News, new videos, and other fun stuff to help you get through the week…
The biggest news of the weekend was the announcement that David Bowie will be releasing a new album next year. There should be high hopes for Blackstar when it comes out on January 8, since Bowie’s last record (The Next Day) was pretty damn good. In other words, this is not merely the case of fans expressing nostalgia for the golden years of a legendary artist, but legitimate excitement for a new album–especially if it is as “completely bonkers”as one “insider” suggested.
Run The Jewels 2 was released a year ago today, and to celebrate the occasion, Run The Jewels has released a music video for “Angel Duster”, which features footage of the duo performing all around the country.
EL VY has released another lyric video from their upcoming album Return to the Moon, which will be released this Friday. This time the duo of Matt Berninger (The National) and Brent Knopf (Menomena, Ramona Falls) have a video for the bouncy “Need a Friend”.
In case you did not get your fix of write-ups on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Consequence of Sound has a ranking of all 28 tracks. Quibbles: the title track and “Here Is No Why” are underrated, “Galapagos” and “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans” are overrated. But at least the top track is correct.
That is not the only list CoS prepared last week–they have one that documents “25 Essential Performances” from Pearl Jam to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the band’s first show.
And finally, this list serves as a bit of homework for our readers, as Stereogum lists the 50 Best New Bands of 2015. We will definitely be consulting this list for the next few days, and it is probably a good idea if our readers do the same as well.
Ought just came out with their second album last week, and Sun Coming Down has been greeted with rave reviews so far. For those looking for a taste as to how the new album sounds, the band shared the video to the almost-title track “Sun’s Coming Down” last week.
With the breakthrough success of their album Sunbather still fresh in the minds of critics and fans, Deafheaven’s New Bermuda is set to be one of the most highly anticipated releases of the fall. They should be highly pleased with the release of the song “Come Back”, as it incorporates many of the elements that people loved about Sunbather with some additional metal touches thrown in for good measure.
New Bermuda is not the only big album being released next Friday, as V from Wavves is also coming out on October 2nd. The band shared the wrestling-themed video for the single “Way Too Much” last week, and it should get you pumped.
DIIV released the single “Dopamine” last week from their upcoming album Is The Is Are, and you can take a listen to the driving and infectious jangle-pop track through the band’s SoundCloud page.
New music, news, and other fun stuff to help start your week…
Last night marked the end (?) of the beloved and bizarre animated series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, but before the show officially said goodbye, the folks at Adult Swim enlisted the help of a legendary artist who is a surprisingly devoted fan: Patti Smith. Smith gave a brief interview to Pitchfork explaining both her love of the show and how she ended up recording the song for the series finale.
Over the weekend, a pretty goddamn awesome supergroup convened up in Seattle to pay tribute to the legendary punk album Raw Power from Iggy & The Stooges. Mike McCready from Pearl Jam, Mark Arm from Mudhoney, Barrett Martin from Screaming Trees, and Duff McKagan from Guns ‘N Roses got together for the charity gig in support of radio station KEXP, and Stereogum has some of the footage from this memorable gig.
Foals are set to release their latest album, What Went Down, this Friday. They have releasedseveralvideos to help build anticipation for the new album already, and today the group released their latest with a “CCTV” version of the low-key “London Thunder”.
!!! announced dates for a tour this fall, and I highly recommend that you check your calendars to see if you are free the night they hit your town, because there are few things in life that are as fun as a !!! show. The band also shared a goofy lyric video for new single “Freedom ’15”, off their upcoming album As If, which will be released on October 16.
Finally, enjoy killing some time with a couple of lists. First, Willamette Week offers the 21 Best Songs About Portland, which does a fair job of covering the city’s unusual musical history. Due to a technicality that the song must explicitly reference Rip City in some capacity, the best song about Portland was excluded, but otherwise it was a solid attempt. And then for the giant time-waster, Pitchfork has decided to use this as a dead week to promote their list of the 200 Best Songs of the 80’s.
Embedded above is the best (and most accurate) song about Portland. You have probably heard it before.
News, new videos, and other fun stuff to help you begin your week…
There had been rumblings for a while now, but now it can be confirmed that Flight of the Conchords are reuniting. Fans of the hilarious HBO show featuring Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie should be delighted to hear that not only are they making plans to head out on tour next year, but that they are in the initial stages of writing a full-length movie.
The best song of 2014 finally has a video, as Death From Above 1979 shared the music video for “White Is Red” today. Instead of following along with the riveting narrative described in the song, it mainly consists of footage from the documentary on the band, Life After Death From Above 1979, serving as a very effective advertisement for the film.
Switching the focus to more recent releases, Tame Imapala released a video today for a condensed version of Currents standout “Let It Happen”, focusing on the travails of one of the weariest travelers you will ever see.
Deerhunter released the first single of their upcoming album Fading Frontier this weekend, with frontman Bradford Cox first teasing fans by playing “Snakeskin” on his radio show. The song is livelier than you might expect considering Deerhunter’s recent material, and you can check it out for yourself as the band has released a video for the song as well.
In another surprise, Talib Kweli has released a free album called Fuck the Money that is available through the website Kweliclub.com. All of this is of course for free, in case the name of the title was not clear enough for you.
Finally, we have a couple of useless lists for your enjoyment. First, Rolling Stone has compiled one of those extensive, vague lists that only exist to get people arguing, this time ranking the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time and attempting to show off some fancy web tools at the same time. A more interesting list is the AV Club Inventory that takes a look at “20 Great Songs Orphaned By Their Namesake Albums”, a concept that took me a few minutes to understand but is nonetheless a pretty cool idea.
News, new music, and other fun stuff to help you through the unbearable heat…
The biggest news of the weekend is the announcement that Dr. Dre will be releasing a new album in the very near future, though it is not quite the album many fans expected. Instead of releasing the much-delayed Detox, which for years was teased asthe expected followup to 2001, Dre is releasing Compton, inspired by his work on the upcoming N.W.A biopic.
Speaking of long-awaited followups, it has been nearly a decade since the release of Tool’s last album, and while for years fans have been teased with tidbits detailing the slow process of following up 10,000 Days, that does not mean the band members have been remaining idle. Maynard James Keenan announced that his other, other group Puscifer will be releasing a new album on October 30, and has shared “Grand Canyon” from Money Shot this week.
Finally, SPIN decided that this was the appropriate moment to rank every single Metallica song that was ever released, and that is probably as good a way as any to waste your time this week.
A tribute album to singer/songwriter Donovan has attracted a lineup of indie rock heavy-hitters, including contributions from The Flaming Lips, Sharon Van Etten, and Hamilton Leithauser. The charity album will be out on October 16.
Who doesn’t love a good rap beef? Quickly get caught up on the Ghostface Killah/Action Bronson beef here. Then you will be prepared to be the talk of the party this weekend.
New music, new videos, and other time-wasters to kick off your week…
Fans of Aphex Twin should be thrilled with the massive amount of free music that he released today. There is a zip file with over 2 GBs worth of music available for download, as well as a YouTube playlist of over 200 songs, though the amount of overlap between the two has yet to be determined. We had seen evidence before that Richard James was hard at work in all those years between releases, but it is great to finally hear more of the results.
Courtney Barnett is an artist that has been receiving a huge amount of buzz lately, especially after her recent appearances at SXSW. We have been rather skeptical of the praise so far (our reaction to her recent single that has begun to get radio airplay is that it sounds like “Molly’s Chambers” with a female version of Mark E. Smith yelling over the top), but we have to admit that we enjoy the fun video that was created for “Dead Fox” that was released today.
And finally, have fun with a variety of useless lists this week. The most ambitious is SPIN’s 300 Best Albums of the Past 30 Years, which if anything is at least diverse, and at least makes an attempt in a lot of cases to avoid merely following along with consensus opinion. Diffuser provides a handy list of 19 Influential Grunge Musicians that they claim “you’ve never heard of,” but whatever the accuracy is of the second part of their claim, it serves as a handy guide for diving into the Seattle scene beyond the Big Four. Then there is NME’s contribution, a list of the original titles for famous albums, which has more than a few mildly amusing anecdotes.
New videos, new music, and news to help tide you over as you wait for the NBA playoffs to begin…
For weeks, TV on the Radio has been teasing the release of their latest single off their brilliant album Seeds by posting photos with the hashtag “#herecomestrouble”, and last week finally shared the video for “Trouble”. Much like the song, it has a somber tone, but there is a redemptive undercurrent that ultimately makes it uplifting.
Janelle Monáe surprised her fans this morning by releasing a new song and accompanying video, a fun romp entitled “Yoga” off an upcoming compilation EP called Wonderland Presents THE EEPHUS. The video does indeed feature some “yoga”, though the focus is not necessarily on fitness or inner peace, but as a precursor to a wild party.
Another highly-anticipated release that is now available for streaming is the newest effort from Speedy Ortiz, with Foil Deer up on the NPR website. We loved their debut album, Major Arcana, and had a lot of fun when they performed at Project Pabst, so we cannot wait to get our hands on the record when it is released next week.
We are also glad to hear that Local H is close to releasing another record, and the AV Club has an exclusive track from the upcoming Hey, Killer. The band (with a slight lineup change) will soon be hitting the road, and we highly recommend you go see them play.
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”.
News, videos, and other end-of-the-year paraphernalia as you transition from one holiday weekend to another…
We gave the Rust Is Just Right staff an extra day off last week, so we’re going to combine our linkdump days this week and get to a couple of stories we neglected to share; we hope you didn’t miss us too much, and hopefully this makes up for our absence.
We’ll kick things off with a music video, as TV on the Radio just released one for the upbeat and frenetic “Lazerray” from their album Seeds, and footage of skateboard tricks somehow seems to be an appropriate take on the song.
Everybody heard about PAPER magazine’s “Break the Internet” issue for other reasons, but hidden within its pages was a fascinatingly hilarious interview with Snoop Dogg, discussing mainly his newfound passion for painting.
Stereogum has the video for a compilation that asked artists over the years a simple question: “Lennon or McCartney?” I believe that the choice of one over the other says a lot about the person, but I shouldn’t have to tip my hand one way or the other. I will say that Bo Diddley offers the best answer of all, however.
Elsewhere on the Stereogum site, they have a list of the 101 Most Anticipated Albums of 2015, and you’re correct we’re using it as a cheat sheet to remind us what’s coming out next year.
And finally, we recommend that you read this remembrance of Joe Cocker from Jason Heller of the AV Club, which does an excellent job of explaining the power of his voice and his unexpected influence on younger generations.
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