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Staff Picks: Flavorwire’s Favorite Cultural Things This Week

By Chloe Pantazi on

Need a great book to read, album to listen to, or TV show to get hooked on? The Flavorwire team is here to help: in this weekly feature, our editorial staffers each recommend the cultural object or experience they’ve enjoyed the most in the past seven days. Click through for our picks, and tell us what you’ve been loving in the comments. … Read More

Music

The 10 Best Songs We Heard This Week: These New Puritans, Arthur Russell

By Tom Hawking on

It’s Friday, which means we basically can’t wait to get into bed and sleep all weekend, and also that in the meantime we’re rounding up the best songs we’ve heard this week. The past several days were curious, largely devoid of big-name releases, etc., but there’s still notable new work from These New Puritans, The-Dream, Sharon Jones, and Eric Burdon (with help from Jenny Lewis.) Elsewhere, there’s pleasantly spaced-out electronic music from Airbird/Napolian and Stellar Om Source, an unreleased Arthur Russell track, wacky Ethiopian dubstep, and more! All this goodness is streaming now, and it all awaits you after the jump. … Read More

Music

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

Music

10 MP3s You Need to Download for Free This Week: The-Dream, Ghostface Killah

By Tom Hawking on

It’s Friday, which means that it’s only a few hours until we get to sleep for two days straight, and also that it’s time for our regular roundup of new music to get your hands on this week. This week the return of The-Dream, the return of Ghostface Killah, the return of They Might Be Giants, the return of Thalia Zedek and the non-return of a bunch of other great artists, including a great El Perro del Mar remix, the next step in the evolution of our erstwhile social media department, a heap of free Kode9 stuff, and more. None of this will cost you a dime, so we suggest you stop watching that Nick Cave video for long enough to grab all this action. … Read More

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

Music

The 10 Albums You Need to Hear in December

By Tom Hawking on

December is traditionally a pretty dire month for album releases, and this year is no exception — but still, having said that, there’s enough noteworthy records dropping over the next four weeks to at least make our regular monthly “Albums You Need to Hear” post worth writing. It’s not just box sets and fancy reissues, either! The headline attraction this month is clearly the new Scott Walker record, which stands as one of the most remarkable things anyone’s released in 2012 and also a testament to the danger of starting your end-of-year-lists in November, but we’ve also tracked down a bunch of other releases that will do a fine job of bulking out your Christmas stocking. As ever, do let us know in the comments section what’s on your shopping list this month. … Read More

Music

10 Auto-Tune Songs That Don’t Suck

By Tom Hawking on

Cat Power’s new album Sun dropped earlier this week, and the fact that she uses Auto-Tune on the track “3, 6, 9″ has generated almost as much interest as the album itself. For an ostensibly innocuous pitch-correction effect, Auto-Tune has generated a heap of controversy over the last decade, ever since Cher introduced it to the world during the chorus of “Believe.” Much of the opprobrium directed at the use of the software is entirely justified (Hi, Eiffel 65! Hi, Chris Cornell!), but that’s not to say that every Auto-Tuned track is a priori awful — so we’ve set ourselves the challenge of finding 10 tracks that use its sound in creative or interesting ways. And for clarity’s sake, we’re discussing Auto-Tune as an audible pseudo-vocoder effect here, not as a production tweak to correct an errant vocal — otherwise every chart song since the turn of the millennium would be eligible. Anyway, let us know if we’ve missed anything. First person to suggest “Believe” or anything by T-Pain gets a lump of coal for Christmas. … Read More

Music

Staff Confessions: Our Favorite Guilty Pleasure Albums

By Tom Hawking on

We seem to have acquired a liking for publicly humiliating ourselves here at Flavorpill — last week, we threw aside our inhibitions and confessed to our favorite literary guilty pleasures, and this week we’re following up with a similar exposé of the dark corners of our record collections. Yes, it’s our favorite musical guilty pleasures, those records that we like to indulge in despite feeling rather uncomfortable when it comes to publicly admitting our liking for them. From cheesy R&B to pop punk and boy bands and — whisper it quietly — even Barenaked Ladies, it’s all here. Feel free to ridicule us as necessary, and if you’re brave enough, admit to your guilty pleasures in the comments section. … Read More

Daily Dose

Daily Dose Pick: Michael Schmelling’s Atlanta

By Russ Marshalek on

Michael Schmelling’s original intent for Atlanta was to create a photo book based on Outkast’s seminal record Aquemini; but as he immersed himself in the city’s hip-hop culture, he found a different story to tell, focusing on the pulse of the future.

The photographs in Atlanta portray Atlanta hip-hop as a living, breathing, growing thing to be found anywhere and everywhere, from strip clubs to the alcohol-free teen rap-party scene. The book also includes a series of exclusive interviews with the likes of producer The-Dream and notoriously elusive André 3000 himself, conducted by GQ editor Will Welch. The true pride of Atlanta, though, is in the included downloadable mixtape of unsigned ATL rappers, including Pill, Them Concrete Boyz, and cover-photo subject Lil Texas. … Read More

News

The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. Between accusations of his antisemitism and the fact that he’s not even planning to show up at the banquet, do you think the Academy is starting to regret giving Jean-Luc Godard an honorary Oscar? [via NYT]
2. So that’s not good: “Show Zero,” which was touted as the warm-up for Conan… Read More