Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of January 18 , 2011. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff or contributors.
The Afro Soultet – Afrodesia (Luv N Haight)
Gregg Allman – Low Country Blues (Rounder)
Aquabats – Hi-Five Soup! (Fearless Records) Blackmore’s Night – Autumn Sky(Spinefarm/Fontana)
James Blunt – Some Kind Of Trouble (Atlantic) Braids – Native Speaker(Kanine Records) — Adam Downer
Cobra Skulls – Bringing The War Home (Fat Wreck Chords) The Decemberists – The King Is Dead(Capitol) — Adam Thomas
Elusive – Hip Hop For Hipsters (Elusive)
Brandon Heath – Leaving Eden (Provident)
Lady Lazarus – Mantic (Apartment Life Records)
Steve Lukather – All’s Well That Ends Well (Mascot Records)
Madlib – Low Budget High Fi Music (Madlib Invazion)
Moon Blazers – The Milky Williams Quintet (Domination Recordings) Motorhead – The World Is Yours(Motörhead Music/UDR) — Joseph Viney Amanda Palmer – Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under(Self Released)
Pearl Jam – Live On Ten Legs (Monkeywrench)
Roomful of Blues – Hook, Line & Sinker (Alligator Records) The Sand Band – All Through the Night(Go To Hell/Deltasonic) — Keelan H. The Script – Science & Faith(Phonogenic) — Davey Boy
Smith Westerns – Dye It Blonde (Fat Possum)
Social Distortion – Hard Times And Nursery Rhymes (Epitaph) Stratovarius – Elysium…
I’m not somebody who’s prone to hyperbole, so I’ll say this in my own typically understated manner: this is the best thing ever to happen to me in my life.
Luckily, we’ve been supplied with a couple of advanced screenings from the tape, and today saw Dublin scuzz-pop outfit Squarehead premiere their cover of labelmatesAdebisi Shank‘s ‘(-_-)’ (in single quotes that almost looks like Napster propaganda.) It’s not just a straight cover though: the trio have added a sun-kissed vocal melody so that we can all now sing along to the tune without looking as demented as I usually do.
It’s with a heavy heart and jazz hands that we bid farewell today to two of our longest-serving staff members.
Channing Freeman and Nick Greer have given a lot to the site in their time here – Nick being one of the few to remain from the site’s launch – and we thank them for everything. They’ll still be back from time to time to contribute reviews and blogs, but for all intents and purposes they can now be considered Professors Emeritus of Sputnik Univ… sorry, that’s way too cheesy. They gone, basically.
Vicious Social Darwinists that we are, though, we’ve wasted little time in giving birth to a new litter of contributor-level and staff babies. We decided to break with convention on this occasion and actively began to advertise the position outside the existing community. The result was that we received over double the number of applications as we have in previous rounds of promotions.
Overwhelmed by the quality of applications put forward, we’ve decided to go ahead and bring in four new contributors (on top of the two added before Christmas) and five new staff members -three from the existing contributor pool and two who impressed us so much we decided to take a leap of faith and grandfather them in at the highest level.
We’d like to thank everybody who applied for both staff and contributor positions. We were pleasantly surprised at the consistently high standard of the applications and many of you can consider yourselves…
Watch Ezra Koenig, of Vampire Weekend, and both of The Black Keys slug it out for Stephen Colbert’s “Best Alternative Music Album” vote; the dubiously titled Grammy category introduced in 1991 to recognize the section of the music industry that existed “outside of the mainstream music consciousness”. Past winners include 7x platinum Parachutes and 8x platinum A Rush of Blood To The Head, both of Codplay’s wins to date, UK Albums Chart #1 Icky Thump, the third of three wins in five years for The White Stripes, and Radiohead’s 3x platinum OK Computer, platinum-within-a-week Kid A, and the self-released, 3,000,000+ units sold In Rainbows, amongst a host of other obscure, mega-selling worldwide phenomenons.
Chet Hanks, son of Oscar-winning actor Tom, is the latest celebrity offspring to try his hand at becoming a rapper. Hanks, rapping under the name Chet Haze, wisely sticks to the subjects he knows best. Not quite his cameo appearance in the recent Indiana Jones movie or the dastardly butler forgetting to fold his socks, but as a student at the somewhat prestigious Northwestern University in Chicago he’s clearly keen to show off his school spirit.
Haze’s debut release, ‘White and Purple (Northwestern Remix),’ is a reworking of Wiz Khalifa’s 2010 hit ‘Black and Yellow‘ – white and purple being the school’s colours. It’s a more or less straight re-working of the original, except with lyrics tailored to reflect the life of a rich kid living away from home for the first time. Think a clubbier Asher Roth without the accidental racism and you’re more or less there.
I haven’t been the nicest to Dallas Green over the years but I’ll be the first to tell you that he does one hell of a job on Canada’s first hip-hop anthem of the new year.
That’s right, I said hip-hop.
Last week Consequence of Sound premiered “Live Forever”, one half of Two Songs, the upcoming charity 12” by Shad and Dallas Green. Shad, for those of you who don’t know, is absolutely fucking awesome. Last year he put out TSOL, his third entry into the imaginary Canadian Hip-Hop Hall of Fame. Like Shad, TSOL is also fucking awesome.
Do you know what else is fucking awesome? “Live Forever”, which you can hear below.
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If you like what you hear and feel like supporting the Skate4Cancer you can pre-order Two Songs at MapleMusic. Act fast, though, because with a limited pressing of just 556 copies I imagine City & Colour fan girls will eat this up faster than any fat joke I can make.
For all the shit Britney gets nowadays, her singles have always been top notch. Even when her vocals were long ago deemed utterly fake and her persona as manufactured as a slice of American cheese, a fan would always have the singles: the sensual “I’m A Slave 4 U,” the clever “If You Seek Amy,” the absolutely perfect “Toxic.” And here is Britney trailblazing pop yet again with a single that blows most of Circus out of the water. Britney does dubstep, something I couldn’t believe until I verified from multiple different streams. Listen to the whole song (it’s really good!), but the bridge around 2:05 almost made me fall off my chair.
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Indie stars The xx seem to be taking it easy these days, but the same can’t be said of their beatsmith extraordinaire, Jamie Smith, who runs around with the under the name of Jamie xx these days. Apart from his prolific remix work, Smith is set to drop I’m New Here on February 22, which features reworkings of some choice cuts from soul master Gil Scott-Heron, dunked in a ripe dose of xx production. Snippets of the upcoming album can be found all across the net, but the latest track to drop now comes with it’s very own pink rectangular block as a visual aide. Slick, just like the song.
Despite the fact that solid information on Wu Lyf is exceedingly scarce, they’re the type of band I feel I know better than half the bands whose middle names and favourite TV shows I could find on their myspace pages in a matter of minutes. For one thing, they’re genuinely different from anything else around right now. They’re a band who seem to willingly defy and avoid any sense of definition; the most unwilling of rock stars. But for a group so determined for mystery and behaviour that seems to only perpetuate their legend, their elusiveness only serves to shoot down the idea that it’s all a gimmick. And if that isn’t enough, the music should speak for itself because what Wu Lyf have is something truly special: tortured, melancholic and absolutely mesmerizing. I couldn’t recommend it enough.
To mark the death of Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty, acknowledged here on Tuesday, Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters dug out an old cover of the late great’s biggest hit, ‘Baker Street.’
The Foos’ cover of ‘Baker Street’ originally appeared way back in 1998 as a b-side to their ‘My Hero’ single (this being back in the days when physical singles actually existed, although most were on CD by then, thus rendering the term ‘b-side’ technically obsolete).
Do you want to know why I’m starting to believe that 2012 is the end of the world? Because it has to be. Hell, at this point I hope it’s sooner. Consider this a small sign of the apocalypse: a couple of weeks ago, Billboard announced Nickelback’s Dark Horse as the best selling hard rock album of 2010. Dark Horse is a terrible album by an awful band, an album so bad that it relies on idiomatic blanket statements to emphasize just how bland it is. It’s like listening to dry paint. Paint which is dry because Dark Horsecame out in 2008 and yet here we are, with 2010 coming to a close and listeners still finding new ways to avoid the heap-shit that is Nickelback’s sixth album.
I found this online. Isn't the world a depressing place to live?
That’s where Fred Durst comes in. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll be the hump that breaks the [dark] horse’s back. Then maybe, just maybe, we can take Dark Horse behind the shed and shoot it one, two, three times in the fucking head. Limp Bizkit has the chance to save hard rock, but for that to happen, and for Durst & co. to make my weirdest dreams come true, they’ll actually have to release Gold Cobra, their first release in a decade with their original line up. The problem is, I’m starting to think it’ll never come out.
As much as year-end lists are basically a conglomeration of everything said about an album over a twelve-month period, it would be criminal not to repeat once more the artistic merits of Joanna Newsom. Newsom went from a quirky (bordering on annoying) harpist intent on increasing her listeners’ patience to a well-developed songwriter and accomplished vocalist who learned how to trim the fat from her songs to create a much better product, and from an elfish girl who posed in animal skins to a sexy woman in hot pants and high heels. She has always had ambition, but never has she been as focused as she is on Have One on Me, which overflows with realized potential and the kind of songs we always knew she could write. Perhaps what is most surprising about the album is the fact that, after her grating warble on Ys, the songs on this album go down easy. Yes, like falling asleep. – Channing F.
Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty died on Tuesday following a long illness. He was 63.
Rafferty enjoyed moderate success in the early ’70s with Stealers Wheel, landing a lone hit single with the Dylan parody ‘Stuck in the Middle’ before breaking up in 1975. ‘Stuck in the Middle’ was given the new lease of life in 1992 when director Quentin Tarentino chose it to score the iconic torture scene in Reservoir Dogs.
After Stealers Wheel broke up, Rafferty resumed his burgeoning solo career and, in 1978, released his best-known work, City to City. The album’s success was fueled by its lead single, ‘Baker Street,’ whose burning saxophone hook has been credited with the “Baker Street phenomenon,” an explicable ursurge in saxophone sales across the UK in the late ’70s.
Rafferty never recreated the success of ‘Baker Street,’ in part an effect of his shyness and unwillingness to perform live, but he periodically released albums right up until the turn of the millennium.
