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Music

Against Music’s Reductive Obsession With Newness: A Defense of Savages

By Tom Hawking on

Cometh the hype, cometh the backlash. Like a lot of the music press, Flavorwire has been enthusing over London four-piece Savages ever since they emerged last year. Out this week, their debut album, Silence Yourself, delivers on the promise of their first singles and killer live show. But with the release of that album, a counter-narrative is emerging, especially in their native UK. It stems largely from the sort of contrarians who haunt Internet comment sections (and celebrity Twitter feeds), but also appears in the occasional (semi-)professional review: Savages are derivative and dull, goes the argument, a rip-off of post-punk/goth luminaries like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division. They’re not doing anything new. … Read More

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Music

The 10 Albums You Need to Hear in May

By Tom Hawking on

As ever, we’re starting out a new month by poring over the schedules of upcoming album releases and distilling the slew of new music on offer into the form of a convenient list of the ten records you really, really should hear over the next four weeks or so. May looks like a particularly strong month — there are at least two albums that might well end up on our year-end Top 10 list (Savages and Majical Cloudz), along with a bunch of other good stuff from the likes of The National, Beaches, Standish/Carlyon, and plenty… Read More

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Music

The 10 Best Songs We Heard This Week: Savages, Laurel Halo

By Tom Hawking on

It’s Friday, and we are, as ever, rounding up the best songs we’ve heard this week, which to be honest is a rather pleasant distraction from all the other fucked-up stuff going on in the world. This week we swooned (again) at new material from Savages, were intrigued by the return of Laurel Halo, enjoyed the new Daft Punk song (albeit perhaps not quite as much as everyone else), and elsewhere generally got down to new stuff by Com Truise, Gunslinger, Tempers… and Black Sabbath, whose new song actually isn’t that bad at all. Who’d have thought it? Anyway, click through and get listening. … Read More

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Music

The 10 Best New Songs We Heard This Week: Savages, John Vanderslice

By Tom Hawking on

It’s Friday afternoon, which means that we’re counting down to beer o’clock, and amusing ourselves during these long beerless hours by recapping all the best music we heard during the past week. Happily, there’s plenty of good stuff to stream — most notably, there’s the new Savages song, which is many many kinds of awesome and augurs very well indeed for their debut album. There’s also the John Vanderslice “Diamond Dogs” cover that we premiered earlier this week, most excellent remixes of Kendrick Lamar and Phoenix, new songs from Cold Cave and Stephin Merritt, the entire new Flaming Lips album (live!), and more. Get streaming, peoples! … Read More

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Music

A Selection of New Bands for People Stuck in the ’90s

By Tom Hawking on

One of the more chastening aspects of getting older is watching the creeping advent of cultural conservatism laying its clammy hands on your generational contemporaries. We warned against the dangers of such conservatism and its attendant revivalism earlier this week in lambasting Foxygen’s new album, and it’s kinda terrifying to start to hear people say things like, “Oh, all the good albums were made in the ’90s.” If you’re also hearing similar things, we humbly suggest that you introduce your friends to the bands after the jump, bands whose sounds recall various ’90s acts while managing to avoid sounding like tiresome cover acts. Who’d have thought it, eh? … Read More

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Music

Flavorwire’s 10 Musical Acts to Watch in 2013

By Tom Hawking on

As we do habitually at this time of the year, we’re putting our heads on the “artists to watch” chopping block and picking the acts that we reckon will blow up big in 2013. After the jump you’ll find our run-down of the ten bands we’re tipping to rule 2013, or at least do pretty damn well for themselves — so go on, tell us that we’re right/wrong/have forgotten someone who we shouldn’t… Read More

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Music

Flavorpill’s Favorite Bands from CMJ 2012

By Tom Hawking on

We survived! The CMJ Music Marathon is over for another year — five days and about 500 bands later, we’re back on the couch and promising never to leave it again. But still, for all that we’re pretty much exhausted now, CMJ was a great week. As ever, we ran around down, drank too much, and saw more bands than we care to remember. And as ever, just as we were about to give up on the whole thing, we’d stumble across a band that made it all worthwhile. So here’s a selection of the best acts that our crack Flavorpill CMJ team — Judy Berman, Tom Hawking, and Sophie Weiner — saw this time around. Whose sets did you enjoy, gentle readers? … Read More

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Film

Brutally Honest Posters for Summer Blockbusters

By Jennifer Lewis on

How have the summer blockbusters been treating you thus far, folks? Already tired of all the superheroes, or are you thirsty for more? It’s been quite a while since the Academy Awards, but remember when we brought you a hilarious selection of Shiznit’s truth-telling posters for 2012 Oscar nominated films? Well, we decided it’s about time we made some exclusive Flavorwire posters of a similar, brutally honest breed. After the jump, we’ve created new versions of seven popular summer blockbusters’ posters. As always, hit the comments to let us know what you think. … Read More

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