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.
It’s hard not to have a grudging respect for Jimmy Kimmel.
Not really funny enough to draw in Conan’s fans and not polished enough to draw in Leno’s golden oldies crowd, he just sort of swims along in the half-life that is ABC’s night-time schedule. He has that sort of look about him, as if he grew upwith the dream of becoming a talk show host and stoically accepted the deserved beatings that came with that dream. But he also has the look of a grizzled former idealist, of a man who’d worshiped a certain Italian-American pocket-plunger before finding out he was a cunt.
Kimmel is good, not great, but occasionally he and his team come up with some genuine gold: think ‘I’m Fucking Matt Damon’ or the completely undisguised loathing he exhibited for Leno during the Conangate fiasco. This Josh Groban sketch falls into that category. The only really disappointing aspect is the fact that we won’t shortly be able to buy the advertised 752-song opus inspired by the great man’s tweets.
As 2010 grilled our patience for new Glassjaw material from crispy to charred, we got a record from California’s Letlive that was arguably just as good as anything the former ever released. Fake History might not have Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence’s cathartic, slightly uncomfortable angst or Worship and Tribute’s deranged perfection, but what Letlive ape from their most obvious influence they amplify, polish, and release with more honesty and heart than Daryl Palumbo’s cryptic lyrics and ironic vocal style could ever allow. Letlive don’t shy away from cheese – lead singer Jason Butler’s clean vocals have more than a hint of Claudio Sanchez – but they’re not winking as they indulge in it. Fake History oozes passion, Letlive selling rage as though they are under the impression that they’re the last angry band out there. And though there’s not much density to the album, there doesn’t need to be. Letlive remind us that sometimes you don’t have to give an album a great deal of thought for it to be all sorts of awesome. – Adam D.
It has come to the point where we can safely proclaim that Floridian quintet Anberlin could not record a bad album if they tried. Their fifth LP, Dark Is the Way, Light Is a Place, may not be as ambitious or influential as Cities, nor as catchy and immediate as New Surrender, but it turns out to be a real grower. Densely layered and subtle musical touches abound, but it is Stephen Christian’s majestic vocal work that takes center stage. From the catchy ‘Impossible’ to the acoustic ‘Down,’ from the hard-hitting ‘To The Wolves’ to the splendid ‘The Art of War,’ there is something for everyone on this slightly back-loaded LP that contains absolutely no filler. – Davey B.
The Saddest Landscape got everything right in 2010. Mostly, it involved just being there. See, ever since their hiatus five years ago, there’s been a Saddest Landscape-shaped hole in the musical scene where a band who continually pushed sonic boundaries used to be. Then, out of nowhere, they took everything that happened in post-hardcore since their departure and crammed in
As anyone who knows me knows I’m pretty big into Twitter. I use it a lot—follow me at @tylrmunro if you’re into shameless plugs—and one of the users I enjoy following* is Jose3030. In addition to running 3030fm, Jose is known for having a quick trigger when it comes to capping basketball clips and either putting them on YouTube or converting them to GIFS.
This is not one of these such instances.
And you know what? I’ll leave my commentary out of it. This one kind of speaks for itself
Is Jose3030 the first to discover this? More importantly, does that really matter?
*okay, so I don’t actually follow Jose3030, mostly because I ultimately see his best content via re-tweets. I should probably still follow him, though, and you probably should too if you’re a basketball fan.
