Some #longreads for helping you pass the time while you luxuriate in humanity’s greatest sin, Central Air…
It’s the dog days of summer, and so it’s probably about time we share some of the pieces we’ve bookmarked over the past few months but neglected to pass on to you. One such example is this account from Vulture detailing Bob Dylan’s first Letterman appearance, and the unique group of musicians he enlisted for support.
On Wednesday night, America will say goodbye to David Letterman, a comedic genius who has been revolutionizing late night television longer than I have been alive. I missed out on the NBC years, so I learned about all his most memorable bits secondhand. Instead, for me he was always the guy on CBS facing off against the Leno juggernaut. As a kid, I appreciated Leno’s easy humor more, but over the years I began to appreciate Letterman’s sarcastic wit and his ironic take on comedic conventions, and eventually fully embraced his approach. In my mind, “Is This Anything?” is the pinnacle late night achievement.
An underrated part of Letterman’s legacy was his willingness to book unconventional musical acts. In our brief run so far, we have spotlighted performances from favorite bands on the show several times, and we probably should have shared several more. Over the years, the Late Show has provided several great groups with their first major exposure on a network, and it was always a joy to see Dave himself get a kick out of many of the bands that performed. Of course, let us not forget the contributions from the brilliant Paul Shaffer and the CBS orchestra; there were few things cooler to watch than seeing Paul join in when he was digging what he heard, like he did with Red Fang a few months back.
A few #longreads as you prepare for the new year to begin in earnest…
Amid a crowded field of new releases next week, the long-awaited return of Sleater-Kinney stands out from the rest as indie rock fans welcome the return of the beloved 90’s band. So it’s no surprise that the band is getting write-ups in most music publications this week, including Pitchfork, Grantland, and Nylon. We’re probably missing other tributes as well, but we’ll try to make up for it by linking to their performance on Letterman last night.
Another new release that we can’t wait to hear comes from another Pacific NW favorite, as The Decemberists return next week with What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World. The Oregonian looks at how the band helped shape the Portland music scene over the past fifteen years, which while giving the city a new national profile also riles up some locals, as evidenced by a few of the comments.
One upcoming new release that we’ve neglected to mention before is the latest record from Belle and Sebastian. In order to rectify this, here is Pitchfork’s insightful musical influence feature “5-10-15-20” with the band’s leader, Stuart Murdoch.
Diffuser is taking a look at “The Roots of Indie”, and their latest installment examines the history of the Violent Femmes, one of the most unique successes in rock history.
We left a ton of material on the table for today’s post, and with the flurry of news this morning our roundup is even more overstuffed than usual. So let’s dive right in with the surprise release of the music video for the Beastie Boys track “Too Many Rappers”, featuring Nas in both audio and visual form. While it’s sad to remember that Hot Sauce Committee Part Two will be the last album we ever hear from the Beasties, but it’s certainly great to have some more footage of the crew having fun together.
NPR has streams for two highly-anticipated new albums available this week. First, there’s the long-awaited return of critical darlings and Pacific Northwest favorites Sleater-Kinney, who are releasing their first album in ten years next week with No Cities to Love. Then there’s the self-titled debut of Viet Cong, who have garnered a ridiculous amount of buzz among various indie blogs in the past couple of months. I don’t yet have the same enthusiasm, though it may take a few more listens of their noisy guitar rock to convince me.
Ghostface Killah seemingly never stops working, because after releasing his solo album 36 Seasons last month (and appearing on The Wu-Tang Clan’s A Better Tomorrow), he’s set to release another album next month. This time it’s a collaboration with BADBADNOTGOOD, with their record Sour Soul set to be released February 17. Their latest track, “Ray Gun”, features a guest spot from DOOM and has a nice grimy funk feel, complemented by some gorgeous strings. Stereogum has more information, including links to previously released tracks, for your perusal.
There’s also a trio of album releases that were announced this morning. Death Cab For Cutie is releasing Kintsugi on March 31st and will be their first album “without” founding guitarist Chris Walla, who while no longer a member of the band still has a presence on the album. Sufjan Stevens is releasing Carrie & Lowell on the same day, which we can take as further proof that the “50 States” project is dead. And Waxahatchee will be releasing Ivy Tripp on April 7th, and you should probably click the link because Pitchfork has helpfully included the new track “Air”. We were big fans of her previous album Cerulean Salt, and while this sounds a bit more polished than that lo-fi classic, sounding like a stripped-down Joy Formidable is something we can support.
It’s disappointing that a once-vibrant genre as Country has become just a bunch of homogenized pablum, and worse yet is the fact that every year it continues to get worse. The genre has just become Nickelback with a half-assed over-enunciated Southern accent, and that’s a damn shame. The thing is, consumers are at least partly to blame, since as The Atlantic points out, uniformity is what sells.
Last week featured some great musical guests on the Late Night shows, including performances from such RIJR favorites The War On Drugs (who performed the epic “An Ocean In Between The Waves” on The Tonight Show) and Parquet Courts delivering a dynamite version of “Bodies Made of” on Letterman, a song that initially sounds like a poor choice for the national stage until it gets to its epic breakdown. But the standout of the week was Foxygen and Star Power performing “How Can You Really” on The Late Show, which prompted an enthusiastic response from Dave himself.
We here at Rust Is Just Right are always down for hearing more from Spoon, so we are pleased to share their appearance on Austin City Limits over the weekend as well as their guest spot on Sound Opinions. We’ll see if we can go the rest of the week without mentioning them, but don’t bet on it.
And finally, a couple of fun lists that can either be used as a discovery tool or merely as argument fodder. Stereogum has a list of “30 Essential Post-Rock” songs which along with usual suspects Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Sigur Rós, and Explosions in the Sky includes several other bands that may not be as well known, though this may partially be due to a broad definition of “post-rock”. You can have an argument about that specific topic as well as the following list from Complex, which goes through each year since 1979 to anoint “The Best Rapper Alive”.
Some videos and lists and other fun stuff as you continue to put off Christmas shopping…
Last week we said farewell to one of our favorite late night comedy shows with the end of The Colbert Report, but that wasn’t the only great program that finished its run last week. The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson was underrated for the entirety of its run, as few could match the creativity and anarchic spirit of its host. Craig ended things with a bang on his last show, and it was nice to see this tribute at the top of his show. Here’s the official video, though it’s missing an excellent second half as seen in this link.
The “Bang Your Drum” performance was an excellent followup to the latest rendition of the annual holiday tradition of Darlene Love performing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home”) on The Late Show with David Letterman. Of course, what really takes the performance to another level is the bari sax solo, but all the musicians are worthy of praise.
Once again, we have even more lists for your consultation. Cokemachineglow has multiple lists for top albums, and then there are best videos lists from Vulture, PASTE, and Buzzfeed. While there are several good selections, I’m surprised to see the absence of our personal pick for best music video of 2014, the haunting “Story 2” from clipping.
In a bit of unsurprising news, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are “on a bit of a hiatus” according to Karen O. But it sounds like it’s just down time and not anything signalling the end of the band, which is great.
Daniel Kessler from Interpol’s side project Big Noble just released their first music video, providing a visual accompaniment to the soundscape “Stay Gold”.
And a melancholy farewell to Joe Cocker, who possessed one of the great voices in rock history. His cover of “With A Little Help From My Friends” was a huge part of my childhood, and I’m sure millions of others could say the same thing.
New music, videos, and other fun as we prepare for “Foo Fighters Week”…
The Foo Fighters are released their eighth studio album today, Sonic Highways, and we’ll be running features on the band all week long. To help get you into the spirit, SPIN has provided a ranking of all 147 Foo Fighters songs, including covers and soundtrack selections. As with all lists, this one has its fair share of faults, including a weird affinity for the band’s weakest effort (Echoes, Silence, Patience, & Grace), dismissal of some of their best recent work in Wasting Light, and an unfortunate-but-expected disdain for tracks from One By One, and ranks “Hey, Johnny Park!” at least thirty spots too low. On the other hand, it does provide the proper reverence for deep cuts like “A320” and “February Stars”, so we’ll take the good with the bad. And though we have most of these Foo Fighters singles, including several obscure ones, this list did inform us of the existence of this performance with Serj Tankian of the Dead Kennedys’ classic, “Holiday In Cambodia”.
Hutch Harris from local favorites The Thermals sat down with Late Night Action recently, and talked about subjects including the band’s early recording methods as well as the band’s personal involvement with their merchandise. It’s always fun to listen to Hutch, so watch when you can.
We’ve mentioned Interpol guitarist Daniel Kessler’s upcoming side-project before, but now we have a bit more info about Big Noble. They’ve also provided a video of one of their songs, which is a nice combination of Kessler’s crystalline guitar with intriguing soundscapes.
Mark Ronson is going to be the musical guest on SNL in a couple of weeks, and to get an idea of where he’s at, he recently released one of the songs he wrote with Tame Imapala’s Kevin Parker, and the result is something that sounds a bit like MGMT.
We’re looking forward to the second album from Father John Misty, since Fear Fun was such an excellent debut; plus we need an additional enticement to go see Josh Tillman’s stage show once again. I Love You, Honeybear will be released next February, but last week FJM performed on Letterman the new track “Bored In The USA”, and it was fantastic.
Cults performed in Austin, and Pitchfork was there. That should be enough to get you to click the link.
And because we’ve spent the entire weekend pondering the philosophical conundrum that comes with “too many cooks”, we’ll ride that out the rest of the week and post the video here.
News and new videos as you adjust to the terrifying new era of reverting back from daylight savings…
The Decemberists have announced that they will release a new album early next year, entitled What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World. And so we don’t come away with only this announcement, the band also provided us with a new song, “Make You Better”, complete with a “visualizer” video.
Prince performed on Saturday Night Live this past weekend, eschewing the normal two song/~four minute blocks for one eight-minute mega-jam. It was a memorable performance, and not just for Prince’s third-eye sunglasses or his backing 3rdEyeGirl group. At the very least, we learned that Prince has spent some time listening to Pantera.
Cymbals Eat Guitars recently uploaded the music video for “Warning”, off their excellent new album LOSE, featuring a very young band (Crosshair) playing the part of CEG. If you never got the chance to pick up their stellar debut Why There Are Mountains, wait another week for the reissue.
Spoon helped end The Daily Show’s run in Austin in style, playing multiple tracks off their latest excellent album, They Want My Soul. We would embed the videos here, but Comedy Central uses a screwy system, so either go to The Daily Show website or find all three performances on Pitchfork, since they did the legwork to get the correct plug-in.
Nirvana fans may be intrigued by the recent discovery of a “sound collage” that Kurt Cobain created, illustrating more of a connection with a band like The Olivia Tremor Control than one would have suspected. Note: this sounds nothing like Nirvana, but have fun with it anyway. Update:An interview with Cobain’s girlfriend at the time, Tracy Marander, sheds some light on the recording, including that there are two versions of “Montage of Heck” and that Nirvana diehards had known of this for years, and in fact a copy had been circulating for some time.
Wilco had some fun on The Tonight Show last week, though not all the footage was aired during the show. Check out this acoustic version of the classic Yankee Hotel Foxtrot track “I’m the Man That Loves You”.
Who knew the middle of October would be filled with tons of new videos and news to report?
Thurston Moore’s new album The Best Day comes out tomorrow, but today he released the Halloween-appropriate video for the track “Speak to the Wild”. Once you’ve collected yourself after watching it, be sure to check out his introspective interviews with The Guardian and Salon. Of course, you may want to check out the NPR stream of the album as you do so, which we linked to last week.
However, the biggest news of the day is the confirmation that Sleater-Kinney is reuniting. Early reports of their new box set that’s being released included a new single with the date “1/20/15”, and today the band confirmed that they will release their new album No Cities To Love on that date. In the Line of Best Fit link you will also see the lyric video for new single “Bury Our Friends”, a tracklist, and a list of tour dates. There’s no Portland date listed yet, but considering we witnessed their final show and their first “reunion” onstage with Pearl Jam, we can probably assume one will be added in the future.
Interpol released the video for El Pintor‘s “My Desire” today, and the grimy video also is appropriate for the season, filling the screen with plenty of the band’s trademark red and black.
Damon Albarn announced that he’s getting ready to get Gorillaz going again, with hopefully a 2016 release in the future, sure to please many fans of the side-project. However, it’s another group of his that I’m personally more excited to hear about, and that’s the fact that apparently The Good, The Bad, & The Queen was not a one-off effort, and that a new album from the band is written and ready to be recorded.
We’ll be doing a big feature on Spoon next week in advance of their upcoming release, and to help you prepare you can read up on this Guardian interview where Britt Daniel discusses the songs from their albums over the years that helped define the band. He makes a few surprising choices, while also providing a nice overview of Spoon’s career.
Kanye West provokes a lot of reactions in people, but he’s always an interesting interview no matter how you slice it. GQ has an extended interview with him for this month’s issue.
And finally, we have an interview with Peter Matthew Bauer. Normally we would be excited about posting (and reading) this interview, considering how much we love The Walkmen and Bauer’s solo debut, but the interviewer is Rick Moody. Our hostility towards Moody would make more sense if we published a planned takedown of another interview he did. But since that got pushed to the backburner, we’ll just warn you by saying to be prepared for pretentiousness and general blockheadedness.
We’ve had some #longreads pile up over the week, so it’s a good thing the weekend is here.
Tomorrow is unfortunately a morbid twentieth anniversary, so there were plenty of Nirvana stories that were printed this week, with more certainly to follow. Diffuser talked to a few musicians about how Nirvana personally influenced them and SPIN reprinted several memorials from legendary musicians in a slideshow. Stereogum has a top ten list that inspires moderate eye-rolls (a real fake bold move by not including “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, and a real dumb move for not including “Sappy”, though a high ranking for “Serve the Servants” deserves a mild tip of the hat). You can compare that list with Billboard’s ranking of their ten biggest hits on the alternative charts, which includes a couple of surprises. And the list of presenters for the upcoming Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony was announced, which includes Michael Stipe being chosen to introduce Nirvana.
Speaking of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Rolling Stone interviewed the Hall of Fame CEO and got an inside look at some of the proceedings. One tidbit I gathered from the piece is that there will be a Nirvana performance of some sort, though how it will actually shape out has not been revealed.
And continuing with the Nirvana theme, the AV Club gave another album a write-up in their “Permanent Records” feature, making the case that Dookie made Green Day the spiritual successor to Nirvana and I guess that grunge gave way to pop-punk? We mentioned before that there’s going to be a lot of pieces this year about Dookie because of its 20th anniversary, but the most I can say about this piece is…it’s an article that exists.
A far better piece about the anniversary of a seminal album is Stereogum’s reflection on the ten year anniversary of Modest Mouse’s Good News For People Who Love Bad News. We’ll do our own pieces in the future around the time Modest Mouse begins touring again at the beginning of May, but here’s a quick comment: the album is better than what old MM fans remember.
The Canadian Edition of the Huffington Post has an interview with Tokyo Police Club about the making of their new albumForcefield. We’re debating whether or not to recommend the album and then run a review of it, but their earlier work is definitely worth checking out. The band reveals what went on during the years since the release of Champ, and thank God they decided to go against someone’s advice to throw in some banjo.
Finally, we haven’t had the chance to show how much we love the finest heavy metal rockers from our neck of the woods, but let it be known that we are big fans of Red Fang here at RIJR. Aaron Beam, the bassist and one of the vocalists of the band, did an interview with Songfacts that goes deep into the songwriting process of the band. It’s amazing how so many of their songs are Frankenstein-like creations, stitched together from bits and pieces over the years, but you wouldn’t realize it just from listening because the sections fit so well. And with the news that we discussed on our Tumblr about the retirement of David Letterman, this is the perfect time to share the video of their performance on the Late Show, with Paul Shaffer loving the song so much that he joins in on the keys.
Rust Is Just Right 