Ex-Moloko lady Roisin Murphy’s solo debut Ruby Blue was my favorite album of 2005, a mix of torch songs set to sumptuous house beats and fuzzed-out electronic glam rock co-masterminded by click-and-cut sampler whiz Matthew Herbert, with Murphy’s dusky diva voice as the album’s true star. From the forthcoming, multi-producer sequel, Overpowered (due in October), “Modern Timing” is a little less quirky than anything on Ruby Blue, but compensates by being Murphy’s most pleasingly direct slice of grown-up disco-pop to date, complete with Daft Punk voices as the Pips to her Gladys and strings to die for. If you can’t listen to anything Madonna’s done since Bedtime Stories without a single tear running down your cheek, this may be for you:
It’s been pretty well-established that I’m lukewarm on “funny” cover versions of songs, and four years at a major Midwestern university have caused me to shudder involuntarily whenever the words “a capella” are uttered. More »
Rogue Wave’s third album, Asleep At Heaven’s Gate, hits stores on Sept. 18, and “Lake Michigan” is the first track from it to make its way out to the Internet; it’s a pretty, chiming song that’s overflowing with harmonies and hand-claps. More »
There’s a little less than four weeks to go until this year’s Video Music Awards–can you feel the excitement? even if, for me, it’s more like a looming sense of dread?–and the NME is reporting that Mark Ronson is going to help out Timbaland as far as “musical director” duties go; he’ll conduct the house band, which will be made up of some dude from Jamiroquai and the Dap-Kings. All well and good, except for the part where the NME refers to as “Amy Winehouse’s band.” Not to play fact-checking cuz, but come on–Winehouse doesn’t even use that band all the time in your home country, NME. Where’s the love for Sharon Jones, who has a new album with the Dap-Kings coming out next month? Maybe if Amy’s still out of commission, she can step in last-minute, push Ronson out of the way, and burn through “100 Days And 100 Nights,” so there’ll at least be one watchable moment during the telecast:
A California jury slapped $1.52 billion in damages on Microsoft earlier this year in a lawsuit filed by French company Alcatel-Lucent, which claimed that Microsoft’s MP3 software infringed on several of Alcatel-Lucent’s MP3-related patents. Microsoft counterclaimed that the liscensing fees for the various products the company uses were all paid up to the appropriate parties, and Alcatel-Lucent wasn’t one of them. A San Diego judge agreed yesterday and overturned the verdict, allowing the digital end of the music biz to sigh in relief that their livelihoods were no longer on the chopping block:
It’s not much of a secret that the Baltimore trio Celebration is pretty much my favorite new band of recent days–their first album was full of fury and beauty, and they’re a spectacle live, in large part because lead singer Katrina Ford is a whirling dervish who isn’t afraid to drag the audience into her stage show. The Modern Tribe, their second album, comes out in October, and it’s easily one of my most anticipated albums of the year; the opening track, “Evergreen,” is a soaring, astonishing song that’s anchored by a twirling organ line buried deep within:
“Warning” by the Baltimore duo Monarch just landed in our inbox, and we’d be damned if it hasn’t already claimed a space on our top 10 songs of right now; it’s a pop song dressed up in layers and layers of feedbacking guitars and slightly distorted, sing-song vocals by Jenn Wasner, and it sounds… More »
King of Prussia are not from that benighted town of malls–they’re from Athens, Ga., and are on the reawakened Kindercore label. While a few people picked up on them when they put out album earlier this year, they deserve another boost. It may be a little hard to get over the fact that they sound like the Decemberists, but try–and then realize, depending on how you feel about that band, that King of Prussia either a) work a similar but more ADD and equally mature thing as Meloy and Co., or b) have all the musical ambition of the Decemberists without Meloy’s smug eleven-year-old-nerd thing. The coda of “Spain in the Summertime,” which is on the band’s MySpace page, is like a hand massage from a sorta cute Scientology volunteer. And we’ve posted two MP3s below: “Misadventures of the Campaign Kids” is about young love while electioneering (think Radiohead if Thom Yorke didn’t have the political sensibilities of a petulant college sophomore), while “Terrarium” is beautiful and shifts on a dime:
The video for Beck’s “Round The Bend,” which was created by video artist Jeremy Blake, somehow manages to be even more low-key and glacially paced than the song itself. The images slowly melt together, leaving abstracted, animated washes of bright colors while only occasionally revealing the nature of their form. There are no figures; when the face of Beck appears, it’s only as a two-dimensional representation directly lifted from the art that Blake created for the 2002 album Sea Change. It’s a gorgeous piece, and it’s likely the final music video of Blake’s career–he went missing last week and is now presumed dead.
Portland, Oregon’s Old Time Relijun’s forthcoming Catharsis In Crisis may be the finale of something they are calling “The Lost Light Trilogy,” but you hardly need to have heard the previous installments to appreciate the record’s ecstatic quasi-Krautrock jams. More »
