It would appear that child-assisted music is the next big thing coming out of Los Angeles’ indie-leaning confines, what with both Ryan Gosling’s Dead Man’s Bones project and Karen O’s first single from Dave Eggers’ film adapatation Where The Wild Things Are, which boasts, in addition to a bunch of Pitchforky boldfaced names (Bradford Cox, the other two Yeah Yeah Yeahs), backing vocals from “an untrained children’s choir.” I guess this can sort of be some sort of leading indicator as far as rock music / people who are in the demographic that’s most loud about the sort of rock music they consume Growing Up (see also: pioneering online sex mag Nerve’s parenting-centric offshoot Babble). As far as the music goes, I much prefer Gosling’s morbid kid-assisted project to O’s first Wild Things offering; the falsetto-heavy “All Is Love” sounds much more grating than it should be, like if a band was given the task of recreating an Arcade Fire song with the obstacle that they were forced to ingest helium immediately beforehand. More »
Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O has been recording what she calls “a body of love songs” under the name Native Korean Rock over the past two years, and now she’s ready to show them off to the world; four of them are on her MySpace page, and they’re stark, spare affairs with deliberate vocals that… More »
The AP has an interview with Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O today, and in addition to alluding to the fact that she’s kind of terrified of Playboy’s audience, she gets the chance to talk about the time she was stared down by an Emily The Strange lookalike at a radio festival a while back: AP:… More »
We haven’t a clue why the Karen O-Kool Keith collaboration “The Teaser” is hitting the Web right now: After all, according to this MTV.com article, the song was recorded two years ago for a porn-music soundtrack that, so far as we can tell, was never released. More »
Firestorm at Stereogum: In their second Karen O demo post, the leaker of the demos confessed, TV On The Radio guitarist Dave Sitek’s damning blog post about the CD-R allegedly being stolen from him was reprinted, and the commenters waved “Live Free (Music) Or Die” flags. More »
KO At Home is a collection of Karen O tracks that were allegedly found at a member of TV On The Radio’s former apartment; the liner notes quote Oscar Wilde, and the few songs floating around out there, like the tambourine-and-guitar “Beside Me,” give new meaning to the idea of being intimate with a… More »
