It’s not so often that you find a music video that perfectly reflects a band’s unique style, attitude and sound. The darkly humorous new clip for St. Vincent‘s “Cruel” so perfectly fits the bumpy music and the ironic, unchanging look of Annie Clark’s face that you can’t help but chuckle at the whole thing. St. [...]
Ever wonder what will happen during the last five minutes of late-night TV talk shows? Here are tonight’s notable performers: The Tonight Show With Jay Leno (NBC): Selena Gomez The teeny bopper is promoting latest album When The Sun Goes Down. Jimmy Kimmel Live! (ABC): Switchfoot Switchfoot is supporting forthcoming album Vice Verses, which drops next week, [...]
All the elements are accounted for on Meg Baird’s Seasons On Earth. By John Vettese The stage is empty except for a microphone and the stool Meg Baird is sitting on. She’s playing to a club crowd a few blocks from her Philadelphia apartment in characteristic stance: right leg sharply crossing her left one, guitar resting [...]
Sindri Már Sigfússon, otherwise known as Sin Fang, has released a new version of “Slowlights,” originally off Summer Echoes (Morr Music). The artist attempted a sound closer to that of a live band for the album and got help from some of his friends from Múm, Amiina and Seabear. Download the special version of “Slowlights” [...]
Magnetic Fields songsmith Stephin Merritt rifles through his mind’s attic in compiling Obscurities. Stephin Merritt is nothing if not precise—in his speech, his painstaking approach to conceptually specific projects (including, most famously, the Magnetic Fields’ self-explanatory 1999 opus 69 Love Songs), and, especially, in his meticulously well-formed songcraft. Uncharacteristically, then, Obscurities, a new compilation issued [...]
When electronic/dubstep disc-scratcher Bassnectar (a.k.a. Lorin Ashton) hosted his mini-festival at the yawning, expansive Bill Graham Auditorium, the downtown San Francisco venue was overrun with thousands of barely legal ravers chewing on glow-in-the-dark binkys and chattering excitedly (with and without the binky). So popular was this event—also featuring Baltimore-based electronic maestro Dan Deacon and jamtronica [...]
Baltimore synth-poppers Future Islands are all set to drop new album On The Water via Thrill Jockey on October 11, followed by a tour across these United States starting two weeks later. To hold you over until then, or introduce you to these bouncy kids, you can check out the video for album track “Balance” [...]
New Zealand’s Chelsea Nikkel—better known as Princess Chelsea—has just released her debut album, Lil’ Golden Book (Lil’ Chief). First single “The Cigarette Duet,” featuring Jonathan Bree of the Brunettes, has a ’60s pop feel with lyrics about smoking. Download the track below, and catch Princess Chelsea on tour this fall. “The Cigarette Duet” (download): [Audio clip: view [...]
Lots of MAGNET favorites are coming out with awesome boxed sets this fall, including of Montreal, which will release the career-spanning Cassette Box Set (Joyful Noise), containing the group’s first 10 full-lengths on cassette tape, on October 25. Eleventh album Paralytic Stalks is due out early next year via Polyvinyl Records … Pink Floyd and EMI music [...]
The Black Lips: Pissing off dickheads since 1999. By Patrick Rapa “Which one should I get?” Jared Swilley’s at a liquor store, looking at beer. It’s 2:30 in the afternoon, Los Angeles time, his first day off in two and a half months. “I’m gonna get an Asahi because I’m going to Japan on Thursday.” The [...]
