Next year, the UK will issue a series of stamps dedicated to the art of the British album cover. The Stones’ Let It Bleed, New Order’s Power, Corruption, and Lies, Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, and Blur’s Parklife will all be honored in this 10-stamp issue. If the US had a similar stamp issue, I wonder what albums would get the nod? You’d think Thriller would be a no-brainer, and Madonna’s True Blue would look kinda dynamite, but after that… ? (First person to shout “Merriweather Post Pavilion!” is fired.) The full issue of stamps after the jump. More »
Apparently former Danity Kane screecher Aubrey O’Day is getting all of her musical ideas from radio stations with ’80s-centric playlists. First there was her horrific cover of Eddie Murphy’s “Party All The Time,” which at least made Murphy’s performance of the song seem like utter genius. (Not that I didn’t like it before, but holy wow.) And now she’s released a new track, “Never Fallin’,” which is about mean people on the Internet who are Just Jealous and which is based around a wholesale lifting of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle.” And guess what—it even includes a reworked lyric for the “Triangle” chorus! Lyrics after the jump. Brace yourself. More »
Remember in Dead Poets Society where they try to analyze poetry via graph and then Robin “O Captain My Captain” Williams tells them to rip up their books and then Eric Foreman’s dad, Clarence Boddicker, makes House’s friend kill himself? Well, people keep trying to quantify musical quality a la J. Evans Pritchard, Ph. D., with varied results. On one hand, you have Pandora, which uses its Music Genome Project to match up artists with similar artists based on a few hundred fairly objective measures—does it have acoustic guitar, does it have female vocals, does it feature distorted guitar, that sorta thing. I think we can all say that’s it’s reasonably successful, though aberrations do occur, and it often presents a flawed, monolithic view of an artist’s work, which is OK for the Ramones or Jesus and Mary Chain, but less successful for, say, Prince or the Beatles. Do you mean the “Sign O’ The Times” Prince or the “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man” Prince (same album!)? Do you mean the “Rocky Raccoon” Beatles or the “Helter Skelter” Beatles (same album!)?
Customers have been taking to the Internet to… More »
On Tuesday, I upset a few people (well, one in particular) with a somewhat offhand remark about Elbow’s lack of popularity in America, or least my perception thereof.
Freebass, a collaboration between New Order bassist Peter Hook, Primal Scream/Stone Roses bassist Mani, and Smiths bassist Andy Rourke, has had an album in the works since late 2005. But Hook swears they will put out an album by March, or he’ll guarantee its presence on the marketplace by killing himself. “It’s going to be out next March or I am going to fucking top myself,” he told Billboard, “I’m fucking sick of talking about it. I just want to give someone some music. I said to Mani and Andy Rourke: ‘It’s coming out and I don’t care how rough it is. Fuck it–let’s do some gigs.'” The album contains tons of alt-rock guest stars, including Mani’s once and former bandmates Ian Brown and Bobby Gillespie. Morrissey and Bernard Sumner, however, may not have even been called.
Sure, I guess you could insist on seeing the actual bands instead, but if you enjoy low ticket prices and remarkable simulations of your favorite ’80s New Wave acts, you may want to visit the Los Angeles-adjacent Gibson Amphitheater on June 21 for the Save New Wave festival. What you’re saving “new wave” from is debatable (irrelevancy? active rock?), but some of these fake bands aren’t that bad.
