1. According to The Observer, Kanye West is planning to shoot a short film — much like his 30-minute clip for “Runaway” — in the Middle East. Says their source: “There’s a lot of preconceived notions and stereotypes about Emiratis and Qataris, which Westerners often play up. [His reps] discussed how Kanye is looking to bridge the cultural divide and break misconceptions.”
2. It looks like Darren Aronofsky may have found someone besides super busy Christian Bale to play Noah. The director is reportedly eying Russell Crowe to star in his epic film, with rumors of Liam Neeson being cast as its villain. [via Slashfilm]
3. Apparently Scott Speedman would be totally down with the idea of a Felicity reunion — but there’s a not so tiny catch. “But if I’m doing a reunion, I’m doing it fat, that’s for sure,” he told E!. “My character’s a giant fat guy.”
4. Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska died yesterday at the age of 88 from lung cancer; despite a career spanning six decades, she only published 400 poems during her lifetime. “There is a trash bin in my room,” Szymborska once explained. “A poem written in the evening is read again in the morning. It does not always survive.” [via Gawker]
5. This is what it sounds like when Orbital joins forces with Zola Jesus. Wonky, the UK dance duo’s first album in eight years, drops on April 3rd here in the US.
Is it just us, or do most of the “best albums of 2011″ lists this year tend towards a certain amount of sameness? That’s understandable given the undeniable greatness of a handful of records, but on the whole, when we’re facing down a few weeks of holiday stress, travel woes, and inane over-festivity, we’re generally not in the mood to listen to something as milquetoast as Bon Iver. Give us something darker, moodier, bleaker to get us through those days of familial celebration. Something from, say, the record label Blackest Ever Black.
So, both as a holiday coping mechanism and as an alternative to all the best albums lists that have placed that unfortunately boring Real Estate record so near the top, we present an alternate best of 2011, recognizing 15 records that are twisted, dark, and out there. Take note: we’ve purposely left out metal, as that could be its own list entirely. Read More »
CMJ’s over for another year, and now that we’ve finally gotten a decent night’s sleep, we’re in a better position to look back over a long and crazy week of drinking, queuing and gig-going. As ever, this year’s CMJ played host to a ridiculous number of bands, and while we know you can’t see everything, we did our level best to see… well, pretty much everything. So here’s a selection of our favorite bands from CMJ 2011 — both new discoveries and established names who put on particularly impressive shows — as chosen by our highly trained and highly caffeinated Flavorpill contingent. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re going to go and slump on the couch for the next week or so.
CMJ: they don’t call it a music marathon for nothing, y’know. An insane number of bands will descend on NYC next week for the annual five-day non-stop assault of shows and showcases. With them comes an even larger number of music lovers, who spend most of their time trying to work out how to make a connection from the F train to the L train in order to make it to Williamsburg for that next awesome gig. Even if you live here, trying to keep track of who’s on where, and when best to catch the artists you’ve got circled on your schedule with “MUST SEE” in thick magic marker, can be kinda confusing.
So if negotiating the official schedule’s iPhone text conversation layout is giving you as much of a headache as it gave us, then rejoice! Here’s the Flavorpill guide to what you really should be seeing this time around, whether you want to follow the CMJ tradition of racing around town to see as many bands as possible, or just pick one great showcase where you can settle in for the night. We’ve also included helpful links to where we’ve talked about these bands in the past (we told you so) and commentary from our highly learned team of musical experts.
Among the piles of albums released in the past few weeks, there’s one that we at Flavorpill can all agree is excellent: Zola Jesus’s Conatus. We simply can’t get enough of, or say enough about, the dark, dreamy, powerful music created by Zola’s Nika Roza Danilova. Wise beyond her 22 years, Danilova’s primary non-musical areas of interest are film and philosophy (and, apparently, the intersection of the two), and it shows on the record. Songs on Conatus don’t play so much as unfold in an epic, cinematic way, from the opening clatter of “Swords” to the woozy swoon that explodes into dark celebration on “In Your Nature.” By the time “Collapse” ends the record, Danilova has masterfully painted a dark, macabre theater piece with sound.
After reading the song-by-song commentary on Conatus Danilova provided to The Guardian and finding out what she’s been reading lately, we wondered: in making a record with such a filmic feel, what movies served as inspiration? Now, we have the answer: in a Flavorpill exclusive, Nika Danilova lists ten films that contributed to the creation of Conatus.
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?
Every Monday morning, we sit down with our good friend Google and search diligently for the best and/or most notable albums that are streaming for free this week. There’s a good haul to be had this week — the line-up is led by the spectacularly good new Zola Jesus album, which has had the Flavorpill office very excited indeed ever since we got a copy of it. There’s also the new Wilco album, surf-rocky goodness from Dum Dum Girls, a new record for synthpop survivors Erasure, and the return of Ryan Adams. All this awaits you after the jump, so click through and start listening!
Good news for music lovers: there’s a wealth of new releases in September, and a lot of them look pretty fine indeed — so much so that it was more difficult than usual to prune our regular monthly selection of the best upcoming releases back to just 10 selections. But we’re a discipline bunch here, so we’ve restrained our urges and pared down our wishlist — the result is what you’ll find after the jump, the 10 records that Flavorpill’s most looking forward to getting hold of this month. What’s on your shopping list?
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 »
Next week, Pendu Disco celebrates its one-year anniversary. As dark music is a mainstay at Pendu Disco, and the music of the bands who have performed at the series have been grouped under the term “Witch House,” we think this is a good time to give you a primer for being a Witch House poser. The creator of the concert series, Todd Pendu, has had beef with the term since the music it claims to represent draws on a variety of styles and sounds, including but not limited to hip-hop, industrial and goth. But Pendu can’t deny that the term has staying power (as evidenced by the publication of this New York Times article). If you plan on going to any future Witch House events, in New York, Los Angeles, or perhaps, someday, Beijing, study this primer to get yourself up to speed and fit right in with the Witchy crowd.
