RS says it goes from the Beatles to Nas and beyond, and it's actually much broader than that, and not that much classic rock at all. A lot of, well relatively, it's still the Rolling Stone, hip-hop, pop music, indie rock. Good list, all in all, and a good starting point to get into musicians' […]
K-pop star and actor Sulli has been found dead at the age of 25. The star was a victim of online bullying, had severe depression, and the Korean police says “it seems that she took her own life". Sulli was a member of the popular K-pop girl group f(x) from 2009, went on hiatus from […]
"Even when it finally settles back into more comfortable lyrical terrain... the music strays beyond their usual comfort zone: ragged and underpinned by glitchy electronic beats. It suits them out there... Musically, Giants of All Sizes is richer and stranger than anything they’ve released since their commercial breakthrough" - Guardian's Alexis Petridis writes about his […]
SuperM exist for only two months now, but they have already reached the top of Billboard 200 album chart (album sales in US). Their EP named 'SuperM: The 1st Mini Album' sold 168,000 equivalent units, of that sum 164,000 were in album sales, Billboard reports. SuperM is a new K-pop septet that’s branded as a […]
The London four-piece are the latest chosen by the NME as the "next-big-UK-rock-thing", and they are - quite good. Not as fresh and exciting as Black Midi, but still worth a listen. Their debut album 'Mass', lyrically, pulls a lot from frontman Theo Polyzoides' childhood, as he says in NME interview: “Some of the fondest […]
“I feel very bad about myself. I cannot see anything positive in my body, I hate to look at myself in the mirror and it makes me suffer a lot" - a young fan named Barbara asked Nick Cave on his Red Hand File blog. Cave thanked her for “entrusting him with such a courageous […]
"While their music may contain a multitude of music theory complexity, it can also be accessible, funky, tender, vulnerable, head-banging, and heavy on guilty-pleasure pop/rock tropes" - PopMatters says about Bent Knee's fifth album. PM describes the Boston band as "prog rock... avant-garde... art rock.. jazz... good old-fashioned metal", but they "use their massive musical […]
Phonocut is the size of a regular turntable, and it allows users to connect a digital audio source of their choice and use an accompanying app to help format the audio to fit two sides of a 10-inch record. From there, a diamond stylus will etch the sound wave into the surface of the record. […]
On his 20th birthday (October 7), American rapper Mavi released his debut album 'Let the Sun Talk', lyrically rich, with production from Earl Sweatshirt, MIKE, and Navy Blue, among others. AlbumoftheYear.com describes it as "incredibly sharp, consistent, very immersive and hazy hip hop record with a ton of great production, great lyrical raps and a creative […]
Production at National Audio Company, America’s largest cassette tape manufacturer, has slowed due to the worldwide shortage of gamma ferric oxide, material essential for the production of cassette tapes, Pitchfork reports. The only factory that refines the magnetic material used in the production of professional audio recording tape has been under renovation for most of […]
'No Home Record' is a first solo album by Kim Gordon, former voice of Sonic Youth, and here, she sounds as fresh as ever. Lyrically, she is dealing with "these calamitous times with as much wit and menace", as Guardian says in their review (five of five stars). Sonically, it's like anything we've heard from […]
A new branch of HMV opened in Birmingham today (October 11), the biggest entertainment store in Europe - it's almost the size of 12 tennis courts. HMV almost went bankrupt, when Sunrise Records owner Doug Putman bought the company, keeping over 100 stores open, though 27 ended up closing. The new Birmingham store, to be […]
For the first time, black students made up more than 3% of new undergraduates at Cambridge University, and, partly at least, it's thanks to Stormzy. Grime artist has pledged to fund the tuition fees and living costs of two students each year, BBC reports. This year 91 black students were admitted to the university, up about […]
"For someone who claims to be a rock star, he’s missing a major point of the job. Rock’n’roll was about subverting traditional engrained ideas, of not doing and believing what you’re told, of questioning the world and everything in it. Every radical musician from Lennon to Frank Turner has questioned religion in song and to […]
The Quietus has an interview with an interesting concept - members of Voivod, Hawkwind, Gong, The Utopia Strong, SunnO))), 808 State and more, interview a band they were influenced by, French prog-rockers Magma. "You can achieve something without any concessions if you work hard, believe in yourself and stick to your ideas" - they answered […]
"As the production mastermind behind one of the year’s other breakthrough acts, Octavian, J Rick occupies a prime position on the vanguard of UK rap, 'No Retreat, No Surrender' is only going to further consolidate that status" the Quietus says about J Rick's new mixtape. "If J Rick seems like something of an outlier just now, […]
They look pretty much neo-hippie (how else, they're covering Mitchell, right?) and sound, well, great. Watch below.
Green Day made a new theme song for this NHL season - their track 'Fire, Ready, Aim' will serve as the Wednesday Night Hockey opening music, Consequence of Sound reports. The song is also to be featured on Green Day’s forthcoming album, 'Father of All Motherfuckers'. Listen below.
'2020' is the sixth album from the much lauded, eccentric songwriter, "hugely witty, but dark as fuck. His lyricism is, frankly, wonderful", the Quietus says about Richard Dawson. His latest album "is heartbreaking, violent, defeated, and yet majestic... He’s an astonishingly good writer. I am awed and envious". What has changed since his last album? "He’s […]
One of the most adventurous guitarists around today, Bill Orcutt releases his new album 'Odds Against Tomorrow, Friday 11, "a tremendous collection of solo performances". "While Orcutt weaves an unusual, jarring web of notes, it's not mindless plunking or blind slashes of guitar chords", PopMatters argues. "He's a highly gifted musician, with a playing style […]
The Quietus interviewed "a genuinely exciting new group with the potential to be massive", London five-piece Squid. They were defined as being post-punk, a label they resist - "We are the first generation that’s been brought up with the internet in developing periods of our lives. It means that genre is much less definable, it’s not […]
American indietronica band Poliça have a new song out, 'Driving' (watch below), and a new album, 'When We Stay Alive', coming out in January. The album was written, as Stereogum reports, when Poliça singer Channy Leaneagh fell off her roof in early 2018 and broke a vertebra - "Laying in bed, as I healed from a […]
Fatboy Slim mixed Greta Thunberg's UN speech in a performance of his club favourite 'Right Here, Right Now' in the UK over the weekend. His mix starts with Thunberg’s speech to world leaders about the climate crisis - “We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw […]
Brooklyn Vegan made a good choice of new songs of the week. There are Petbrick, new industrial project from former Sepultura drummer Igor Cavalera and Big Lad’s Wayne Adams, with guest vocals by Laima Leyton; Texas collective Golden Dawn Arkestra with their French pop-post-punk-krautrock-tropicalia project; first new Caribou song in five years; Sebastian give us pulsating new […]
Pitchfork likes their indie rock and (selected) pop musicians, so the selection of the best albums of the last 10 years (2019 is not over yet, right!?!) mirrors that philosophy. Check it out here. As for the best songs of 2010s, a lot of artists absent from the albums list found their place at the […]
Norwegian producer Lindstrøm has transformed dance music into something both emotional and architectural, and now, on his latest album, 'On A Clear Day I Can See You Forever' he loses all the disco, and leaves just the space, Stereogum says in its review. These songs are "indistinct haze that nevertheless lends a certain grandeur to […]
New Batman movie 'Joker' has come under fire for using a track by convicted pedophile Gary Glitter on its soundtrack. The movie uses Glitter's 1972 hit 'Rock and Roll Part 2' in a lengthy and pivotal scene, in which Joaquin Phoenix dances down a long flight of stairs and transforms into the iconic character. A number of upset […]
Big Thief this week release new album 'Two Hands', five months after their latest, 'U.F.O.F.', the latest being an "earth twin" to the older one's "celestial" spirit. 'U.F.O.F' was recorded in Washington State's dewy forests, as multi-layered, highly constructed studio work, and 'Two Hands' was recorded almost entirely live in the harsh, decaying desert of El […]
BadBadNotGood keyboardist and co-founder Matthew Tavares has confirmed his departure from the group, after taking a hiatus in 2017, Exclaim reports. "This decision did not come easy however", he said in an Instagram post - "I had invested every waking hour into this project since I was 20 years old, and on-top of co-producing and […]
All of the 135,000 tickets for the 50th year of Glastonbury have been sold out in 34 minutes, with a record 2,4 million people signing up to have chance of securing a ticket, Daily Mail reports. The ticket sale was the second fastest in the event’s history, with only the 2014 festival selling out a […]
Sao Paulo trio DEAFKIDS are the latest guests in Fact Magazine's Against the Clock, where an artist has 10 minutes to produce a song. The model proves a perfect fit for the psych-noise industrial experimentalists, since their music often comes to life in a spontaneous way. Watching music creation rarely gets this close!
'Game of Thrones' actress Esmé Bianco has sued singer Marilyn Manson, claiming he coerced her with "drugs, force, and threats of force", CNN reports. The plaintiff alleges sexual assault and battery, also, the suit alleges Manson and his manager Tony Ciulla broke trafficking laws by luring her from London to the US with empty promises of work. Bianco is among a handful of women who spoke out against Manson, however, her court filing on Friday marks the first legal action over such allegations against Manson. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department started investigating allegations against Manson - real name Brain Warner - in February.
'Punk the Capital: Building a Sound Movement' is the first documentary to tell the story of Washington D.C.’s influential punk and DIY movement from the turn of the 1970s to the 1980s. The 88-minute documentary features some of the biggest names from the D.C. scene, such as H.R. from the Bad Brains, Ian MacKaye from Minor Threat and Fugazi, Henry Rollins from the Black Flag, Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys, and others, Consequence reports. It comes out May 14.
Will Mecum, founding guitarist of long-running stoner metal outfit Karma to Burn, has died, Metal Sucks reports. Will formed Karma to Burn with bassist Rich Mullins and drummer Nathan Limbaugh in 1994 in Morgantown WV, to release six albums with the band.
“Because everything’s so cancel-culture, woke bullshit nowadays, you could never have the punk explosion nowadays... We’re lucky it happened when it did, because it’ll never happen again. You won’t have any of those kinds of bands ever again. Everyone’s so uptight and P.C., it’s just like, ‘OK, whatever'” - Glenn Danzig says in a Rolling Stone interview about his beginnings with the band the Misfits in the late ’70s. He explained: “Part of [my songwriting approach was] like, ‘F**k everybody. F**k you, f**k you, f**k you, f**k the world.’ And that was pretty much the attitude. It was just like, ‘F**k your system, f**k all this bullshit.’ It was something else. I don’t think people will ever see anything like it again. There won’t be any new bands coming out like that. Now, they will immediately get canceled”.
Most of the music festivals in the UK still due to take place this year could be scrapped without the safety net of government-backed cancellation insurance, the Association of Independent Festivals has warned. A quarter of UK festivals have already been called off, but 76% of the rest need "urgent intervention" from the government to save the season, BBC reports. Festivals contribute £1.76bn to the UK economy and support 85,000 jobs.
The organisers of the Grammy Awards have scrapped their secret and anonymous voting committees following allegations of rigging, favouritism and racism, according to the New York Times. The Recording Academy voting members - which run into thousands - would instead select next year's nominations and winners. The Grammys voting procedure had been notoriously complex, with committees made up of 15-30 "highly-skilled music peers" having the final say in 72 categories. This meant they could overrule the votes of rank-and-file members. The Academy said it was also reducing the number of categories in which voters may vote, and adding two new award categories - Best Global Music Performance and Best Música Urbana Album.
Iranian metalcore band Out of Nowhere made a selection of 10 best Middle Eastern metal bands (or, we can call it Near East, depending, probably, on where we are). So, the best in metal from the vast region are:
Calibre - melodic metal core, Iran
Chopstick Suicide - mathcore, Turkey
Coast of Arms - metalcore, UAE/Qatar
Creative Waste - grindcore, Saudi Arabia
Kimaera - doom/death, Lebanon
Mortem Atra - melodic doom / death metal, Cyprus
New Carnis - death metal, Iran
Phenomy - thrash metal, Lebanon
Scarab - death metal, Egypt
Smouldering in Forgotten - death/black, Bahrain
‘I’m Going to Break Your Heart’ is a documentary about singer-songwriters Raine Maida (of the group Our Lady Peace) and Chantal Kreviazuk, who comprise the duo Moon Vs Sun, who are trying to save their marriage by making music together, in front of the camera. Variety likes the marriage-as-a-band premise of the docu: "The two escape from L.A. for a songwriting retreat on the French island of Saint Pierre, only to be constantly rubbing each other the wrong way in the collaborative process. That Maida and Kreviazuk are also husband and wife does lend some extra stakes when they battle it out as co-writers: This might be the first marital-drama documentary that has, at its crux, irreconcilable differences over a pre-chorus".
The UK is testing the relaxation of Covid rules with a trial festival this weekend in Liverpool, the Evening Standard reports. Fatboy Slim and Sven Väth will headline The First Dance at The Circus nightclub, which sold out its 6,000 tickets quickly - the first time any such event has been allowed for over a year. Clubbers will not be required to social distance or wear face coverings but will have to take a lateral flow test before entering the venue. The First Dance is part of the Events Research Programme (ERP), which will provide data on how events holding anywhere between hundreds and tens of thousands of people could safely reopen later this year.
