British historian Mark Lewisohn, one of the world's leading authorities on the Beatles, played a tape to a Guardian journalist of a meeting held 50 years ago containing a disagreement that sheds new light on Beatles' breakup. It was "common knowledge" that the Beatles knew 'Abbey Road' was their last album and they wanted to […]
UK newcomer Slowthai and Miami rapper Denzel Curry have a new collaborative track 'Psycho', where they trade verses over chopped up horror movie violin screeches, courtesy of English producer Kwes Darko.
Prince’s classic double-album '1999' has been remastered for the very first time and expanded with 35 previously unreleased tracks for an upcoming Super Deluxe reissue. The new edition of the album will be available in deluxe and remastered versions, out Nov. 29. Released in 1982, the album was Prince’s first true crossover success, and catapulted […]
BBC has a nice video-article about the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the first Black classical ballet company, founded by Arthur Mitchell in a converted garage in Harlem in 1969. They talked to Virginia Johnson, one of the first dancers to join the company, now DTH's artistic director, who says that at the beginning "there were […]
All four original members of the iconic goth band - Peter Murphy, Daniel Ash, Kevin Haskins, and David J - will take the stage together 11/3 for a reunion show at LA’s Hollywood Palladium, Brooklyn Vegan reports. Since Bauhaus initially broke up in 1983, they’ve reunited several times in various formations. In 1998 they did […]
"A collection of exquisite hauntings, songs threaded together by a clawing sense of unease" - Stereogum says about 'House of Sugar', newest album by (Sandy) Alex G, a indie-rock project by American singer-songwriter Alexander Giannascoli. "'House Of Sugar' seems to be about the corrosive quality of the past, the ways addiction or naïveté or inherited trauma […]
"Gentler, but no less powerful, it's a velvet glove on an iron fist. It's fertile ground for Wolfe to rediscover... a Gaia figure of gothic folk metal" - PopMatters reviews about Wolfe's sixth album. "She takes steps away from synthwave and doom, but only in the strictest sense. [Her] creative versatility is on full and […]
This list, made for Brooklyn Vegan by the alt-rock band Microwave, is interesting since it shows how influences on one particular album can vary in terms of genre - here it goes from grunge to hip-hop - and from the almost obscure bands to the most famous ones - Fear Before the March of Flames […]
"No one puts the soul of the Sahara into music so intimately and ingeniously as Tinariwen, and 'Amadjar' is a particularly well-polished jewel" - PopMatters says in it's review of Mali's band new album (gave it 9 of 10 stars). "Their position at the forefront of a cultural movement - the globalization of a music scene often […]
Violinist, singer, songwriter and producer Sudan Archives has announced her debut album, 'Athena', out November 1 via Stones Throw Records, Fact Magazine reports. 'Athena' explores duality, a concept Sudan has long been familiar with as an identical twin, it was produced by Washed Out, Paul White and Rodaidh McDonald, and Sudan says the full-length is “more […]
Just a lovely story in the Guardian about Hemen, tiny Kolkata sitar shop, opened 73 years ago, and still working on the same principles. Hemendra Chandra Sen started the business, first as a repair shop, then as manufacturers, and after his death in 2010 his sons Ratan and Tapan took over. But it isn't a […]
“I never thought heartbreak could be so all-encompassing" - FKA twigs said in a press-release about her new album, 'Magdalene', out October 25, adding - "the process of making this album has allowed me for the first time, and in the most real way, to find compassion when I have been at my most ungraceful, […]
Kurt Cobain’s estate has launched a new clothing collection “Kurt Was Here”, featuring T-shirts, sweaters, hoodies and more branded with the late icon's artwork, sketches and journal entries. The clothing is available in limited quantities through Barneys in the United States, Selfridges in the U.K. and through an official Cobain webstore. A number of the shirts […]
“It’s a given that the product of some artistic work is worthless. You are therefore expected to 'mother' it instead of working and being compensated for it", Jenny Hval and director Zia Anger explain their newest work 'Accident', as Fact Magazine reports. They add: "Sometimes this is the best kind of work. Because it doesn’t […]
Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore chose five songs that influenced him while he was a young musician in NYC in the late 1970s. It's 'Lesson No. 1 for Electric Guitar' by Glenn Branca, 'In My Eyes' by Minor Threat, 'Too Many Creeps' by Bush Tetras, 'Man Ah Warrior' by Tapper Zukie, and, finally, as he told Rolling Stone, […]
Iron Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson unexpectedly halted band's show at Tacoma Dome on Wednesday (9/5), saying he had seen a fan being repeatedly punched by a group of security guards. According to Dickinson, the fan’s injuries were so severe he was bleeding from the head, and being treated backstage by medical professionals. The security professionals say the […]
Sony has unveiled a limited edition Walkman to mark the device’s 40th anniversary – the new NW-A100TPS looks identical to the cassette-gadget, but the tape is simply appearing as a nifty graphic on a 3.6″ inch display. The new digital device holds thousands of songs, has a 26-hour battery life, boasts 16GB of storage and […]
UK alt-rock band Supergrass have reunited, after a 9 year hiatus, and have already played their first post-reunion show. They headlined the Pilton Party, an all-day event hosted by Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis as a thank you to the Glastonbury staff and residents of the nearby area, Brooklyn Vegan reports.
"Shaun Ryder is the son of John Lennon, Johnny Rotten with a few kilos of John Belushi stamped in" - writer/director Matt Greenhalgh ('Control', 'Nowhere Boy', 'Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool'), says about his new project 'Twisting My Melon', the musical biopic of Shaun Ryder, of "the last true working-class band — the Happy Mondays". "Since […]
Tool first album in 13 years, 'Fear Inoculum', debuts at No. 1 with the biggest week for any rock album in over one year. The band’s fifth album sold 270,000 equivalent album units, and of that sum, 248,000 were in album sales. 'Fear Inoculum' was only sold in two formats - a digital download and a […]
"I grew up with Obama and we were happy in New York. We were really, really happy with everything. That’s what I think people miss. We had gotten to a point where we could focus on the music and the arts. It was great” - Lana Del Rey says in an NME interview. Then came Trump […]
Prophets of Rage have released powerful new video for their song ‘Pop Goes the Weapon’, which features a comprehensive list of all of America’s mass shootings that have taken place in 2019, including the date, location and number of those killed and injured (watch below).
Just a lovely article by the Rolling Stone, about famous artists and their early bands. There's Madonna and her post-punk act Emmy where she played drums at first; Radiohead members played in a saxophone heavy band On a Friday (“the worst band name ever” Thom Yorke later said); Neil Young had a Motown pop band […]
Lucien Greaves, co-founder of The Satanic Temple, recently listed his favourite devilish songs for NME - Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, Iron Maiden... - and of course Mark Beaumont had to react: "The devil’s music is far more insidious... It’s the pleasing four-note trumpet fanfare you hear when paying ten quid for an ‘exclusive’ in-game plough, […]
"The convoluted career of Sandro Perri can be seen as an ongoing effort to... make time feel like it’s moving at just the right pace... His records are busy, vibrant, and bursting with life, but aren’t ever in a rush to get anywhere" - Pitchfork chooses nice words for new album by Toronto musician Sandro Perri. This time […]
Leverage Models is an electronic ensemble led by former Stars With Fleas founder Shannon Fields, and their new compilation 'Greys' is the work of "20 brilliant artists whom I respect and adore", as Fields says. One hundred percent of the profits from the sales and streams of Greys will go toward the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees. […]
Katherine Paul identifies as a radical indigenous queer feminist, and on her second album as Black Belt Eagle Scout, this remarkable one-woman band delivers a stirring, low-key version of garage rock/pop folk. 'At the Party with My Brown Friends', as Consequence of Sound says in it's review, is "almost exclusively, sometimes uncomfortably, intimate, probing private places of […]
For the first time since 1986, vinyl records are on pace to outsell CDs this year - in the first half of 2019 vinyl sales made $224.1 million, comparatively, CDs yielded $247.9 million. Vinyl revenue grew 12.8% in the second half of 2018, and 12.9% in the first six months of 2019. The profits and […]
The Quietus is going metaly in this month's edition of Columnfortably Numb, their selection of best new psych-rock editions. Why? King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard went that direction on their latest album. So, what's on offer this month? Lo-fi stoner doom by Flowers, hairy heavy psych rock by Ecstatic Vision, psych-folk by Wet Tuna, and "colourful […]
Danny Brown's fifth album 'uknowhatimsayin¿' is “my version of a stand-up comedy album", and his new song 'Dirty Laundry' is in the same vein. The album will feature production from the iconic likes of A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip, Flying Lotus and JPEGMAFIA, with Run The Jewels, Obongjayar and Blood Orange appearing on the album.
Universal Music Group’s total revenues hit $2.20 billion in Q1, up 9.4% year-on-year. MBW does a breakdown of that number - $2.20bn quarterly turnover was equivalent to $24.5m a day, or $1m an hour. The star of the period, expectedly, was streaming - it generated $1.23bn, up 19.6% year-on-year.
Italian chanson and pop music singer and actress Milva, very popular in the 1960s and 1970s, passed away Friday at her home in Milan, Italy, aged 81, Deutsche Welle reports. With an active career spanning decades, Milva sold some 80 million records, and recorded 173 albums. Her penchant for singing in foreign languages led to her success around the world - she released songs in English, French, Spanish, Greek, Portuguese and Japanese. She had an especially large fan base in Germany, where she gained fame with sophisticated easy listening tracks.
"I’m anxious to be accepted and for people to know what I’m about. More than is necessary I hang on other peoples’ thoughts of me. That hurts or slows me sometimes" - Shock G said in a great Alice Price-Styles interview back in 2014. The interview went deep into Shock G's relationship with another late hip-hop great, Tupac Shakur, and his mother who at first didn't like her son hanging out with the prospective rapper. "I was fed up and like 'Ma, he had a rough time'. She said 'I know Gregory. You know how I know? He has those eyes that little kids give you in the grocery store when they’re not getting love at home and they’re like "will you save me? Will you take me home? Will you feed me?” But they’re not allowed to say anything, and they look at you a little too long'. She said Pac had those eyes when she first was around him". The visionary hip-hop bandleader died last week.
Remember Sports have hidden a laid-back indie-gem 'Out Loud' on their new album; Dope Purple go beautifully psychedelic on 'Evilness'; Arcade Fire's violinist Sarah Neufeld announces her new album with hypnotic 'The Top'; Royal Blood share straight-rock 'Boilermaker', made with the help of QOTSa's Josh Homme; Girl In Red endures consequences of love on 'You Stupid Bitch'; Brooklyn rappers AKAI SOLO and Navy Blue announced a joint album with 'Incursio Fur', indie-rap New York style.
'Vulture Prince' is the third album by Pakistan-rased and Brooklyn-based Arooj Aftab, dedicated to her younger brother who died while she was making it. The album was written as an instrument of swimming out of feelings of loss and grief. Arooj Aftab's mesmerizing voice is supported here by a team of renowned musicians. It's a subtle amalgamation of classical, South Asian music, jazz, even some trance and reggae. Full of class and a class of its own...
“A lot of people are making music intending to break it on TikTok. Your average person on TikTok is going to have 15 seconds to make the video, right? So you want to have as much of the song in that 15 seconds as possible. I think things naturally have gotten shrunk down from there” - Jasmine Star, 17-year-old musical prodigy and a guitarist who has found a large audience through TikTok, tells Guitar World in their piece about how TikTok is changing guitar music. Star says music is - "shrinking down into two minute songs that are written hook one/hook two/hook three, back to hook one with a variation hook, to hook three. So it's all about how the guitar fits into the hooks... And I think that that will change how riffs are being written. I think that riffs are probably going to become more melodic because of how songs are being written right now”.
Video game sounds, abrasive distortion and emotional rap lyrics are a typical digicore cacophony, but that's not all - digicore artists also pull from genres as wide-reaching as midwestern emo, trance, and even Chicago drill, Vice writes in a profile. Everything about this scene of teen musicians - the kids of digicore are mostly between the ages of 15 and 18 years old - centres around the modern Internet landscape; from its origins, to its diversity, right down to how community-oriented it is, including everybody working from their bedroom.
Lisa Rovner’s archival documentary celebrates the women whose breakthroughs in early electronic music laid the foundations of modern electronic styles. The focus falls on about nine or 10 women in the field, including experimental music pioneer Clara Rockmore, British composer and mathematician Delia Derbyshire who co-created the 'Doctor Who' theme, and Suzanne Ciani, the first woman to score a major Hollywood movie - 'The Incredible Shrinking Woman' in 1981. Guardian gave it five stars, describing it as "superb" and "electrifying". The Wall Street Journal starts with a provocative premise: "that the frontiers of electronic music were blazed by women".
Pitchfork looks back at 40 years of albums by "pop stars to metal urchins to avant experimentalists" covering the issue of climate danger. The list goes back to The Clash and Dead Kennedys, and also covers today's pop stars such as Grimes and Billie Eilish, as well as metal heroes Cattle Decapitation, avant-guard artist Babe, Terror, and indie-rock heroine The Weather Station.
TV needs new content in order to grow, while music, on the contrary, thrives on catalog music, MBW points out the examples of Netflix and music consumption in the US in lockdown. In Q1 2020, Netflix added nearly 16 million global paid subscribers quarter-on-quarter, whereas in Q1 2021, the platform gained just 4 million – 2 million lower than its own forecast. Music, on the other hand, was thriving on catalog music (records released 18 months or more prior to the time of listening) - it claimed more than two thirds (68%) of the US recorded music market (in sales-equivalent terms) in the first three months of this year. Catalog’s total share of US sales-equivalent music consumption in 2020 stood at 63.3%, up from 62.8% in 2019.
