This song still reminds me a lot of Regina Spektor.
Linkin Park have released the first video from their forthcoming A Thousand Suns.
You can watch it below, though since embeds are going down very quickly, you can also go over to the band’s official YouTube channel and watch it there.
I have to admit that ‘What I’ve Done’ was a guilty pleasure of mine. ‘The Catalyst’ though, is just okay.
Of course, Linkin Park are a band that likes to “evolve” from album to album. This time, they have gone in more of a sample heavy direction. So yeah, it sounds like a Linkin Park song in every way: melody, main hook, lyrical content, dynamics…
But for the most part, the big guitars and drums are are replaced by blips and bleeps.
Evolution, huh.
It would be fun to see them go in a country direction though. Oh, and Mike Shinoda makes a good Ringwraith.
Over his career, Ray LaMontagne has seemed at times like a fine voice in search of a sonic identity.
Trouble was full of plaintive folk, and Till The Suns Turns Black, gothic introspection. Both of them were very good albums, but they didn’t hang together like something great, even if LaMontagne’s voice did.
Then came Gossip in the Grain, which careened from the adult-contemporary (‘You Are The Best Thing’) to the plain weird (‘Meg White’, anyone?) It was the songwriter’s most inconsistent album and a career lowlight. But still: that voice!
So, with God Willin’ & The Creek Don’t Rise, LaMontagne has recorded for the first time with a band, The Pariah Dogs. And with them comes, finally, some thematic consistency. Read the rest of this entry »
U2 will be bringing their U2 360 Tour to Auckland, New Zealand.
The Irish icons will be returning to Mt Smart Stadium, where they last played in 2006. The concert this time will take place on November 25th.
General admission ticket prices start from $39.90, though you can expect to pay $100 for most GA tickets.
Tickets go on sale September 3rd.
Yesterday, David Fricke of Rolling Stone posted some unpublished excerpts from his interview with U2 frontman Bono, which included the news that the arena-rock titans are sitting on a slew of unreleased material.
Bono told Fricke the following when asked about the new songs:
“We have Songs of Ascent, which is the meditative work that was meant to complement No Line on the Horizon. We’ve got a rock album. We also have a club-sounding album. And then we have the Spider-Man [musical] stuff.
Across those four, there are 25-30 songs. Now we have to decide how we go about releasing them? Do we release them in their groups? Chris Martin [of Coldplay] called me and said, ‘I hear you’ve got all these albums going. I have a great idea. Why not just pick the best songs from all of them and put them out now?’ And I’m like, ‘Hmm…’ [Strokes his chin].”
No word on any release dates, but Bono said he thinks the band “probably will” have a new album out by the time U2 returns to North America this summer to play some rescheduled shows.
Sufjan Stevens has released a new EP entitled, All Delighted People.
It’ll be out on CD later this year, but for the moment you can pick it up from Stevens’ website.
Tracklist after the jump.
In 2004, Arcade Fire released their debut, Funeral. It was full of gorgeous baroque pop and defiant joy. Quite something, for a record about mortality. It was also, arguably, one of the greatest albums of the past decade.
And then came 2007’s Neon Bible. Once again, it hit all the right critical notes, but this reviewer at least didn’t connect with it on as personal a level. It was good, that’s for sure, but the group’s intent to make a Big Serious Album meant that some of the wide-eyed beauty of their debut was lost.
So we arrive, in 2010, at The Suburbs. It saunters in quite calmly with the acoustic driven title track, bringing to mind David Bowie. And then the second song, ‘Ready To Start’, confirms the tone for the rest of the album. It’s very Funeral-y, but different: less innocent.
Of course, Arcade Fire have never let us down when it comes to a grand narrative theme to drive each album. This time, Win Butler and company have arrived back in their home town – the town of Funeral’s childlike escapism – except this time they are seeing it with adult eyes. Read the rest of this entry »
Once again, we’ve made our monthly trek into the wilderness of the contemporary Christian music scene. And once again we’ve returned with a dispatch on the good, the bad and the ugly.
Andrew Peterson, Lt Funk, The Museum and Ivoryline all spend time under the microscope this month. The results? Two counts of “meh” and two counts of decent. Who scores what?
Find out after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Music from the outer reaches, courtesy of Steve Goble.
This is a compilation of floppy discs.
No, not those rigid square things that used to slide comfortably into personal computers in the 1990s, I mean actual floppy floppy circular discs.
Floppy discs.
Oh all right then, they were alternatively known as flexi discs. Do you see what they did there? They took the word “flexi” from “flexible”, and “disc” from “disc” and they created the term “flexi disc”. They also called them “sound foils”, because they had sound recorded on them, and were made of… um, vinyl, generally.
Well actually, for a while the underground flexi disc industry in Russia used to make them out of discarded medical x-rays, but let’s not get side-tracked, we’re here to talk about Germany. Read the rest of this entry »
