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10 New Tracks You Need to Hear This Week: Grouper, The xx

By Tom Hawking on

It’s Friday, which means that this week is nearly over and it’s nearly time for the holidays — woo hoo, etc. — and also that it’s time to survey the various new tracks that caught our fancy this week. (If you missed our post last week, we’re temporarily replacing our regular MP3 post with a more general roundup of new music, as downloads are few and far between at this time of year.) Anyway, this week we get into the festive spirit with, um, a new track from Grouper. There’s also The xx covering Wham! (you’ll NEVER GUESS which song), a couple of new-ish Burial tracks, rather excellent remixes of Lower Dens and Sky Ferreira, a couple of gloriously misanthropic Christmas anthems, and more. Click through and get listening, gentle readers. … Read More

Music

10 MP3s You Need to Download for Free This Week: Thee Oh Sees, Prince Rama

By Tom Hawking on

It’s Friday, which means a) we survived the apocalypse and b) it’s time for another installment of our regular roundup of downloadable MP3 goodness from around the web. This week we have Prince Rama welcoming in the post-apocalyptic age, along with Thee Oh Sees covering the Velvet Underground, another beautiful home recording from Marissa Nadler, melancholy songsmithery from Willy Mason and El Perro del Mar, retro-futurism from Chrome Canyon and Ital Tek, and various other goodness for your downloading delectation. Since all this action costs precisely nothing, what are you waiting for? All the download links await after the jump. … Read More

Music

25 Intimate and Revealing Backstage Photos of Famous Musicians

By Tom Hawking on

We all know what our favorite musicians are like on stage — whether they’re shy or flamboyant, whether they’re chatty or businesslike, whether they’re funny or taciturn. But we also know that what we’re seeing on stage is ultimately a performance. Off stage, however, it’s a completely different matter, and thus backstage photography has always provided an interesting insight into the music world, particularly when the photos in question aren’t posed or contrived. We’ve pulled together a collection of such photos, images that seem to capture sides to performers that we rarely get to see, giving a glimpse of the person behind the persona — whether it’s a tearful Kurt Cobain slumped in a corner, Bob Marley playing soccer, or Lemmy reading a book (with nary a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in sight!), these are like all great photos in that they capture a moment in time and in doing so also capture some part of the subject’s personality. We hope you enjoy… Read More

Music

10 Albums You’ll Love If You Like The xx

By Tom Hawking on

The xx’s understated, minimal approach to pop music has been one of the pleasures of recent years — in an era of turning everything up to 11, it’s rather heartening to see that a band can sell a heap of records with a sound that’s built on the virtues of subtlety and restraint. Their second album, Coexist, which dropped yesterday, isn’t a dramatic departure from the template they set out on their 2009 debut — it’s a record that provides subtle refinements of their sound, and works very well in doing so. And while that sound is distinctive, it certainly isn’t unique, so we thought we’d celebrate the release of Coexist by pulling together a selection of albums that will sit nicely next to it in your record collection — albums that have informed The xx’s sound, or that we think share stylistic similarities with it. Let us know if you have any to add! … Read More

Music

The 15 Albums You Need to Hear in September

By Tom Hawking on

You know summer is well and truly over when the humidity recedes, the days start getting shorter and the big album releases start coming thick and fast. Yep, it’s almost time for the September rush, and this year the crop is particularly good — so much so, in fact, that we’ve expanded our usual round-up of 10 albums you need to hear in the month to come to a bumper list of 15. As ever, we’ve also rounded up the rest of the month’s notable releases: the good, the bad, and the ugly. So tell us: what are you looking forward to hearing in… Read More

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

Design

Duane Dalton’s Elegantly Redesigned ‘Album Anatomy’

By Judy Berman on

You might be tempted to lump in Duane Dalton’s Album Anatomy series with the many “minimalist” renderings of pop-culture icons and artifacts that have flooded the Internet. But the Dublin-based designer is actually doing something a bit more interesting than many of his peers, pushing all the information about the record to the top and bottom of the image and using the center space to illustrate his own experience of it. Dalton writes that the project is “an exploration in the art of reduction. It breaks down album imagery into its purist [sic] form by discarding any unnecessary information. This is achieved using a strict grid that displays the relevant album details, which leaves a central void to convey a response to the album. This void is filled by my personal response to an album. It can be influenced by a key track, the cover art or the overall flavour of the album.” Click through to view some of our favorite Album Anatomy redesigns, and visit Dalton’s website to see many more. … Read More

Music

10 Great Musical Double Bills That Should Play Occupy Wall Street

By John DeFore on

The Occupy movement is famous for welcoming anyone who wants to join. But you can’t help but wonder if, for campers who’ve endured taunts and snow and pepper spray, some musical guests are more welcome than others. Yes, it’s a thrill to see Philip Glass using the people’s mic at Lincoln Center, but too many of the celebrities who visit OWS seem (at the risk of being uncharitable) to be using its fame for their own good instead of vice-versa. One wonders, for instance, how many impassioned discussions of banking regulations and foreclosure statistics were ever interrupted by the comment, “You know who I’d love to hear right now? Third Eye Blind.”

With that in mind, we offer ten dream concerts for OWS — double bills of music that’s relevant and rousing, from artists (unlike these movement-friendly newcomers) with enough name recognition to draw both fans and media attention to Zuccotti Park, or anywhere else the 99 percent are trying to make themselves heard. … Read More

Music

Thanksgiving-Appropriate Albums the Whole Family Can Agree On

By Tom Hawking on

Sure, cooking the turkey so that it’s not underdone and not too dry is difficult enough. But the hardest thing about Thanksgiving Day with your family is, inevitably, the music. Your parents want something dire from the ’70s, like Neil Diamond or Creedence; that cousin from Jersey who you never speak to has somehow heard that you “like music” and wants to play you the new Nickelback record; and your kid sister keeps demanding to connect up her iPod to the stereo so she can play her Miley Cyrus record. Argh. So let us help out with a selection of Thanksgiving records that’ll at least placate your folks, and hopefully Jersey cousin too — you might need to just lend kid sister your headphones and hope for the best, though. … Read More

Music

10 Advertisements That Shamelessly Rip Off Well-Known Songs

By Tom Hawking on

When the advertisement for Dell’s new laptop started airing last week, it came accompanied by a song that was kind of like Broken Bells, only shittier. Unfortunately, this is far from the first time a band has had its music “borrowed” for a commercial — the sound-alike has a long and ignominious history, and since suing for music-related copyright infringement is notoriously difficult, it’s unlikely to stop any time soon. After the jump, we’ve collated some of the more notorious examples from years gone by. Read on and shake your head in disbelief. (We also can’t help but be amused that several of the most shameless examples have been quickly dragged off YouTube by the companies involved on the basis of, yes, copyright infringement. Ha.) … Read More