Stream the new album Ceremonials, due out November 1st, over at Pretty Much Amazing.
Watch the video for “Shake It Out” & listen to the beautifully done remix from The Weeknd.
This INCREDIBLE cover of U2’s “Love is Blindness” appears on Q Magazine’s AHK-toong BAY-bi Covered tribute album. You gotta love how Jack both honors the original and totally owns this with the intense passion and soul that we’ve come to love from Mr. White. (Does it make up for the ICP collaboration? I don’t know… But c’mon, most of that criticism would be there regardless of how that song turned out because it’s cool for normal people to hate ICP and cool for juggalos to hate…everything that isn’t ICP… What else do they like?) I like to think he did this to remind the world that he’s still a genius and is really good at making covers sound better than the originals.
The tribute album is available with copies of the magazine’s next issue which hits shelves on October 25th. Also, check out Damien Rice’s cover of “One.” Damien Rice’s “One”
Check out the track list below. In related news, U2’s Achtung Baby reissue arrives on October 31st. Never was much of a U2 fan, myself, but I might have to check it out.
Tracklist:
1. Nine Inch Nails, “Zoo Station”
2. U2, “Even Better Than The Real Thing (Jacques Lu Cont Mix)”
3. Damien Rice, “One”
4. Patti Smith, “Until The End Of The World”
5. Garbage, “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses”
6. Depeche Mode, “So Cruel”
7. Snow Patrol, “Mysterious Ways”
8. The Fray, “Trying To Throw Your Arms Around The World”
9. Gavin Friday, “The Fly”
10. The Killers, “Ultraviolet (Light My Way)”
11. Glasvegas, “Acrobat”
12. Jack White, “Love Is Blindness”
WILCO - THE WHOLE LOVE
Like 2007’s “Sky Blue Sky” and 2009’s “Wilco (The Album),” the eighth studio album from Jeff Tweedy and company is a more straightforward affair. Buttressed by two epic-length cuts - multifaceted opener “Art of Almost” and 12-minute closer “One Sunday Morning” - the heart of the record ping-pongs between upbeat tunes reminiscent of late-’70s U.K. new wave (“I Might,” “Standing O”), oddball Americana (“Black Moon”) and a swell Beatles pastiche (“Capitol City”). Although Tweedy writes and sings the songs, the record’s not-so-secret weapon is guitarist Nels Cline, who injects all manner of curious tones and textures into the 14 selections.
There has been a large PIG seen in the London sky. That’s right. Not a bird, not a plane, not Superman — no, it’s a pig, floating above London.
The 30-by-15-feet inflatable Pig soared over the derelict Battersea Power station today in London — the infamous image used on the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album “Animals.”
The scene was recreated to mark the release of the re-mastered versions of Pink Floyd’s 14 studio albums. Organizers had hoped to use the original vinyl pig, which has been in storage for 35 years. But it was found to be leaky, and a replica was created instead.
There was no replay of the moment during the 1976 photo shoot when the original pig broke free of its moorings and floated into the flight path for Heathrow Airport. It was later found in a farmer’s field.
MADONNA AND LIVE NATION: Match Made in Heaven????
Does Madonna want out of her 360 Deal with Live Nation?
Sources reportedly close to the matter recently told the New York Post that while Madonna is still bound by her 10-year touring and recording agreement with Live Nation, the Material Mom has recently been in talks with record labels to distribute and market her next album.
But Madonna’s publicist Liz Rosenberg set the Post straight, telling the paper “rumors that Madonna is looking to end her relationship with Live Nation could not be further from the truth.
“Many partnership conversations have begun which also include record label distribution, along with non-traditional distribution,” Rosenberg said.
After much anticipation, the Iconic Grace Jones will release her tenth studio album stateside this week: Hurricane – Dub, a 2-disc collection that includes the original album released in November 2008 and a brand new ‘dub’ disc, featuring slick new dub versions of each track on the original tracklisting.
From slick “Corporate Cannibal,” to the balmy tropical beat of the Island rhythms of “Well, Well, Well,” to her emotional and complex tracks like “I’m Crying (Mother’s Tears)” and “Williams Blood,” Hurricane is her chic symphony and her return at the helm as the Music Goddess; with her larger than life persona and alienist power to in trance and entangle all humans that encounter her voice and music while floating here in this universe.
Don’t miss this new interpretation of the ultra-Grace Jones experience.
With his just released single If I Had A Gun slowly climbing the US radio charts, Noel Gallagher has released a third track from his upcoming solo release.
Featuring a radically different sound than the first two tracks released from Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, the distant and ambient feeling of AKA…What A Life! borders more on Euro-flavored trance music instead of the typical rock and roll jams we have grown accustom to from the former member of Oasis. With the first strums of an electric guitar not showing up till well past the two minute mark, perhaps it is no coincidence that the song was debuted in the United Kingdom while America was busy celebrating Labor Day.
AKA…What A Life! will be available for purchase on September 11th. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds will be released on November 8th. Gallagher has tours planned for both the United States and Europe in the weeks following the release of his debut solo album.
PEARL JAM TWENTY (PJ20) Eddie Vedder and Julian Casablancas Perform Together
This past weekend, Pearl Jam celebrated their 20th year together as a band by headlining their own Pearl Jam Twenty festival at the Wisconsin ski resort town of East Troy. Festival attendees had to endure a whole ton of rain, but they also got some big one-night-only collaborations. The biggest of those was almost certainly a reunion of Temple Of The Dog, the collaborative PJ/Soundgarden project responsible for the classic yell-along “Hunger Strike.” Chris Cornell joined the band onstage during the encores and sang “Hunger Strike,” “Call Me A Dog,” “All Night Thing,” and the Mother Love Bone track “Reach Down.”
The Strokes also played the fest, and Vedder joined them onstage to sing “Juicebox” and to utterly overpower Julian Casablancas. The Strokes singer, who payed Vedder tribute during his band’s set, also joined PJ onstage with them later to sing “Not For You.” And at some point or other during the weekend, members of just about every other band on the bill collaborated with Pearl Jam, including Queens of the Stone Age, Mudhoney, the Swell Season’s Glen Hansard, and X’s John Doe. We’ve got videos of “Hunger Strike,” “Juicebox,” and “Not For You.”
musicROVR hosted a lounge at this year’s GALApalooza Event held at the Petrillo Band Shell in Grant Park. The event takes place every year on the Thursday night before Lollapalooza kicks off.
We discovered a great band, “Walk the Moon” and were rocked by the extrordinary headliner, “Grace Potter and the Nocturnals” — we fell in love with Grace and were lucky enough to have a spot in the pit to film this amazing footage of Grace & the Nocturnal’s finale song. Enjoy!!!
BEN GIBBARD personally selected Frightened Rabbit to open on their current tour, and the Scottish indie rockers brought with them a rep for Invisible Children, a charity that aims “to end the use of child soldiers in Joseph Kony’s rebel war and restore LRA-affected communities in central Africa to peace and prosperity.” As a ‘thank you’ to concertgoers who’ve supported this cause, FR frontman Scott Hutchison recorded a riverside acoustic take on his favorite DCFC song, Plans‘ “Different Names for the Same Thing.” “I almost tried to ‘countrify’ the song, as it has such a strong beautiful melody,” he told SPIN. “It’s a very simple song at its core, so I just stuck with that basic structure and let it be plaintive and sad.”
Chris Brown has completed his transition from R&B crooner/dancer to hip-hop prince by finally dropping his “Boy In Detention” mix tape. The 21-track freebie features collaborations with the likes of Wiz Khalifa, Swizz Beatz and, perhaps most noteworthy, Justin Bieber, who’s happily back to rapping on Brown’s “Ladies Love Me.” Chris samples his own “Look At Me Now” on his track with the pop star, which coincidentally (or not) broke out that song during one of his recent concerts. Produced by David Banner, both Breezy and J-Beezy (we prefer that to Justin’s chosen rap moniker of “Shawty Mane”) lay it down hard over a wobbly beat.
The musicROVR team kicked off 2011 Lollapalooza in style at the 5th annual GALApalooza party at the Petrillo Band Shell in Grant Park, where we enjoyed food from some Chicago’s hottest food trucks like 5411 empanadas, Flirty Cupcakes, The Slide Ride & our favorite from Bucktown’s The Southern Mac & Cheese. We also discovered an incredible new band which has clearly become all of teamROVR’s most interesting emerging discovery, Walk The Moon. And then of course there was Grace!! Our new obsession Grace Potter!!
Grace is a modern day Tina Turner meets a Janis Joplin risen directly from the grave. Grace Potter and the Nocturnals performed an incredible show, the guests were standing on their feet dancing into the Potter Trance.
Lollapalooza founder Perry Ferrell appeared and singer David Draiman also attended GALApalooza, which raised $243,000 for the Parkways Foundation.
Stay tune for Exclusive musicROVR Videos clips of Grace Potter
musicROVR Favorite: FLEET FOXES HELPLESSNESS BLUES
Hey, my name’s Robin and I’m a singer in and songwriter for Fleet Foxes, here to write the promotional biography meant to accompany and explain Helplessness Blues. I’m just going to write down some thoughts I have about the album and give you some context. Let’s do this.
So, for a bit of background: we’re from Seattle, and the members of the band are me, Skye Skjelset, Josh Tillman, Casey Wescott, Christian Wargo, and now our buddy Morgan Henderson, who helped out on the album and will join the band on tour. The band began as just me and Skye in Junior High, playing songs in his bedroom, until we moved to Seattle, settled on a name, and began meeting other musicians and playing with different people until we met all the guys currently on board. Casey joined in 2005, Christian in 2007, and Josh joined shortly before our first album was released, but after we’d recorded it. So, that’s some background information. Good luck working that into something intriguing.
We released our first album in 2008, had a lot of unexpected support from people and the press and we ended up on tour until October of 2009 (we’d expected to do one or two U.S. tours and hoped to start our next album in the Fall of 2008!)
Recording started with demos at a building in Seattle that’s been multiple recording studios since the ‘70s, from Triangle, to Jon & Stu’s, to Reciprocal Recording, to the Hall of Justice. A number of incredible albums have been made in that building over the years, including Bleach by Nirvana. So we were lucky enough to take over the lease when Death Cab for Cutie moved out in October 2009, and I started writing songs more seriously again. A couple months later, Joanna Newsom asked me if I would open some shows for her. As a huge fan of hers, I was completely honored and flattered that she’d want me to open her shows, and I felt like I needed some new songs that I could play alone. So, a number of the songs that ended up on this album came from the writing that preceded those tours. Having to play the songs alone meant I was really focusing on having a clear lyric and a strong melody, which ended up being a great change of focus for me as a writer because I’d spent a lot of 2009 messing around with non-songwriter type music and not always finding it satisfying.
After the first Newsom tour, we all went up to Woodstock, New York, to record at Dreamland Recording, where our friends in Beach House had had a good experience recording their last album Teen Dream. We were there for twelve days recording the drums and acoustic guitars. As an aside, I think Josh did an incredible job on the drums on this record, writing really inventive parts without a lot of instruction, and having such good tempo and “feel” that we were able to record all but one song on the album without a click track.
From there began a long stretch of recording in Seattle, from May of 2010 to November of 2010, where a ton of shit happened at numerous studios including Reciprocal, Bear Creek, and Avast. I could get into it, but basically it took a long time due to illness, scheduling, creative doubt, reassessment, rewriting, new songs being written, etc., etc ., etc. It was at times difficult to make this record. We ended up mixing at Avast in Seattle in December of 2010, with the record finally finished, even though we were recording vocals and guitar and rewriting lyrics up to the 11th hour. Not even the 11th, more like the 13th. So here we are, almost three years after the first album, finally done with the second one. Now I’ll talk about the actual music a little bit.
I think this music draws influence and inspiration from popular music and folk rock of the mid ‘60s to the early ’70s, folks like Peter Paul & Mary, John Jacob Niles, Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Neil Young, CSN, Judee Sill, Ennio Morricone, West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, The Zombies, SMiLE-era Brian Wilson, Roy Harper, Van Morrison, John Fahey, Robbie Basho, The Trees Community, Duncan Browne, the Electric Prunes, Trees, Pete Seeger, and Sagittarius, among many others. I’d say it’s a synthesis of folk rock, traditional folk, & psychedelic pop, with an emphasis on group vocal harmonies. Astral Weeks was a big inspiration on this album, if not always in sound then in approach. The raw emotion in Van Morrison’s vocals and the trance-like nature of the arrangements were very inspiring for this album!
Musically it leans on country music a little bit more, in the slide guitar of songs like “Grown Ocean” and “Bedouin Dress” or “Helplessness Blues.” We used a number of new instruments including the 12-string guitar, the hammered dulcimer, zither, upright bass, wood flute, tympani, Moog synthesizer, the tamboura, the fiddle, the marxophone, clarinet, the music box, pedal steel guitar, lap steel guitar, Tibetan singing bowls, vibraphone, along with more traditional band instrumentation.
OK! I think that covers most of it. The last thing I’ll talk about is the title. It’s called Helplessness Blues for a number of reasons. One, it’s kind of a funny title. Secondly, one of the prevailing themes of the album is the struggle between who you are and who you want to be or who you want to end up, and how sometimes you are the only thing getting in the way of that. That idea shows up in a number of the songs.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the record!
Robin
DREW BARRYMORE COLLABORATES WITH BETHANY COSENTINO
Last month, Bethany Cosentino told Rolling Stone she had started hanging out with Drew Barrymore after meeting her backstage in L.A. one night. Which, pop culture history suggests, is the exact way many people have met Drew Barrymore in their lives. And so Bethany and Barrymore decided to collaborate, and the result is a celeb-heavy video directed by Drew for the sweet fuzz of Crazy For You‘s “Our Deal.” The internet has a teaser for you, and it stars Kick-Ass’s Chloë Moretz in Grease-era wardrobe along with fellow fames Miranda Cosgrove, Alia Shawkat (Maeby Funkë!) and Community‘s Donald Glover.
As for the next Best Coast LP, she announced tha that it’s already in the making, and it may well be influenced by all the country she’s been listening to “Loretta Lynn, Skeeter Davis, Patsy Cline.” Watch, the teaser video below:
