Aphex Twin

Over the Weekend (Sept. 2 Edition)

News, , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

New music and videos for your recovery from the Labor Day Weekend…

Peter Matthew Bauer released the video for “You Are The Chapel”, the majestic closer to his stellar debut album.  It’s a mix of both performance and lyric video, with a slight twist on the latter as you’ll see:

Spoon did a “Secret Show” for MySpace, and the site has posted their performance of “The Rent I Pay”.  The direct link has been pretty spotty, so if necessary, check out the band’s Facebook page for an alternate link; and if they upload more, we’ll be sure to send you over that way.

There are two new albums that will be released next week that we have our eyes on, and you can listen to their streams now in preparation.  Death From Above 1979’s The Physical World is streaming on iTunes, and NPR has had a stream available for Interpol’s El Pintor since last week.  For more discussion of El Pintor, Gigwise has a series of interviews with the band as well as an exclusive documentary covering the making of the new album.

Those aren’t the only albums coming out next week; Better Than Ezra was one of the bands that I loved from my youth, and not only are they still kicking, they have a new release next week with All Together Now.  Billboard is hosting a stream if you want to check it out.

And now, a look at some art: Gigwise has pictures of the cool accompanying art for the new Aphex Twin album Syro, and Paste Magazine talks to Josh Graham, the artist behind the projections used by Soundgarden for their recent tour with Nine Inch Nails.

Faith No More is releasing its first new album in 18 years, according to an interview that Rolling Stone conducted with bassist Bill Gould.  And while there is no confirmation of a Sleater-Kinney reunion, Sub Pop is releasing a massive boxset of remastered versions of their previous studio albums.

Frontman for The Strokes Julian Casablancas is set to release another solo album called Tyranny in a couple of weeks, and just released “Human Sadness” as its first single, a rather unorthodox choice considering it’s an 11-minute song.

TV on the Radio provided more information for their new album today, announcing that Seeds will be released on November 18, and also provided a list of tour dates for the fall.  Also, the band posted the first single “Happy Idiot”, complete with lyric video.

Didn’t get the chance to catch Kanye West on his latest tour?  SPIN has the link to his performance for the Made In America festival this weekend, where he performed in both LA and Philadelphia.

Over the Weekend (Aug. 25 Edition)

News, , , , , Leave a comment

Some fun stuff to flip through as you struggle to stay awake for another week of the Simpsons marathon…

In case you didn’t know, MTV aired their Video Music Awards last night, and I think the best way to sum up my feelings about the event is to quote AV Club writer Sean O’Neal: “Today is the 15th anniversary of me realizing I no longer care about the VMAs.”  Nevertheless, Sean himself printed a “recap” of the show, but this was based purely on skimming articles about the show.  If you’re still in the mood to talk about the VMAs, SPIN provides their own category of Worst Music Video and hands out their own award.

In a more substantial piece, SPIN also has an interview with Run The Jewels, and they talk about current events and race in America.  With that, you should also check out the new track released by clipping. in the wake of the events of Ferguson.

We’ve mentioned that Aphex Twin is finally releasing a new album with SYRO, and now Pitchfork has given us a quick preview of a longer interview to be published at a later date; among the most important items mentioned is the pronunciation of the album title.

And finally, Pitchfork decided to use one of the dead weeks in August to go full List-mania, with lists covering the best albums, music videos, and tracks of the last five years.  The fact that Celebration Rock is not the number one album pretty much calls the entire enterprise into question (and the fact that two of the three paragraphs written about the album are pure garbage is also another great hint), but if you’ve got time to kill, then I guess you could read it.

I will say that they are correct about how great Tame Imapala’s “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” is.

Over the Weekend (Aug. 18 Edition)

News, , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Kicking off the week with a ton of new music and exciting news, as summer slowly morphs into fall…

It began with cryptic message from a giant blimp, but it’s official: Aphex Twin is releasing a new album.  Richard James most recently released music as AFX, (with the vinyl-only release of Analord, though a compilation of selected tracks was later sold as an Aphex Twin/AFX release on CD called  Chosen Lords), but even then it’s been a long time since we heard new music from him as those records were last released in 2006.  Syro will be the first Aphex Twin album since 2001’s Drukqs; no word on whether we’ll have any more creepy music videos, but the artwork announcing for the release seems to suggest as much.

Fans of the site should be well-aware of how excited we are for Death From Above 1979’s upcoming reunion, and a warm-up show brought us some additional material to help whet our appetite.  A fan has uploaded another track scheduled to appear from the new album The Physical World, courtesy of a free CD handed out to fans at the show.  “Government Trash” lives up to its name, as the song shows the harder-edged roots of the band, and is a perfect example of trashy punk.

Interpol today gave us another taste of El Pintor with the release of “Ancient Ways”.  It’s an uptempo track that shows that the band is really intent on piling up instruments on top of each other, similar to the style of Interpol, but with some of the edge of their earliest work.

KEXP has been uploading videos from a number of different groups that have stopped by their studios, and they’re definitely worth the time to watch all the way through.  So far I’ve watched Peter Matthew Bauer perform an excellent set with a full cast of backing musicians (which is sure to irk Rick Moody, since it contradicts his point) and Cloud Nothings rip through their latest, and I’m looking forward to checking out the Broken Bells and Wye Oak sets soon enough.

It’s always fun to hear bands talk shit about one another, and Kim Thayil provides quite a bit of it with these recent rips on Billy Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins.

And finally, some sad news as Rick Parashar, a producer and engineer known for his work with the early years in the grunge scene in Seattle died a few days ago.  He helped out with Ten and the Temple of the Dog album among others, a contribution that which we all appreciate very much.

Catching Up On The Week (Apr. 26 Edition)

News, , , , , , , Leave a comment

Not too many #longreads this weekend, which probably is good news for us since our publishing schedule got sidetracked a bit this week, and there’s not much time left to cram.

The one exception is Stereogum’s week-long celebration of Britpop, featuring a ton of articles celebrating the 20th anniversary of one of the defining trends of the 90’s.  The pieces that grabbed my interest the most were the anniversary retrospective of Blur’s Parklife and the list of the Top 10 songs from The Verve, but I’ll be checking out more when I get the chance.

Going a few years from Britpop’s heyday, Shortlist has a slideshow of facts about Joy Division’s landmark album, Unknown Pleasures.  If that piques your interest, then I’d urge you to set aside some time in your schedule to watch Control and 24 Hour Party People if you haven’t already done so, because both are excellent looks at the brilliant band.

Just so you have the information somewhere on file, know that Lorde has been given Dave Grohl’s “Dad’s Seal of Approval”, which should have been somewhat obvious given her appearance with the reunited Nirvana at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony.

Finally, there are a couple of articles from Pitchfork I wanted to highlight.  On the one hand, there’s an interview with Marc Weidenbaum about his 33 1/3 book on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which provides some good insight into the composer, the development of the ambient genre, and the album itself.  At the end of the scale, we have this attempt by the staff to avoid writing a simple review of the new Pixies album Indie Cindy, with this half-assed stab at covering the entire Pixies discography.  It offers no insight or perspective on landmark albums like Surfer Rosa or Doolittle, but seems to exist only so that they have it on record that those records deserve perfect 10 scores, and that for some reason Trompe le Monde is a better album than Bossanova.  Perhaps that belief helps color their insistent tone in dealing with the new album.  I’d normally advise against reading something like this, but I’ll make an exception for this since it’s a good example of how empty some music writing can be.