chanteuse is gearing up to take her solo show on the road. In January, Haines will support her debut with a few weeks of touring in the U.S.
and Canada. She ll be backed by members of her Soft Skeleton band (drummer Scott Minor of Sparklehorse and bassist Paul Dillon). The shows will also feature film projections by director Guy Maddin.
Metric itself is far from dormant. They re on a European and UK tour right now, and plan on getting to work on their next album once they return in November.
MP3: 120 Days Remixed by Lansing-Dreiden, the Field Norway s latest export, tundra-rockers , have been winning fans on both sides of the Atlantic.
It s somehow appropriate, then, that acts representing each side have elected to remix the lead-off track on 120 Days self-titled, debut, Come Out (Come Down, Fade Out, Be Gone) .
Both tracks come courtesy of Vice s website. First up, New York s enigmatic concept rock troupe bend and stretch 120 Days original, take it for a few spins around the moon, and drop it off at an unspecified location in the early 1980s.
Then Swedish loop wizard , aka Axel Willner, dumps the vocals and just totally slices the thing up into a pulsating, fade-in-fade-out, rhythmic club-floor sprawler.
Both efforts get the thumbs up from us! It s a day for exclamations on Pitchforkmedia, and a day for the indie rock titans of yesteryear to return and show the kids how it s done.
We ve got Gang of Four , Pixies , and now, -- who just hit us with the stellar, 9.4-rated, -stamped collection -- have announced a spate of reunion shows.
According to Matador, the original lineup of Matt Sweeney (vocals/guitar), Clay Tarver (guitar), Scott Masciarelli (bass), and The James Lo (drums)-- who haven t recorded anything since 1996 s Ride the Fader-- will join forces once again to rock faces off at four December gigs, with a few more to be announced.
Can new material be far behind?
For now, if you don t live in Baltimore, Brooklyn, San Francisco, or Chicago, feel free to gaze upon those cities and their citizens with green eyes. Then cross your fingers and stay tuned for the latest updates.
Drum teacher by day, electronic experimentalist by other-days Martin Dosh, aka , follows the release of his latest opus, , with a mid-sized tour of the U.S. kicking off tonight.
For the first six dates, Minneapolis trio will join him to do a little intro set before I hit the stage. Then they ll back me up on a few songs; I ll do a bunch solo and then have them back up for the last few. Shit is going to be off the hook.
We have The Lost Take s A Ghost s Business available for download as an MP3 below. It s a jittery track, featuring Andrew Bird s violin, which sounds like Dosh ripped Beirut s Jeff Mangum-aping vocal chords out and strung the rest of him around a break by his capillaries. Shit is off the hook.
Raymond Raposa s will spend the next month or so on a European tour, but they ve left a new video for us to puzzle over while they re away. The video for The Smallest Bones , directed by Ben Piekut and Marie Rossettie, is a small oddity: Raposa sings on the left side of a split screen, the shaky camera allowing his face to go in and out of the frame while a woman does sign language interpretations of the lyrics on the right side. The split screen also gives the song a clinical feel, like something you d get on inter-library loan for a research paper.
Nevermind that it s a music video ostensibly created for deaf viewers. The Smallest Bones is from Raposa s 2004 album , which means s missed the release date on this one by a dozen or so months. But according to the label, that s not the point.
AK assistant director Michael Kaufmann (who came up with the Castanets video concept) says The Smallest Bones is the latest in a series of videos the label will compile for eventual release as a DVD collection. The collection will include videos for all AK artists and will have a range of concepts, from fan-created homemade videos to dances and animation. No release date has been set yet.
One of these videos sucks. Guess which one! clips from the Streets latest album, , for the tracks Never The Never Went to Church clip, directed by Adam Smith is a reflective train ride through the snow-covered countryside.
Though the track isn t exactly a party, its visual counterpart makes it out to be corny and dull, two adjectives that should never pop up in reference to religion (haha). Pranging Out is much better, and does a brilliant job of representing a state of drug-induced paranoia. Some segments of the Dawn Shadforth-directed clip are straight out of a horror film-- wind coming out of nowhere, girls being spied on in the shower, and And speaking of sweating, we d like to let you know that Skinner s training is well underway.
He wrote on his official blog late last week, I am shitting myself. I ran about 15 miles this morning and that fuckin hurts. I m moaning now and I always swore I would never moan.
You don t end up with an AWARD WINNING BLOG by moaning. For info about sandwiches, dreams, and more, hustle on over to the Streets .
I think there's enough going on in the world for us to start pontificating again.
Having come a damn long way-- from being a gang of lads in Leeds in the late 1970s to becoming one of the most exciting and influential bands of the post-punk era to proving their lasting vitality with a recent reunion tour-- won t be slowing down anytime soon.
Now comes news that the Four-piece have a brand new record in the works, their first set of new material since 1995 s Shrinkwrapped and first with the original lineup since 1981 s Solid Gold, barring last year s re-recordings disc Return the Gift.
Pitchfork recently phoned up the man behind Gang of Four s groove, bassist , for a chat about GoF s musical offering to the twenty-first century.
We re in the very early stages, Allen told Pitchfork. [Guitarist] and I have been talking-- that s how Gang of Four starts with stuff like this: there s a lot of talking about what do we want to do, how can we do it, is there a need for it? That was a big question for me.
After Entertainment! and Solid Gold, we ve got to be careful, we ve got to deliver something rather special.
I wanted to be sure that me Andy and [vocalist] Jon [King] especially were fired up about things, and I think we are.
I think there s enough going on in the world for us to start pontificating again. Remember that kick-ass a capella rendition of God Only Knows that we posted as part of the of our Infinite Mixtape series? Well, -- former , Jack Black s , violinist extraordinaire, buddy to , and daughter of one of the most bad-ass/ - looking bass players of all time-- is the woman behind it, and now she s taking her a capella show on the road for five East Coast dates.
According to a press release, Haden and the Sell-Outs-- her 10-piece (nine backing vocalists + Petra), all-female choir that the former That Dog vocalist/violinist assembled to recreate her a capella tour de forces -- begin the de force-ing tonight in Pittsburgh and end before Halloween at Buffalo s Soundlab. Expect live versions of tunes from 2005 s Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out, which is, yes, Haden giving the entire classic Who album the a capella treatment.
Meanwhile, Haden should think about formally releasing God Only Knows .
It s, like, totally the best song she s ever written, and I think it s got .
U.S.
Immigration to Brits: You're not a real band are in a rush. The British electro-rockers are at the airport in Iceland when Pitchfork catches up with them, heading from a triumphant set at the festival back to a gig in their home country. That s pretty much the story of our lives, lead Klaxon Jamie Reynolds says.
We go to the most beautiful places in the world but don t actually get to see them. We just sit in the back of a taxi and then go home. But the band s hurry isn t just a struggle not to be late.
Their music races frantic grooves through candy-colored riffs and comet-chasing synthesizers, and it has propelled the trio to near-instant fame. Despite having only released a few singles in England and an EP ( on ) in America, Klaxons have already rocketed to the top of the buzz bin, appearing on the cover of the NME, signing to Polydor, and selling out shows everywhere. Ah, the magic of the internet!
However, Klaxons rapid rise has been both a blessing and a bit of a curse, when internet hype meets real-world logistics. The band was scheduled to go on its first U.S.
mini-tour in early November, but were forced to cancel the shows when the members were denied visas due to the band s youth and its small recorded output. I guess it s something about not being able to have a visa unless you ve been together for a certain period of time, Reynolds says. We haven t even had our [one year] anniversary yet.
It s on the fourth of November or something. It does sound a bit crazy doesn t it? Certainly they can t mark your popularity on the amount of time that you have been in existence.
The band is using their newfound extra time to finish up work on their debut album, set to be released January 29 on Polydor in the UK. (They re still negotiating with labels in the U.S.
) We have recorded the majority of it; we have just not finished mixing it yet, Reynolds says. It has just been a case of the buying the time to make sure that we make the best record possible.
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