Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett surprise-released her 'MTV Australia Unplugged Live In Melbourne' this week, closing the set with a beautiful cover of Leonard Cohen’s 'So Long, Marianne' (watch below). The album is out digitally - on Bandcamp.
On Monday SoundCloud announced they will be setting up a free upload limit to 15 tracks. On Thursday they abandoned the idea. But the damage was done. Twitter pushed its “decentralized and open-source” streaming service Audius (free, unlimited upload) in the meantime, and another competing service Audiomack started s new ad campaign - "always free, […]
The Weeknd performed his new song 'Heartless' on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert this week, while wandering the elaborately lit, mysteriously shifting halls of the Ed Sullivan Theater. The video starts, also unusually, with Colbert wondering away trying to find the singer, and finishes with the Weeknd appearing in front of the audience. Later […]
Lyrics service Genius is suing Google for allegedly copying its song lyrics and using them in search results. Genius is asking for $50 million in damages from Google and its partner LyricFind, the Verge reports. Genius says they caught Google twice - first they placed straight and curved apostrophes within the lyrics of 301 songs […]
PopMatters made a good selection of 15 best R'n'B/soul albums published in 2019. There's Emeli Sandé with "a real touch of warmth and love" on her 'Real Life', Michael Kiwanuka with "luminous songs", Jamila Woods with songs that "feel like individual baptisms as much as compositions" and, obviously, a dozen others. Check the full list […]
Tickets site TickX gathered Spotify data and curated a set of artists, songs and genres for the moods happy, sad, sexy, love, angry, and chill. The statistics for the list dubbed The Ultimate Playlist for Every Mood were drawn from a variety of playlists that featured those six moods as keywords. Top songs in each mood are. […]
A photo-portrait of UK rapper Stormzy has been hung in the London National Portrait Gallery, with Gallery director Nicholas Cullinan saying he was delighted to exhibit the portrait “as a contemporary intervention", the Bustle reports. The image by Mark Mattock features the rapper wearing a crown made up of the letters HITH, standing for 'Heavy […]
Billie Eilish tops Billboard's Top 200 Albums chart for 2019 with her debut 'When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?'. The 17-year-old star becomes the youngest artist to have the year-end No. 1 album. No. 2 on the year-end list is taken by Ariana Grande and her 'Thank U, Next', and No. 3 […]
Instead of listing them from the No. 1 best to No. 100 best, AllMusic listed the albums in alphabetical order, with links to original reviews. There's a few classical music album, and it's only these that have a full five-star reviews :-). Still, a good list.
Kanye West has announced a new opera titled 'Mary', scheduled to take place at Miami Marine Stadium on Sunday, December 8, the last day of this year’s Art Basel, Complex reports. Once again tapping his Sunday Service choir, 'Mary' will be directed by frequent collaborator Vanessa Beecroft, who recently directed 'Nebuchadnezzar' last month in Los […]
"If they’re blaming the music, then a lot of us wouldn’t be here – we’ve changed our lives, so it would be bad for us to watch them ban a form of music knowing that it’s how we got off the streets” Konan from the London drill rappers Krept & Konan tells the NME about […]
New York federal prosecutors have accused R. Kelly with bribing a public officer for “the creation of a fraudulent identification document for Jane Doe #1”, NPR reports. Prosecutors allege in an indictment filed in Brooklyn federal court that the bribery occurred on Aug. 30, 1994, the day before Kelly married Aaliyah - who was 15 […]
It's middle-of-the-road music, mostly ladies in the top 10, no surprises, nothing experimental; a good and quick way to understand where does the RS stand. Check out the full list here.
On the top spot there's 'Norman Fucking Rockwell!' because "Lana Del Rey just might have written the next best American record she’s so obsessed with after all". The list finishes with Greet Death's 'New Hell', bearing "a feeling of depression in desperate search of catharsis". Check out the full list here.
Spotify has unveiled its annual Spotify Wrapped which tells its users what artists, songs, genres, and podcasts they listened to most in 2019, and 2010s overall as well. My Decade Wrapped gives Spotify users a chance to look back on the music that defined each of their years throughout the 2010s. TechCrunch...
Daddy Yankee’s 'Con Calma' feat. Snow was the most-watched YouTube video globally, and in the USA the top one was 'Old Town Road - Remix' by Lil Nas X feat. Billy Ray Cyrus. Full Top 10 lists below. Top music videos global: 1. Daddy Yankee & Snow - 'Con Calma'2. ROSALÍA, J Balvin - 'Con Altura' […]
“Death metal, or minimal techno, isn’t going to work 99 times out of 100” - Alex Hill of the music consultancy company MAV told the Guardian about the right choice of music for a restaurant. "Music is as strong a flavour as food – it’s just another thing to get wrong” - London restaurateur Dan […]
Kim Kardashian West helped save death row inmate Rodney Reed from execution, inspiring others like T.I., Meek Mill, and Rihanna to voice their support. The Face asks, and tries to answer, why do pop stars, and should they at all, do these things. The dilemma celebrities face - "risk speaking up, pissing people off, and […]
Rolling Stone holds this, let's call it conservative rock position, and it's reflected on their list of best albums of the 2010s. There's no surprises there really, but it's interesting to see what did end up on the list, and how high on it, and what did not. Check it out here.
They are the architect of the sad-banger, the creative genius, a long shadow over a tough decade, the pop icon redefining gender, the voice of the next generation, the survivor, the relatable superstar, the saviour of grime, rock frontperson 2.0 and the hip hop’s boundary-pusher. NME...
The Quietus is opposed to album rating and best-of lists in general, but still, they took a bullet for their audience and made a list of 100 best albums of 2019. Good that they did, it's one of the most diverse. In the top 10 only, they have Black Midi, Richard Dawson, and Sunn O))), […]
Sonically, Bambara are somewhere in the space between Nick Cave, goth-rock and melancholy, with new album 'Stray' coming out in February. The band released two songs from it, 'Sing Me To The Street' and 'Serafina', both dealing with death, just like the whole album; listen to both songs below.
PopMatters has chosen "ten particularly phenomenal albums from across the globe", the ones where "artists ask their audience to leave behind insular worldviews and try to understand new perspectives". They chose Nigerian blues guitarist Mdou Moctar, Izraeli pop-trio A-WA, afro-pop by Ekiti Sound, tropical pop by The Garifuna Collective, Afro-Cuban singer Angélique Kidjo, Turkish rock and […]
Will it end up being a travesty remains to be seen, but the Guardian reports about the new Michael Jackson musical as something quite usual. Playwright Julien Nitzberg wrote it, it's called 'For the Love of a Glove: An Unauthorised Musical Fable About the Life of Michael Jackson, As Told By His Glove', and it […]
BBC Music has announced Celeste as BBC Music Introducing Artist of the Year 2019. She has received critical acclaim for her soulful voice, and the best advice she got, as she told the BBC, was - "try to remain yourself". Previous winners of the award are Slaves, Florence + The Machine, The Big Moon, Idles, […]
"Not fashionable but eternal" - Revolver magazine writes about their choice for the best metal album of 2019. At No. 25 a "cosmic death-metal". All in all, Revolver says it was "one of the biggest years in heavy music in recent memory". Check out their best albums list here. They made a list of top 25 […]
The first name in dubstep, reclusive London artist Burial has compiled his highlights from nine-year stretch into 17 tracks over two discs, resulting in "the most immersive Burial experience to date". Stereogum hears it as the best album this week - "a vast collection of music that proves a tour de force doesn’t have to […]
Slipknot canceled their performance at their own Knotfest Mexico festival on Saturday night due to a broken barricade and an on-stage fire, Revolver reports. Audience members broke through the stage barrier and, after repeated attempts to fix it, Knotfest announced that the night would no longer proceed as planned. Evanescence, who were scheduled to go […]
"2019 assured us that the album is a far, confident cry from deceased. Billie Eilish and Lizzo showed us multiple ways to cram banger after banger onto a disc while aspiring to something greater than a mere collection of singles. Tyler, the Creator and Angel Olsen took their studio recordings to staggering new levels this […]
Drake was named Spotify's most-streamed artist of the 2010s with more than 28 billion streams of his songs. His most popular song, 'One Dance', played 1.7 billion times alone, but it wasn't the most-streamed one of the decade - Ed Sheeran's 'Shape Of You' is decade's most listened-to track with 2.4 billion streams. 2019's biggest […]
"I’ve spent a lot of my career writing about the 'emo revival' and it often feels like writers who cover this stuff are constantly in defense mode, myself included. I wish it wasn’t such an uphill battle to talk about this type of music compared to the type of indie rock that gets consensus critical acclaim, especially when the music itself isn’t all that different" - Brooklyn Vegan's Andrew Sacher says in the Music Journalism Insider interview about genres being mostly ignored by the mainstream media. "In 2021 so far alone, we’ve seen some big 10th anniversary pieces go up for debut albums by Joyce Manor, Title Fight, and Balance and Composure, and what’s really clear to me, is that people are REALLY reacting positively to these pieces. These are classic albums to a generation of music fans in their early 20s right now, and these albums got basically no press when they came out, outside of punk-specific websites. In 2021, those albums seem a lot more important than a lot of the stuff that had consensus critical acclaim in 2011".
"It was really fun to play and to be in a really great Batman movie. And to be a villain! I put a hallucinogenic in Gotham City’s water supply. I had my own trial. I was in mental asylum, I tried to murder and probably rape Katie Holmes, I got clobbered by Batman. What more can you ask!" - James' Tim Booth says in The New Cue interview about his Batman role. There's also a funny anecdote: "One of my funniest moments from that is I'd go into makeup for hours every day where they put scars on me for two hours. On about the sixth day I'm sitting in a makeup chair and Batman's in there in his regalia. Christian Bale stays in character on set the whole time. He's sitting there in his full Batman outfit, doesn’t say anything to me. Then he finishes his makeup and gets up and he goes and stands behind me and in the Batman voice he says, 'Are you Tim?' 'Yeah…' And he goes, 'From the band James?' 'Yeah…' ''Laid' saved my life. I love that fucking album'. He walked out and I'm sitting there going, ‘Holy shit, Batman likes our album!’ It was one of the funniest and loveliest moments because he stayed in character. When he was in casuals he was Bruce Wayne, which I didn't realise. I had great conversations with him. I hung out with him quite a bit on set. I thought, ‘What a nice man.’ And then later I realised that he was hanging out with me as Bruce Wayne, which was really quite a mind fuck". James release their new album 'All The Colours of You' on June 4.
The Weeknd took home 10 awards at the 2021 Billboard Music Award, including top artist and top male artist, Billboard reports. Pop Smoke won five, including top new artist and BTS and Bad Bunny each earned four. P!nk was honored as the Icon, Drake as the artist of the decade and Trae Tha Truth as the Change Maker.
"Marvellously-named guitarist and vocalist Geordie Greep [is] a soft-spoken 21-year-old who talks while barely moving his lips, dresses offstage like Tony Soprano’s accountant (ie, suited-and-booted ’90s sharp), and can sing like a man possessed by a menagerie of personalities. Like the band, he contains multitudes" - The Face interview with black midi reads. Their new album 'Cavalcade' is out next week - "this is the eight-songs-wide, full-fathom-deep second record from black midi. Yes, it’s still, fantastically, a record to scare the neighbours".
J. Cole debuted at No. 1 on Billboard 200 chart with his newest album 'The Off-Season', with an impressive 282,000 equivalent album units, Billboard reports. Cole’s record is the largest rap album of the year with his new release more than doubling the first week of Rod Wave’s 'SoulFly' album, as well as the second-biggest […]
The New Yorker is highlighting a selection of their pieces celebrating Bob Dylan's big birthday. "In 'The Crackin’, Shakin’, Breakin’ Sounds', from 1964, Nat Hentoff visits Dylan in the studio and catches the artist in the first stages of his meteoric recording career. ('Wiry, tense, and boyish, Dylan looks and acts like a fusion of Huck Finn and a young Woody Guthrie. Both onstage and off, he appears to be just barely able to contain his prodigious energy'). In 'The Wanderer', Alex Ross follows Dylan on the road during his Never Ending Tour, which has defined the most recent decades of his seminal performances ('It’s hard to pin down what he does: he is a composer and a performer at once, and his shows cause his songs to mutate, so that no definitive or ideal version exists. Dylan’s legacy will be the sum of thousands of performances, over many decades')".
Navy Blue shares smooth jazzy psychedelic hip-hop 'Ritual' from his surprise-released new album; Curtis Harding shares a warm, conscious soul single with a pretty video for 'Hopeful'; Sa-Roc released s deluxe version of her last year's album, featuring new song 'Re-Birth' with MF Doom on the mic; Jade Bird's 'Different Kinds of Light' is just a nice love song; 'Like I Used To' is slightly 1980s-big-ballad song by Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen; Yoo Doo Right go enjoyably post-rocky on 'Don't Think You Can Escape Your Purpose'.
Italian competitor Måneskin won Eurovision 2021 with their song 'Zitti E Buoni', a rock song sang in Italian. Singing in French was a thing, since the two closest competitors were France's Barbara Pravi with a big-sounding song 'Voilà' and Switzerland's Gjon's Tears with a grandiose ballad 'Tout l'Univers'. The UK got, all summed-up - zero points!
"These are records that stop you in your tracks, that are impeccably recorded and have the two ingredients above all that we exist for: great songs and authenticity" - Chris Sheehan, founder of UK-based Karousel Music, writes in MBW after he launched a new label venture, Buried Treasure. It will be a platform for the "world’s most criminally overlooked artists to finally present their work to a new generation and earn the living they deserve". The first release on Buried Treasure is the UK folk singer-songwriter Matt Deighton.
“A little while before we went into lockdown, a boy in my class came up to me and said that his dad told him to stay away from Chinese people. After I told him that I was Chinese, he backed away from me. Eloise and I wrote this song based on that experience” - Mila (10) describes how she and her bandmate Eloise (13) wrote 'Racist Sexist Boys', a song that made their band The Linda Lindas the stars of this week. LA punks are rounded up by Lucia (14) and Bela (16), and they've been playing for two years now. Consequence brings the story of the band.
