sang their hearts out to a venerable folk-punk smorgasbord. Even California punk legends such as NOFX’s Fat Mike and Bad Religion guitarist/Epitaph Records head honcho Brett Gurewitz could be seen roaming the grounds among the fans.
The night began with Lansing, Michigan’s Cheap Girls. The only act of the night that didn’t feature acoustic guitars, Cheap Girls took control of the gathering crowd with their upbeat Texas is the Reason by way of The Replacements brand of crunchy, no-frills rock and roll. Given the context of the rest of the night, they were a wonderful appetizer to the main course of Andrew Jackson Jihad and Frank Turner. The only downside was that given the crowd’s unfamiliarity with their material and the incredibly low placement of singer and bassist’s Ian Graham’s vocals in the overall mix killed the potential audience participation factor during their performance.
Baths‘ new album Cerulean has been blowing me away for only twenty four hours but I must share its excellence with the world. I’d write a review but the video for “Lovely Bloodflow” is memorable and haunting enough make the sell on my behalf.
After watching a number of reality television shows, specifically Survivor, the music tends to be a dead giveaway in challenges. Often, you will find a climax or crescendo for any attempt, such as shooting coconuts in a basket. Along with that, you will hear a triumphant crescendo as a team is about to win. Here is an example of the music in reality television shows, in this upcoming years The Amazing Race. I will let the video speak for itself, but listen to the music as the events unfold as this contestant tries to hurl a watermelon at a knight in shining armor.
Yes, I just wrote a blog about reality television so I could show Sputnikmusic’s readers the most incredible moment of reality television challenge.
On Sunday, the biggest clouds in the sky were those made of dirt and dust kicked up at every stage from dancing. Unlike Saturday, Sunday brought fewer early birds, likely because of the exhaustion from the day before, and a slightly weaker initial line-up. The weather was once again picturesque. When I arrived, I really had no set plan of who I would see until Laidback Luke. Therefore, I started the day the Red Bull Music Academy Riverside Stage where XXXChange was playing to a pintsize crowd of about 50 to 100 people while there had to have been over 750 people at the time and stage the day before. There simply was not much of a buzz at any tent early on, even if XXXChange was dropping mixes of DJ Kool’s “Let Me Clear My Throat.” However, D. Ramirez was slowly sucking everyone to the Hilltop Arena where all of the local house favorites were blasting while Jon Hopkins was luring a more IDM crowd with his haunting beats, something that was out of the ordinary at Electric Zoo, in a good way.
Trying to find some shade in the afternoon sun.
On a side note, the tents set up at the Red Bull Music Academy Riverside Stage and Hilltop Area were perfectly sized and positioned, especially if it had rained. Unfortunately, a few feet outside of the tent and the sound quality was unbearable. In…
Many of you will remember producer wait what‘s, mashup project the notorious xx. The album quickly gained a ridiculous amount of attention from a variety of sources including The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Rolling Stone among others. Rather than sit back and live fat, wait what decided to ball out and follow up with a mixtape, this is real life, which features some hood tracks that gather source materials from modern indie (Sleigh Bells, Justice, LCD Soundsytem, etc.) and the annals of the late nineties rap (Black Rob, Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz).
This past Labor Day weekend brought magnificent weather to the New York City area, as Hurricane Earl bypassed the area completely, allowing the second edition of the Electric Zoo festival to thrive. For a total of 24 hours split between Saturday and Sunday, Randall’s Island was New York City’s hottest club, and potentially a newfound earthquake hotspot. Booming beats resonating from four precisely placed stages likely sent the rest of the island humming.
Festival goers dressed in green latex suits, deer costumes, and tiger body paint, among other bizarre outfits littered the grounds, provided a unique flavor of diversity. While the average stereotype of dance music and the New York area would assume that it would be thousands of juicehead guidos with blowouts, it was hardly the case, in fact quite the opposite. The mix of concert goers among the 25,000 plus each day was welcoming to all sorts of characters geared with pacifiers and surgical masks.
Starting off on Saturday, LA Riots brought early excitement, mixing Estelle’s “Freak” with distorted beats while catching onto the infectious “Pon de Floor” by Major Lazer in what proved to be a house filled weekend. Forty minutes felt like five minutes during LA Riots set as climaxes and crescendos came at perfectly timed moments. After a glorious start, I quickly made the rash and hasty decision of watching Boris (not to be confused with Japanese noise-rockers Boris) at the Main Stage, whose set was slightly disappointing and underwhelming. Coupled with…
Besides having really great album art and a frustratingly hip name, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. have talent. They can write a damn good pop song. “Vocal Chords” is one of three examples off their Horse Power EP, which also includes a cover of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”.
Have a listen:
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As part of my ongoing efforts to educate the masses about an archaic musical genre that nobody really liked in the first place, I’ll be highlighting some of the forgotten classics (i.e. all of them) of the hair metal era. Anybody who had harboured any lingering respect for me up to this point will soon see the error of his ways.
George Lynch formed Lynch Mob after the original line-up of Dokken disintegrated in 1989.
Their one and only hit album, Wicked Sensation, was released in 1990. Singer Oni Logan left soon afterward, and the band flagged badly as grunge trounced hair metal in everything but the style stakes. The band endured a volatile ’90s, breaking up and reforming regularly, though 1998 proved a particular low point as they attempted to capitalise upon the popularity of rap-rock with Smoke This – think Tommy Lee’s Methods of Mayhem but way, way shitter.
‘Wicked Sensation’ is the opening track, the title track and the best track on their debut album. Vocalist Oni Logan isn’t particularly distinctive a singer, but Lynch found him nigh-on-impossible to replace, and it’s not hard to work out why on this impossibly catchy pop-metal number.
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‘We Used To Wait’ is one of the more interesting tracks on Arcade Fire’s third album, the Suburbs, both from a musical and lyrical perspective.
Here, Brooklyn indie rockers the Drums take the song on a completely different course. The cover, recorded for BBC’s Live Lounge with Huw Stephens, resembles more closely a less jangly version of the Cure, in stark contrast to the original’s glossy barrelhouse piano-led arrangement.
MP3: The Drums – ‘We Used To Wait’ (Arcade Fire cover)
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As part of my ongoing efforts to educate the masses about an archaic musical genre that nobody really liked in the first place, I’ll be highlighting some of the forgotten classics (i.e. all of them) of the hair metal era. Anybody who had harboured any lingering respect for me up to this point will soon see the error of his ways.
#1: Tigertailz – ‘Love Bomb Baby’
Spare a thought for Tigertailz – not alone did the group’s breakthrough album Bezerk unfortunately coincide with the popping of the hair metal bubble, but they’ve also been forced to deal with the eternal indignity of being Welsh. They never stood a chance.
Having said that, Tigertailz can always console themselves with the dubious honour of being the UK’s most successful hair metal act… ever! (Def Leppard notwithstanding, the Sheffield quartet being of an earlier vintage). Bezerk was released in 1990 to mild applause, with infectious lead single ‘Love Bomb Baby’ and obligatory power ballad ‘Heaven’ (not a patch on the Warrant track of the same name) driving album sales above a respectable quarter of a million.
Musically, Tigertailz were always more Motley Crue and Accept than Poison or Pretty Boy Floyd, but ‘Love Bomb Baby’ is the exact opposite: pure bubblegum pop wrapped in a driving, hard rock shell. Remarkably, given the genre’s track record, the “love bomb” in question does not, in fact, refer to the singer’s penis (or anyone else’s).
To the uncultured ear (and that includes my own), searching for good post-rock can feel like a hiding to nothing. It’s not that there isn’t plenty of good material to choose from – there is – but otherwise it can take an awful long time to figure out that something is, in fact, shit.
Irish trio Halves gave me no such trouble – featured tune ‘May Your Enemies Never Find Happiness’ practically assaulted me the first time I heard it. It’s not that it’s particularly loud – they don’t seem to go to the same ear-splitting levels as other, more conventional bands (on record at least) – but it builds slowly and deliberately with soft vocals and a chiming blues guitar motif, so that the inevitable crescendos are just an aspect, rather than an aim, of the song.
It sounds like a typical post-rock track, and it is, but it’s also an incredibly moving one.
‘May Your Enemies Never Find Happiness’ is taken from the seven-track EP Haunt Me When I’m Drowsy.
Trawling through endless press releases and PR pitches is, unfortunately, a major aspect of my life – I say unfortunately because I am currently sat at home at 4am on a Sunday morning wading through release after release in search of something – ANYTHING – that will make the suffering worthwhile.
Also, I had dry clothes on the washing line and then it started raining. Shit.
‘Hard To Say I Love You’ isn’t quite the panacea I crave, but it is the first thing I’ve seen all night thoughtful enough and, dare I say it, innocent enough to penetrate the deep-rooted cynicism I’ve built up this eve.
Dylan works as an a&r at a label (I don’t know if he wants me to say which), but he contacted me on Friday with an entirely different project: a summery pop video he made with his brother and an unnamed friend. ‘Hard To Say I Love’ you is undeniably raw and more than a little bit trite, but the man I believe to have identified as Dylan spends most of the video topless, which is always a plus.
Dylan and his brother Noah hope to make it as more than just a music video in the near future, and I can only wish them the best of luck as their video has made my life just a little bit brighter this evening.
You’re probably going to need an hour-long EP to get through this, so start listening.
Anyone remotely connected to the indie music world knows that Sufjan Stevens surprised the world last Friday by releasing an hour-long EP completely unannounced. Even more surprising was the mode of release. Instead of putting it on iTunes (although it did reach other digital stores on Monday), Sufjan and Asthmatic Kitty Records decided to upload the EP on Bandcamp. And it was probably the smartest decision they could have made, considering Sufjan’s usually tech-savvy fanbase who, if the EP had premiered on iTunes, would probably have pirated the EP if only to avoid the awkward file format used by iTunes.
To compare the world of digital music stores to the world of Internet browsers, the iTunes Store looks more and more like Internet Explorer–widely used but antiquated in many ways, rendering them completely unusable to anyone who does not use iTunes. iTunes has also faced numerable phishing scams, including a very recent one that came about the same time as Sufjan’s EP.
Bandcamp, in keeping with the web browser analogy, is the Mozilla Firefox of digital music stores–not necessarily the fastest, but the one with the most customizable options. On Bandcamp, the musician or label simply uploads their master files, and the service converts them to any file format you could possibly want: 320 kbps mp3, VBR mp3, FLAC, Apple Loseless,…
