Father John Misty

Catching Up On The Week (Feb. 6 Edition)

News, , , , , , , , , , , , One comment

Some #longreads for the moments you refrain from laughter due to serious newscasters using the phrase “Pineapple Express”…

We’re really excited for the release next week of Father John Misty’s new album, I Love You Honeybear–his debut, Fear Fun, was a pleasant surprise and the man put on one entertaining live show.  To help prepare you for the new record, be sure to read the profiles on Josh Tillman on Grantland and Pitchfork.

There are few reasons to care about the Grammys no matter what year it is, but the fact that Beck’s Morning Phase was nominated for Album of the Year and as a result will perform with Chris Martin on Sunday’s telecast might spur us to watch.  However, the awards did provide the L.A. Times with the opportunity to talk to Beck and discuss how he feels now that he’s no longer the young buck but an elder statesman for these shows.

If you’ve ever listened to a Sub Pop album from its early days, chances are you listened to an album recorded by Jack Endino.  He was the man behind the boards for a number of the heavyweights of the grunge era, and has continued to record numerous awesome indie bands since then.  Noisey caught up with the former Skin Yard drummer for an interview.

Everybody has been talking about the recent leak of the settlement between Sam Smith and Tom Petty over the similarities between “Stay With Me” and “Won’t Back Down”, and that prompted the AV Club to take a look at other instances of musical “borrowing.”  The first part of the Inventory was released today, so be sure to check on Monday for a few more examples.

And finally, if you still find yourself with some free time this weekend, check out the Albums That Never Were blog, which has painstakingly recreated some of the most famous “lost albums” of all-time, all with meticulous notes about their composition.

Over the Weekend (Nov. 10 Edition)

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

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”.

Aphex Twin recently sat down for an extensive interview with Dan Noyze, and not only that, provided a number of outtakes and and fragments made during the making of Syro.

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.

Here’s an excellent list of “Songs You’ll Never Hear on a Sufjan Stevens Album”.

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.

Over the Weekend (June 9 Edition)

News, , , , , , Leave a comment

Let’s kick off the week with some fun videos and some new music, shall we?

Probably the best thing that I saw this weekend (aside from the news that Bill Watterson made a surprise return to the comics page) was this video of Sir Mix-a-Lot performing his classic hit “Baby Got Back” with the Seattle Symphony.  The last time we saw this kind of synergy between the classical music and hip-hop worlds was back at the ’96 Hullabalooza Festival, when the London Symphony Orchestra performed “Insane in the Brain” with Cypress Hill.

It’s definitely worth checking out the Oral History of the song as well.

That was not the only salacious thing to happen this weekend–it appears that Neil Young’s Twitter account was hacked, and followers ended up receiving a bunch of porn suggestions.  Apparently, all is well now, so you’ll need to check in with another classic rock legend for your porn fix (as a commenter pointed out, David Crosby would probably be a great bet).

The biggest news from this morning (or late last night, if you were up) was the surprise release of the first half of the new double-LP from Death Grips, the powers that b (though they do have a penchant for this sort of thing).  It’s available for free from their Facebook, and after a couple of listens this afternoon, I can say it’s actually a less-rambunctious release than you might expect (I do love that the automatic genre tag that appears when you load into iTunes is “Pop”, though).  And you’ll see a lot of mention that Björk does guest vocals on each track, though her appearance shouldn’t be that much of a surprise.

A couple of links to check out from NPR–first, there’s Spoon performing the brand new track “Rent I Pay” live in New York; and speaking of New York, they also have the early stream of Familiars from NYC’s The Antlers.  In the email sent to fans about the stream, The Antlers mentioned that there will be limited edition white label copies of the LP available at some of the band’s favorite independent record stores.

Pitchfork has Father John Misty performing a cover of recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Cat Stevens’s “Trouble”, released as part of the soundtrack to a documentary on Hal Ashby.  The site also has news that Steven Drozd and Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips are releasing an album as “Electric Würms”, with Steven assuming more traditional front-man duties and Wayne backing on bass.

And finally, because we’re always fans of what our favorite Portland heavy metal band is up to, check out Red Fang discussing their influences in this interview with Loudwire.  A few of their choices may surprise you.

Catching Up On The Week (May 9 Edition)

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

A lot of quick-hitters, a cool graph, and a lot of talk about an anniversary this week for your #longreads weekend.

We’ve mentioned before that this year marks the 20th anniversary for several big albums, like Superunknown, The Downward Spiral, Dookie, and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain.  This week, Weezer, aka “The Blue Album” gets its moment in the sun.  Grantland has a roundtable feature if you’re interested in a lot of half-baked memories and not-particularly-insightful analysis, and Stereogum has a more nuanced look back at the seminal album, as they’ve done several times already this year.  Of course, this leads to thinking about “how the hell did Weezer become so shitty?”, though as Film Crit Hulk observes, it’s not that surprising an answer (yes, it’s the firing of Matt Sharp).

We did a feature on them already this week mentioning their new album, so it’s no surprise that The Black Keys announced a huge new tour today.  Using the video posted above however, may have been a surprise.  We’ll be posting a review in the near future, but if you’re feeling a little antsy, Grantland has an early review.  In general, I agree with several of the points about the recent direction of the band, but I am still flummoxed by the mention of “Little Black Submarines” in the section about minimalist guitars–this is after all a song with a good “Stairway to Heaven” 30-second solo rip-off that serves as the climax of the song.

AVClub has several pieces worth checking out this weekend.  There is an extended look at the making of the Alice in Chains EP Jar of Flies, which features several of the band’s best songs (including my personal favorite, “Nutshell”).  They also have a quick plea to get people to listen to Big Star’s “O My Soul”–Erik Adams points out the nifty use of palm-muted non-chords, but to me the most brilliant part of the song was simply the way the drums were recorded; I don’t think I have ever heard a snare pop better than on that track, and on Radio City in general.  Also, be sure to read about how one band was able to trick Spotify and then check out this absolutely brilliant headline.

We previously did a bit on music infographics, and another one popped up this week that you might have seen tweeted out or on your friend’s Facebook page.  This one takes a look at the diversity of the vocabulary of a number of rappers and presents it in chart form, with Shakespeare and Moby Dick as points of reference.  It wasn’t surprising to see the various members of the Wu-Tang Clan (and the group itself) ranking so highly, or 50 Cent ranked so low, but I thought for example that Kanye would appear higher on the list.  The Fader interviewed the creator of the chart and gets some insight into its creation.

We haven’t had much of a chance to talk about Father John Misty, but his debut Fear Fun was one of our favorites from 2012, and we’re eager to hear the follow-up when it’s released.  Pitchfork did a quick interview with him to give us an idea of what he’s up to these days.

Finally, we linked to the very first Drum Fill Friday from NPR, but we neglected to do any followups.  Well, it’s a continuing series and lately they’ve stepped up the challenge a bit by bringing in the choices of some guest drummers.  We’ll give the spotlight to Michael Lerner, the drummer from The Antlers, and link to his selections (for the record, I got 4/5).  It’s definitely worth keeping up with every week.