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The 10 Best New Songs We Heard This Week: Joanna Newsom, Beaches

By Tom Hawking on

Over the last year or so, we’ve been spending our Friday mornings rounding up the best downloadable MP3s from around the web. Over that time, it’s become clear that the (legally) downloadable MP3 is in something of a decline — the advent of Soundcloud and Bandcamp has meant that bands are far more inclined to stream their work than offer it up for free, which is entirely fair enough, and it’s also meant that of late we’ve missed being able to share a whole bunch of new music that wasn’t downloadable. So from here on in, we’re sharing the best new songs we’ve heard over the course of the week, and offering them up for you to stream at your leisure. This inaugural edition features work from Joanna Newsom, Beaches, Dam-Funk, Motion Sickness of Time Travel, and plenty more. Happy Friday! … Read More

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Music

10 New Tracks You Need to Hear This Week: Sufjan Stevens, Factory Floor

By Tom Hawking on

It’s Friday, which means the first working week of 2013 is over — rejoice! It also means that it’s time for us to round up the 10 most noteworthy tracks of the week that’s gone by, and happily there’s some decent tunes to be had again after a pretty fallow holiday week. Specifically, there’s a hitherto unreleased Sufjan Stevens track, new Factory Floor, a bunch of interesting remixes involving everything from shoegaze to neo-R&B, Skrillex aping Burial to hilarious effect… and, yes, the depressing Azealia Banks/Angel Haze shitfight. Click through and get listening. … Read More

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Music

10 MP3s You Need to Download for Free This Week: Factory Floor, Why?

By Tom Hawking on

It’s Friday, which means another installment of our regular roundup of downloadable MP3 goodness from around the web. This week brings a new remix of “Two Different Ways,” the lead single from Factory Floor’s much-anticipated album on DFA, along with new tracks from Why? and Maria Minerva, an EP from Vampire Weekend’s Chris Baio, a remix of Zebra Katz’ “Ima Read” (featuring Tricky!), the inevitable new Lil B mixtape, and more. Since all this action costs precisely nothing, what are you waiting for? All the download links await after the jump. … Read More

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Music

10 Delayed Debut Albums That Were Totally Worth the Wait

By Tom Hawking on

Good news this week for fans of UK experimental trio Factory Floor — after nearly a decade of waiting, the band are finally putting out an actual full-length debut album. It’s due early next year through DFA, and we’re betting it’s gonna be excellent. This news, along with the release of Purity Ring’s long-awaited first LP next week (we’ve heard it, and it’s not bad at all) got us thinking about debut albums that have proven worth a lengthy wait. Most bands chunk out an album as soon as they get a sniff of a record deal; these bands didn’t, and we reckon the wait made their releases all the sweeter. … Read More

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Music

10 of the Most Interesting Women in Experimental Music

By Tom Hawking on

Laurel Halo’s debut album Quarantine is out this week, and it’s just as good as we were hoping it might be, full of strange and wonderful sounds, all topped by Halo’s distinctive vocals. Experimental music has a long and proud history of female involvement, from the work of electronic pioneers like Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire through Cosey Fanni Tutti and Ikue Mori and Laurie Anderson to latter-day examples like Diamanda Galas and Gudrun Gut. To celebrate the release of Quarantine, and the fact that there seem to be more fascinating female experimentalists around than ever, we thought we’d put together a selection of contemporary talents whose work we love — some you’re probably familiar with, some you might not be, all of them are great. And, of course, let us know your suggestions. … Read More

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Music

10 Bands Who’d Do a Great Job of Covering Our Favorite Artists

By Tom Hawking on

Bear with us here, but the fact that the new Marilyn Manson album is out this week has got us rambling off on a train of thought that’s led us to this point. Y’see, Manson’s album skates awfully close to self-parody at times, so much so that it’s almost like listening to a cover band doing Marilyn Manson tracks, just not quite as well as the originals. This got us thinking — well, what band would cover Manson well (an especially apt question considering that Manson’s own greatest strength seems to be covers)? And more generally, what contemporary bands would make a decent fist of covering some of our favorite artists? We couldn’t come up with a good answer for the Manson question — feel free to let us know in the comments if you can think of one — but we did come up with a selection of other ideas for dream covers sets. … Read More

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Music

7 New London Bands You Have to Hear

By Charles Ubaghs on

We love London. More specifically, we love music from London (might have something to do with a mid-’90s teenage infatuation for all things Britpop). The UK capital spits out new music at an aggressive rate. Yet the past few years has seen the city’s musical DNA mutate beyond recognition. Acts like The xx craft come-down tunes out of a love for the Pixies and chart R&B, while fuzz-punks Male Bonding recently earned Pitchfork’s Best New Music designation with a debut that sounds like it should have come from the LA scene that spawned No Age, instead of an East London that until just a few short years ago was dominated by the rule-Britannia shapes thrown by the Libertines and their landfill of indie followers. … Read More

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