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Rare Photos of Industrial Bands Looking Happy

By Tom Hawking on

This week is shaping up to be a good one for fans of industrial music — apart from the much-heralded return of Nine Inch Nails, which we reported this morning, there’s also a new album by ’80s industrial veterans KMFDM, the latest in a decade-long purple patch that followed their brief breakup and reformation under the moniker MDFMK. As a genre, industrial is rather known for its stony-faced seriousness, but occasionally its progenitors can be found cracking a smiling or even looking, y’know, happy. And so, to celebrate a week of good news, we thought we’d find some photos of genre icons looking cheery. It’s harder than it looks. … Read More

Music

10 Albums Guaranteed to Make Your Ears Hurt

By Tom Hawking on

We’ve been listening a lot to the new Crystal Castles album III, which is out this week, here at Flavorpill, and while we’ve been enjoying it a lot more than we thought we would, we do rather miss the days when they sounded like someone taking a sledgehammer to a Commodore 64. Clearly, you have to be in the mood for such things, but when you are in the mood, there’s nothing more viscerally thrilling than some nasty, nasty noise music. We thought we’d share some of our favorite albums for inducing earaches. What are yours? (Incidentally, we mean albums that make your ears hurt in a good way — which means: sorry, Hadouken!/Enter Shikari/BrokenCYDE/etc, you don’t qualify.) … Read More

Music

10 of the Best Remix Albums in Musical History

By Tom Hawking on

The art of the remix is an interesting one — depending on context, it can be a fascinating reinterpretation of an existing track or a throwaway four-to-the-floor cash cow. There have been some great remixes over the years, of course — indeed, some have ended up being more definitive than the original (we looked at some such tracks here). And then there’s the remix album, which is a whole different beast. Like, for instance, the fantastic Philip Glass remix album, which has been on high rotation at Flavorpill central of late — since it’s soundtracking our countdown to the apocalypse, we thought we’d take a look at it and some of the other great remix albums from throughout the history of music. As ever, let us know (nicely) if you reckon we’ve missed any. … Read More

Music

A Selection of Bands Who Should Never, Ever Have Reunited

By Tom Hawking on

Rumors of a Smiths reunion ruled the Internet for the past week — apparently someone at Coachella has had the genius idea of luring Morrissey with the offer to make the festival 100% vegetarian if the Smiths played. But, of course, it’s not going to happen, which is probably for the best. While the idea of being able to finally see one of the best bands of the ’80s playing live is definitely an appealing one, we’re still not entirely sure how we’d feel if the impossible did come to pass. Honestly, we can’t see it lasting long — it wasn’t so long ago that The Smiths were slugging it out in court, after all, with the presiding judge memorably describing Morrissey as “truculent, devious and unreliable.” There are some bands whose interpersonal relationships, or lack thereof, seem to preclude successful reunions. Like this lot, for instance — it’s not that the performances were necessarily bad, but they were simply doomed from the start… … Read More

Web

What’s On at Flavorpill: The Links That Made the Rounds in Our Office

By Alison Nastasi on

Today at Flavorpill, we read up on the newest mock meat that freaked reviewers out. We learned 10 things we didn’t know about London’s Olympics. We reimagined Disney princesses as women of color. We listened to Scarlett Johansson cover Serge Gainsbourg’s “Bonnie and Clyde.” We watched Chris… Read More

Music

Our Favorite Dark Ladies of Rock ‘N’ Roll

By Tom Hawking on

As we mentioned earlier in the week, we’ve had Zola Jesus’s new album Conatus on constant rotation of late, and boy, can we ever recommend it. Although Nika Danilova’s not keen on being labelled goth — “What would be the point of making goth music? It’s already been done,” she told Q magazine in January — she certainly shares some kinship with the likes of Siouxsie & The Banshees and Dead Can Dance, female-fronted or female-centric acts whose music carried a certain ominous air. In this sense, Danilova is the latest in the line of what we might call the dark ladies of rock ‘n’ roll. We’ve selected our 10 favorites after the jump. Who are yours? … Read More

Music

Mixtape Primer: Dark Synthpop Sounds Past and Present

By Tom Hawking on

If you head over to Matador Records’ website, you’ll find the new Cold Cave album streaming in its entirety. It’s been on high rotation here at Flavorwire, and we’re particularly loving the strong influence it draws from the darker/harsher end of the 1980s synthpop spectrum – darkwave, coldwave, and other genres with names that sound like they were made up by Hipster Runoff but really, truly, actually do exist. These sounds have been creeping back into music over the last couple of years, coinciding with a resurgence in interest in the original genres. Synthpop got a bad name during the late 1980s, but when it began, it was a hugely exciting genre, taking the DIY philosophy of punk and applying it to newly affordable electronic equipment to create dark, raw electronic sounds. Here’s a C60 of some fine examples of this sound, with the old on Side A and the new on Side B. … Read More