A slew of artists are lending their voices for the upcoming animated series. More »
Plus: Kanye West requests that you stop asking him for favors. Also see which artists will be performing on TV today. More »
During last week’s discussion of Marmite artists–those artists that are so divisive, they force people to take sides, with no one left in the middle–Idolator commenter moomintroll wondered if we shouldn’t try and find more ways to classify popular bands through their analogues to various condiments. Since we figured the safe space in the fridge inhabited by your ketchups, your mustards, and your molding bottles of Hidden Valley Ranch was as good a way to make sense of the current musical landscape as any, we invited her to flesh out her theory for us. It’s after the jump!
Over the weekend, the Shins’ Marty Crandall was arrested for his involvement in a domestic dispute with his now-ex-girlfriend Elyse Sewell, a former America’s Next Top Model contestant who broke the news on her Livejournal shortly after she made bail. (The post she wrote about the incident, which includes photos of her bruised arm, has been friendslocked at the advice of her legal counsel, but it’s been reproduced elsewhere.) Crandall was held over the weekend and has apparently since been released. As is often the case with ugh-inducing incidents involving indie rock semi-luminaries, the Brooklyn Vegan post on the arrest has been the go-to place for the music-blog cognoscenti’s reactions, and while some of them actually address the situation semi-intelligently, most of them are about as tasteful as you’d expect from a Web site that allows its readers to post anonymously:
The Shins’ most recent album, Wincing The Night Away, was released thirty-seven years ago. Or at least it feels like it was, because no matter where we go–bars, parties, dog funerals, bars–we cannot escape hearing it in the background. Enough already! More »
This morning, the Wall Street Journal introduced “Face The Music,” a new column with the not-at-all-bets-hedging mission statement of covering “music past and present.” The debut entry was all about how the Shins might be the next Nirvana–or then again, they might not. More »
As Consumer Guide tastemaker Robert Christgau once noted, there is so much recorded media coming forth every day, from major-label pushes to Myspace uploads, that it is physically impossible to listen to it all. Our disgruntled postal carrier brings more bubble-packed mailers daily, and there’s no hope of our “to listen to” pile going down anytime soon.
At the risk of being buried under hundreds of jewel cases, we have taken the sage advice of gonzo rock writer Richard Meltzer to heart. Meltzer, ever the curmudgeon, considered promo albums precious commodities–provided you didn’t break the shrink wrap on ’em, as doing so reduced their resale value. After the click-through, Andy Beta fords the Waterworld that is the Information Age with his eyes rather than his ears.
It’s looking like the Shins’ Wincing The Night Away will debut at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 this week–the highest-placing first week for an album on an indie label since Thom Yorke’s The Eraser entered the chart at No. 2 in mid-July. More »
When the Shins released Wincing The Night Away last Tuesday, they did more than make lovelorn bong-builders sigh with glee: They also might have helped revamp the once-thriving tradition of record-store midnight-sales parties. More »
