IL GENIO DI POMONA

The Strokes Working on New Album

It’s official: The Strokes are back in the studio. The band confirmed Monday via its official site that work on the much-speculated fourth album is underway.

Not many details are available at the moment, but the website notes that the band is recording the follow-up to First Impressions of Earth with producer Joe Chiccarelli and engineer Gus Oberg at Avatar Studios in NYC. The site also promises in-studio video soon. (Paste Magazine)

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eheheh b16!

A.C. Newman Talks Upcoming New Pornographers Album, Together

Before the 2000s began, A.C. Newman wondered if he and the rest of his New Pornographers stood a chance in the music industry.

“I remember, we would take smoke breaks from practicing, and then I remember somebody playing Belle and Sebastian—If You’re Feeling Sinister or The Boy with the Arab Strap—and thinking, God, these guys are so good, and we fucking suck,” Newman, the band’s principal songwriter, tells Paste. “I remember thinking it was so demoralizing, and I was like, Why do we even try?”

Of course, Newman kept trying. And thanks to his perseverance, spitting out albums every 18 months or so, he’s become one of Matador‘s most dependable songwriters and the New Pornographers, one of the decade’s most prevailing examples of how a supergroup should exist. Together, out May 4, is the next step for the band.

Challengers, the band’s 2007 release, was also Newman’s most autobiographical, covering his then-recent move to New York and finding the woman he would soon marry. But in the tradition of the band’s older material, Together removes Newman a bit from his own life—even though he didn’t stray far from the band’s mainstay locations of Vancouver and Brooklyn, or even his new home in Woodstock, N.Y., to record.

For example, Newman penned “My Shepherd” specifically for Neko Case to sing after watching the 2007 documentary Crazy Love, which tells the story of a woman who returns to her husband years after he threw acid in her face. “It made me want to write a really dysfunctional torch song,” Newman says. “You know, that kind of Dusty Springfield-style torch song, but with kind of upsetting lyrics.”

At times over the years, Newman would find himself fixated on word combinations or even specific chords, simply because of how they sound. This time, however, he was initially inspired by a drum beat. “The first germ of an idea was that I wanted a song that started like ‘New Day Rising’ by Hüsker Dü,” he says of “Up in the Dark,” another Together song. “Just that ”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsiecG0Mu8″>pbt pbt, that big snare beat, to the extent that I even wanted to start the album like that for a while, just as a tribute to ‘New Day Rising’ and one of my favorite albums.”

In another song, the band tried to combine Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” with ABBA’s “Waterloo” and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Christine.” If that sounds confusing, you’re not the only one having trouble envisioning the new album’s sound. “[Fellow songwriter] Dan Bejar wrote me something where he said he thought [Together] sounded like [2000’s] Mass Romantic crossed with Challengers, and I’m like, I guess that might be true as well.” Newman says before pausing. “Although, any combination of our albums may be true. I think it’s Electric Version crossed with Twin Cinema, myself.” Then he pauses again. “I don’t think that, actually.”

In addition to its many notable, older influences, Together includes contributions from several modern-day musicians. When Newman wanted a guitar solo, producer Phil Palazzolo called up St. Vincent’s Annie Clark, having just recorded with her. When Newman needed one last trumpet part, he called up Beirut’s Zach Condon. And when Newman contemplated adding an additional backing vocals, Okkervil River’s Will Sheff suddenly showed up to the studio. Together, indeed. “When [Clark] was playing, I was thinking that this is almost too easy,” Newman says. “When you’re trying to figure out a great guitar solo, all you have to do is call her up and she’ll show up and do it. I definitely feel lucky that way, on top of just everybody in the group. We’ve got a singer [Case] who had a number three record last year. It all seems kind of absurd sometimes.”

But even though he’s reined in Case for a number of albums and shows over the years, and even after Challengers led to an all-time Billboard high for the band (#34 on the Hot 200), Newman still refuses to give himself too much credit, deferring instead to his talented friends. “Ted Leo did some percussion on a song, but it was a song that we dropped off the album,” he says. “We should have given him the percussion credit anyway. At that point I was just trying to throw in as many indie-rock celebrities as possible into the mix. I even thought of just calling up Ben Gibbard and going, ‘Hey Ben, can we just say you’re on the record?’”
(Paste Magazine)

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Recensione di

Midlake: The Courage Of Others (Bella Union, 2010)

The disappointing thing about most Molly Hatchet albums—beside the fact that they’re horrible—is the blatant deception of their covers. During the band’s heyday, Hatchet album art featured a hulking, wide-eyed barbarian swinging a massive battleaxe as sinew and bits of bone fell about him like crimson snow. It was, in a word, badass. But when you dropped the needle, out came a sickening bilge of chuggin’ boogie blues and butt rock. The only thing hemorrhaging was your ears.

So thank Christ for whoever art-directed Midlake’s new album cover, The Courage of Others. Here we have a pissed-off dude in a hooded cloak looking like the Wizard of Williamsburg, and a vaguely psychedelic mirror-image effect that turns entwined fingers and background trees into buds of broccoli. It’s at once trippy, foreboding, and beguiling. Hit play and immediately it makes sense: Ladies and gentlemen of Midlake fandom, after a nearly four-year layoff, we are taking a hard left turn. Next stop, the Middle Ages.

Whereas 2006’s The Trials of Van Occupanther, the band’s breakthrough, had lazy journalists reaching for phrases like “modern Fleetwood Mac” or “East Texas Radiohead,” Courage has this lazy journalist reaching for “Baroque Sabbath.”

Gone are the sleepy, piano-driven lo-fi grooves—the nod to ’70s guitar rock that Midlake admittedly did better than most, but that still left them pigeonholed alongside equally mellow bands like Vetiver. This time out, Midlake has left its native Denton, Texas, for a place way south of somber. It’s a much darker, oppressively minor-key world where songs have a madrigal lilt, vocals are layered like sediment, guitars (mostly acoustic) are gently strummed, echoing flutes and droning Floyd-ian keyboards provide atmosphere, and where there is much moping all around. This isn’t metal, but thematically, at least, it’s just as heavy.

At times—in fact, most of the time—this doesn’t even sound like the same band that made Van Occupanther. (Or, for that matter, Bamnan and Slivercork, their Grandaddy-period 2004 debut.) But this is a good thing. Occupanther was a solid record—and “Roscoe” a great song—but the shambling shoegaze pop was familiar. At its best it resembled Grizzly Bear. At it’s worst, alt-Fray. Either way, Midlake didn’t own it. With The Courage of Others, the band’s continual sonic tinkering has led its members down a lonely road they can call their own—a sound of unwavering menace and maddening restraint it’s hard to imagine the rest of the flock following.

The most immediate sign of this sea change is singer Tim Smith’s delivery. Where he chose a high Yorke-ian whine the last time out, he’s now stripped his vocals of almost all color, subduing himself almost to the point of becoming lyrical wallpaper. His lines are still double-tracked, and the delivery—sleepy, erudite, scheming—sounds repetitive at times, but it’s an effective anchor throughout the album, as background vocals billow around, forming a sort of rock ‘n’ roll chamber choir.

Right out of the gate, “Acts of Man” sets the bleak tone, a downtrodden meditation on some end-of-the-world scenario—“If all that grows starts to fade, starts to falter, oh let me inside, let me inside”—where monochrome harmonies brood over strummed guitar. Each verse grows in strength until the end, when the track finally reaches a subdued, yet forceful, gothic release.

This unrelenting but beautiful melancholy forms the glut of Courage. Beauty is key here, especially with a song like “Bring Down,” where an otherwise depressing dirge is given liftoff by Smith’s sweet harmony and a twittering flute. It’s cinematic and slow-building, and would seem right at home soundtracking an ancient massacre on some desolate stretch of Scandinavia as galloping hordes with stone faces crush the enemy in slow-mo beneath their steel.

It’s an exercise in painstakingly plaintive pain that’s not unlike, say, José González. Except that Midlake is smart enough to take time out every couple tracks to wreck your speakers. Guitarist Eric Pulido doesn’t get to announce his presence very often, but when he does—on burners like “Winter Dies” and “The Horn”—he sets fire to the darkness, choking out snarling, sinewy contrails of guitar that sound like lightning squeezed from a tube of toothpaste.

It’s all gloomy and mesmerizing—just like the Wizard of Williamsburg on the cover said it would be. (Paste)

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occhio! Malachai: Ugly Side of Love [Domino / Invada; 2009]

7.5

“I know what I want/ I want off this roundabout!” Given Malachai’s apparent fondness for turn-of-the-1970s British music– the Badfinger, schmaltzy AM-radio pop, or the grainy reggae imported by England’s Jamaican immigrant class– this lyric from the masked Bristol duo’s debut could very well just be a colloquial reference to traffic congestion on UK motorways. But the manic, cut-and-paste aesthetic that members Gee Ealey and Scott Hendy exhibit on Ugly Side of Love also suggests that the lyric could be a rejection of the (re)cyclical nature of rock, what with the 80s post-punk resurrection that informed so much indie over the past decade now yielding to 90s alt-rock revivalism, like clockwork. For a band like Malachai, who are more interested in toying with unfashionable pop arcana than conforming to hipster-baiting trends, it’s hard to tell what’s more wearisome: the prevalence of genre-centric nostalgia, or the fact that it recurs at such predictable intervals.

Now, Malachai– previously Malakai, before a namesake California rapper claimed legal dibs on the “k”– are hardly ones to present themselves as futurists; Ugly Side of Love seems deliberately designed to evoke the dusty-grooved ambience and freewheeling feel of a UK pirate-radio broadcast from 1973. But unlike so many Britpop bands who tried to recapture the spirit of a bygone era by writing and performing songs that sound like their favorite albums, Ealey and Hendy simply take the posturing out of the equation altogether and just sample them wholesale. Ugly Side of Love is thus a rock album pieced together by crate-diggers, one that’s eager to undercut notions of authenticity to emphasize its own pastiche quality with obvious samples and abrupt edits.

Surprisingly, the liners list only two sample sources, one of them 70s-era UK crooner Daniel Boone’s “Sad and Lonely Lady” being repurposed on the boogie-rock stomper “Snowflake”. But there’s clearly so much more where that came from: “How Long” loops the Guess Who’s 1970 single “Hand Me Down World” into a piece of hand-me-down rock that deviously cuts its sample off mid-guitar-lick; “Shitkicker” revs up on a riff reminiscent of Heart’s Camaro classic “Barracuda” before sling-shooting back on a cavalcade of incessant handclaps, Gee’s double-tracked harmonies and, of course, more cowbell; the reggafied rumble “Warriors” not only name-checks the 1979 gang flick, it uses the film’s climactic, bottle-plinking “come and out play” taunt as its hook. But Ugly Side of Love is more than just the sum of Malachai’s dollar-bin finds. In Gee, they boast an elastic vocalist who perfectly embodies band’s mischievous approach, yielding performances that are by turns sinister (the mutant acid-rocker “Blackbird”) and heart-on-sleeve sweet (the bubblegum-soul serenade “Another Sun”). Ironically, it’s his least affected performance that feels the most forced, with the clap-along campfire jam “Moonsurfin'” coming off like a commercial jingle (“Now it’s here/ Grab a beer!”) pitched at trustafarians.

Considering Malachai’s Bristol roots and flair for sample-based recontextualization, it’s no surprise that the duo has found a champion/mentor in Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, who first issued the album last year on his Invada imprint and served as its “executive producer.” Indeed, the sole Barrow co-write, “Only For You”, carries heavy, cannabis-infused whiffs of Portishead’s film-noir funk. But Malachai are actually most reminiscent of Clinic, another shadowy outfit who debuted on Domino some 10 years ago. The latter tapped more canonical cult-rock sources like the Velvet Underground and Sparks, but exhibited a similar adeptness at processing and repackaging disparate reference points into seemingly familiar yet freakishly alien two-minute pop songs. And if, like Clinic, Malachai are too respectful of their retro sources to fully veer off the rock’n’roll roundabout, Ugly Side of Love nonetheless revisits a moment in British pop history through a series of surprising U-turns and thrillingly illegal lane changes.

— Stuart Berman, Pitchfork – February 3, 2010

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Dead Weather Prep New Album, Tour
It’s time to fill your daily requirement of Jack White.

Just seven months after their blooze-rocking debut album, Horehound, Jack White’s band the Dead Weather are already planning to release their second LP this April, according to a recent interview with the singer-drummer-guitarist-workaholic on Australia’s triple j radio. (Via TwentyFourBit.) The news dovetails nicely with a new Dead Weather tour set to start Down Under this March before heading to the U.S. in April. All those dates are below.

Naturally, there’s even more Jack White-related news than that. In the interview, the man said he takes lead vocal duties on the forthcoming Dead Weather single, called “Blue Blood Blues”, and that the new record is “bluesier and heavier than we ever thought we could be.” He’s also apparently editing no less than six music videos right now, including two for new Third Man Records band the Black Belles.

And if you’re looking to stock up on Third Man releases and you’re heading down to Austin for SXSW this year, you’re in luck– White and company are planning another pop-up store at the fest, which takes place March 17-21.

Listen to the triple j interview– in which White sounds more like Elvis than ever– here.

Lastly, Third Man is starting a new live concert series called, um, Third Man Live. The afternoon shows will take place at Third Man HQ in Nashville and will be “recorded direct to 8-track analog reel-to-reel tape for the purpose of producing a live album,” according to the label. The first show will take place tomorrow, February 4, with the Dex Romweber Duo. More info on Third Man Live here.

I think that’s it. For now.

The Dead Weather:

03-17 Auckland, New Zealand – Logan Campbell Centre
03-19 Melbourne, Australia – Forum Theatre
03-23 Brisbane, Australia – Tivoli
03-26 Sydney, Australia – Enmore Theatre
03-29 Perth, Australia – Metro City
03-31 Tokyo, Japan – Zepp
04-15 San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore
04-17 Indio, CA – Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival
04-18 Las Vegas, NV – The Pearl Concert Theater
04-20 Albuquerque, NM – Sunshine Theater
04-22 Tulsa, OK – Cain’s Ballroom
04-23 Bonner Springs, KS – Sandstone *
04-24 St. Louis, MO – The Pageant
04-26 Lake Buena Vista, FL – House of Blues
04-27 Birmingham, AL – WorkPlay Soundstage
04-28 Memphis, TN – Minglewood Hall
04-30 Austin, TX – Stubb’s Waller Creek Ampitheater
05-01 Houston, TX – House of Blues
05-02 New Orleans, LA – New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

* with the Flaming Lips, White Rabbits, Minus the Bear

Posted by Ryan Dombal Pitchfork on February 3, 2010 at 1:40 p.m.

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certo che jack white non si da’ tempo neanche per dormire….sempre attivissimo!

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