"These two iconic, legendary English fucking rockers that have been through it all are singing about the end of their lives — 'I don't wanna die an ordinary man' — it's fucking great" - Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith said about Ozzy Osbourne's new song 'Ordinary Man'. Elton John plays the piano and sings on it, Slash plays the guitar. Smith plays the drums on the whole album.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have released a three-part score for HBO's drama 'Watchmen', a one that plays as "a dispatch from some other weird world, one that feels like Reznor and Ross’s alternately paranoid and plaintive music".
"Of the top 500 charted country songs from 2014 to 2018, only 16% were by female artists. That is tragic. Those numbers reveal a truth that artists share and lament over" - country singer Jennifer Nettles wrote in her article for the Glamour. She has started an initiative "Equal Play" demanding, well, obviously, equal play for women in country music.
Dave and Lewis Capaldi are the most nominated artists at Brit Awards this year, with four nominations each. Grime star Stormzy has three nominations, as well as 23-year old Mabel, being the most-nominated female artist this year.
Last year's phenomenon Billie Eilish had the biggest-selling album of last year in the USA with 'When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?' selling in 2.5 million total album-equivalent units in 2019, 400,000 more units than any other album.
Singer-songwriter Jim Noir published his first new album in six years, a "smooth and soft" record 'A.M. Jazz', a "groovy, synth-heavy bachelor pad prog pop".
Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist for Rush has died at age 67. Peart had joined Rush in 1974, remaining their drummer and primary lyricist up through their 2015 breakup.
"There's enough stuff to go on forever with my music, to do compilation albums, to do, actually, new and original stuff, and I am purposely trying to put songs down for that very purpose" - Dolly Parton said in her podcast. She explained she plans - "to have a click track and my vocals, to […]
There is a title of "the Metal Ambassador of the Decade", given by the Loudwire, and for the 2010s it was - WWE Superstar and NXT founder Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque, because - "throughout the decade, Triple H and his NXT team elevated up-and-coming metal acts more than any other mainstream outlet". Loudwire talked to him about […]
Henry Rollins has teamed with Los Angeles Tourism for a YouTube series (three videos so far) where he explains how to use LAX. Characteristically for him, he is very enthusiastic about it, says the food is great there, he likes the executive lounge and suggests people should use the "therapy dogs"! Video 1 here, video […]
Algiers have a new album coming out next week, last songs before that release is dubby trip hop 'We Can't Be Found'; Wolf Parade have a new disco song 'Julia Take Your Man Home', with Spencer Krug singing about "some other, worse version of myself"; Agnes Obel sings beautifully about struggles with falling asleep in […]
Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds bandmate Warren Ellis have donated $500,000 to help those battling Australia’s bushfire emergency, Billboard reports. Metallica have also pledged to donate, A$750,000 (more than $500,000) to bushfire relief efforts in Australia, Rolling Stone reports. Elton John, Keith Urban, Nicole Kidman, Pink and Flume have already donated to Australian firefighters.
Sonically, new diss tracks by Stormzy and Wiley are great, lyrically, really just below the two (insulting mothers!?!, really ?!?). A message to both of them (and every other talented musician): "Next time someone wants to start a beef - ignore it! Make something worthwhile!" Waste of good beats - summed up on Fact.
'Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion' is the first autobiography by the punk veterans punks, and it chronicles band's beginnings "as teenagers experimenting in a San Fernando Valley garage dubbed 'The Hell Hole' to headlining major music festivals". It includes rare photos, never-before-seen material from the archives, and new interviews with former members […]
Parlophone Records has shared a previously unreleased version of David Bowie's 'The Man Who Sold the World' yesterday on what would have been singer's 73rd birthday. The largely acoustic rendition, recorded in November of 1996, was aired a few months later on Bowie's 50th birthday. 'The Man...' is 50 years young this year, and it is […]
Soul singer Celeste has won BBC Music's Sound of 2020 thanks to her "entrancing voice and jazz-steeped songs". BBC's accolade is given to artists who are tipped for success in the coming year. Indie band Easy Life came second, while pop-punk firebrand Yungblud was third on BBC's list this year. Adele, Michael Kiwanuka, Haim, 50 […]
English pianist and singer-songwriter Bill Fay will release his new album 'Countless Branches' next week, and this week he released his newest single 'Salt of the Earth' (watch it below). Fay's appearance in the video is that of an old man (he's 77), but warmth of his voice is like the one of a young […]
"And while Twin Limb seem rooted in a very warm, traditional style of dream-pop... it's not so much the sound of a band at home with an old sound; rather, they're committed to a genre" - PopMatters says in a review of dream-pop's trio new album. Two qualities stand out on this album - "tuneful, […]
Pianos Become the Teeth frontman Kyle Durfey has started a new band Burial Waves, with members of We Were Black Clouds, Deleted Scenes and Flavor Waster. Burial Waves debuted their first song 'Cinema Shame', adding some post-punk to PBTT's post-rock/emo sound. Watch below.
PopMatters is delighted by the new book 'Fandom of Methodology', a collection of experimental texts, autobiography, fiction, and new academic perspectives on fandom in and as art. PM says "Academics must permit themselves to be fans", and adds - "I am officially a huge fan of 'Fandom as Methodology' because the articulation of these concepts ultimately leads […]
Avantguard pop artist Lyra Pramuk made her debut album 'Fountain' using only her voice, modulated by electronics, exploring "perception of music, rhythms, speech, body, and the relation between technology and humanity, exploring a post-human, non-binary understanding of life". She mixed it with her twin brother Ben, and the title is derived from her family name, […]
Grandmother and drum instructor Dorothea Taylor published her drum cover of Disturbed's 'Down With The Sickness', showing how people should just be open, as Kerrang reports. Video begins with several reenactments of the type of biased treatment Taylor has endured as a drummer - an instrument store clerk presumptuously directs her to the string instruments […]
The Quietus has an accurate and lovely description on new song 'Haunted And Known' by Six Organs of Admittance: "It starts with Chasny’s acoustic guitar played in hypnotic ribbons, underscoring his whisper-singing and beckoning you closer, before a colossal synth surge overwhelms the track and gives it a whole new topography". It comes out on band's […]
Six of ten top-grossing tours of 2019 were reunion tours or legacy acts, whose most prolific and successful musical output are years or even decades behind them. The top three earners were Ed Sheeran, Pink, and BTS, but then it travels back to the 20th century - Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Metallica, Paul McCartney, […]
'Diatom Ribbons' is the most ambitious project to date by Canadian jazz pianist and composer Kris Davis, but also "her most accessible and inviting". How so? "Incorporating elements of hip-hop, rock, and groove music... with voices, with horns, with electric guitars, with hip-hop techniques, with complex time signatures, and with butt-moving grooves", and with help […]
"We’re not creating areas for Instagram, but we know the areas we create have to be Instagram-friendly" - Tamás Kádár, CEO of Sziget in Budapest, told Mix Magazine in their excellent article about how Instagram is changing design of clubs and festivals. Or, as Barcelona's Elrow David Jordan puts it - “when we prepare a new […]
"There are a lot of different ideas in play, all of them in service to that great high which can only be found on the dancefloor, when the entrancing lights and sweaty bodies give way to actualization" - Stereogum says about their latest choice for Album of the week. On her second album, London musician […]
Lee Buford of The Body, Kristin Hayter a.k.a. Lingua Ignota and Dylan Walker of Full of Hell have formed a supergroup Sightless Pit, and have recorded an album, 'Grave of a Dog', out February 21. The first single is 'Kingscorpse' - dark, powerful, haunting, noisy. Listen to it below. Grave of a Dog by Sightless […]
Timothée Chalamet will play Bob Dylan in a new music biopic 'Going Electric', directed by James Mangold ('Ford v. Ferrari' is now in cinemas), about Dylan's controversial 1965 performance at the Newport Music Festival where he went from acoustic to electric. Hollywood Reporter writes that Dylan is working closely with Mangold on the docu-movie, singer-songwriter's […]
One of London's most famous music venues, Koko in Camden has been badly damaged in an overnight blaze - the dome on the roof has been destroyed by fire. The venue which began life as the Camden Theatre in 1900 has hosted stars including The Rolling Stones, The Clash, Madonna, Coldplay, Prince, and Ed Sheeran. […]
11-year-old phenomenon Nandi Bushell ripped through a drum cover of Slipknot’s 'Duality', attracting the attention of Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg who tweeted “You’re the best, Nandi!!”. Bushell masters the intense double-kick pedal and controlled chaos of the song’s drum part, Consequence emphasizes. Bushell even sports a mask of Slipknot guitarist Mick Thomson to look appropriately spooky as she plays along.
The great YouTube music theorist Adam Neely tries to explain the Neapolitan chord, and goes on to argue why it's high time for that specific chord progression to come back. Man, he talks about classical music, and still makes it just so exciting, again! Some other fun stuff too in the video...
Olivia Rodrigo scores her first Number One on the Rolling Stone Artists 500 Chart this week to the tune of a staggering 283.7 million streams. As her debut album 'Sour' rules the Billboard 200 albums chart and 'Good 4 U' leads the Rolling Stone 100, Rodrigo becomes only the third female artist to sweep all three charts in one week, Rolling Stone reports.
Music theorist Rick Beato is a big fan of Pink Floyd's 'Comfortably Numb', which was a strong point in his growing up, so he takes it to analyse it. He also emphasizes the David Gilmour - Roger Waters relationship and how it affects both the song and Pink Floyd in general.
"I want to supply my people with some theme music so that they can feel self-confident, self-possessed; something to keep their heads up high" - 37-year-old vocalist, songwriter and producer Georgia Anne Muldrow says in the Guardian interview about her latest tape, 'Vweto III'. She made it to weather the “traumatic events experienced as a community online and offline”. It's not just racism that she's fighting against, there's also misogyny, which has given her some resilience - “It’s made me fierce. And what better obstacles than those of chauvinism, misogyny and racism to be a catalyst for becoming fierce?”.
YouTube paid artists, songwriters, and rights-holders over $4 billion in the last 12 months – money derived from both YouTube ads and YouTube Music / YouTube Premium subscriptions, YouTube’s Global Head of Music Lyor Cohen confirmed in a fresh newsletter sent to the music industry, Music Business Worldwide reports. YouTube paid the music industry over $3bn in 2019, and the streaming service added more paid ‘members’ in Q1 21 than in any other quarter since launch. Cohen states that the Alphabet-owned platform’s goal is now “to become the leading revenue generator for the music industry”. Spotify paid out over $5 billion to the music industry in 2020.
#ACFM podcast shared a podcast about the history of American folk music. It looks at the communism of Woody Guthrie and the singers of the Dust Bowl era, the Vietnam protest music of Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village scene, and the folk psychedelia of the Incredible String Band and Vashti Bunyan. The episode includes over 40 musical examples spanning a period of around 100 years.
Hip-hop playlist RapCaviar made The Mount Rushmore of 2010s hip-hop, picking the first three and leaving it to its Twitter followers to pick out the fourth. RC first chose Drake, Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole, with the Twittersphere picking out Nicki Minaj. Kanye West was close 2nd, followed by Future and Lil Wayne.
"The aim of artists is to put information out there, and when people are ready, they can come to it - and hopefully further themselves" - Sons of Kemet frontman Shabaka Hutchings says in Downbeat interview about their latest album 'Black to the Future' and sending messages with music. "If you have a surface-level understanding of racism or the legacy that we’re referring to, then if you encounter the music and suspect there is something deeper [with] the rhetoric around the album, and the message behind the album, it gives you clues and hints of ways to explore. For me, that’s the best thing, in that it gives people a way of going forward".
"I'm not naturally competitive but the hardest lesson I learned was that there are a lot of people in the music business who are extremely competitive and will sometimes do things that could be problematic" - Daniel Miller, the founder of Mute Records who published Depeche Mode, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, New Order, Can and many more says in The New Cue interview. One of his fondest memories comes from "when Moby made Animal Rights, a pure punk rock record, and everybody had written off his career and then he came back with 'Play'. When he did his first tour around 'Play', he was playing the Scala, and it was kind of semi full. The album started getting some airplay and, about a month later, he came back to play the Scala after a month on tour. And I've never had more guestlist requests than for that gig. Every celeb was there, wanting to be part of it, lots of other musicians. Nobody was interested three weeks before! The album got a full page zero out of 10 review in the Melody Maker".
