Blues guitarist Corey Harris has started working on a biography about the life and music of African guitar legend Ali Farka Touré, and I wrote about it for Rolling Stone.
Shows You Missed: New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down Edition
Recently in the Village Voice: Tricky, Infected Mushroom, The Crystal Method, Roger Daltrey, White Lies, and The Carolina Chocolate Drops. SPECIAL BONUS: my Pazz & Jop 2010 ballot; angry comments welcome below.
Shows You Missed, October/November Edition
Whoops, I guess I fell asleep at the wheel on this! Booka Shade, Yo-Yo Ma, Bonobo, and George Clinton.
Shows You Missed, September Edition
In the Village Voice for September, little nubs on Vampire Weekend, Fennesz, Mary J. Blige, Jay-Z with Eminem, and Jay-Z with an unusually impressive gaggle of females.
Shows You Missed, August Edition
And now right back to the monotony — in this set of previews you’ll find Asobi Seksu and Donna The Buffalo, among others.
Phil Selway
A nice break from the monotony of concert previews — kind of a holy-shit moment for me here, interviewing the drummer from Radiohead.
Does your new solo album need a record label even though Radiohead doesn’t simply because the band had spent so many years as a primary project for a major label first?
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It hadn’t really crossed my mind, to be honest with you. I certainly wasn’t thinking about it on that political a level. I just wanted the music to be released in a way that I felt happy with. There wasn’t any great intellectualization behind the process, really. And in some ways, the same could be said about how we released In Rainbows — it was just something which, at the gut level, felt very exciting.
The proper thing to do here is probably to point you toward that solo project, but I’d wager that you’d prefer to spend your time with the band proper. So here’s “Idioteque,” a song on which Phil doesn’t actually perform since he was famously tossed out in favor of a drum machine on that album, except that the music video apparently used an alternate version which does feature live drums, and thus is much closer to the arrangement they use in concert. Eh, whatever.
Shows You Missed, July Edition
I promise, I’ve been doing more with my life other than writing concert previews for the Village Voice, even if you wouldn’t know it from looking at my past few months of updates here.
Anyway, this last batch included rounds with Nas and Damian Marley, Heart, The xx, Corinne Bailey Rae, Steve Earle, Wakey!Wakey!, Natalie Merchant, and Iron Maiden.
Pictured above: me, immediately after submission deadline.
Shows You Missed, June Edition
In the Village Voice last month, some brief thoughts on Jay Farrar, Annuals, The Budos Band, 50 Cent, and Tortoise.
Shows You Missed, May Edition
In the Village Voice last month, some thoughts on Starscream, Parts & Labor, Local H, LCD Soundsystem, and the Reverend Horton Heat.
Rave Review And Its Opposite
I have some thoughts on former Everything But The Girl singer Tracey Thorn’s new album Love And Its Opposite in the current issue of The L Magazine. The short version is that you should track down a copy of her fantastic 2007 release Out Of The Woods instead.
It’s been decades since Everything But The Girl decided to start trading in songs for beats, so rather than talking here about how Thorn is now “wearing a different hat,” I’d like to propose a sister metaphor which instead substitutes pants, the reason being that if you hang up your pants for twenty years, you may find when you finally pull them back down that they no longer fit properly. This is the situation in which Thorn finds herself now.
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Shows You Missed, April Edition
In the Village Voice last month, some thoughts on Ben Folds, Snoop Dogg, and Dragonette.
Go West
In this week’s Village Voice, a feature on giving up formerly Brooklynite weirdo-pop duo High Places.
Bad news, folks: This new High Places album is easily their best yet. Since they no longer live here, this deals a blow to New York’s collective musical ego, which, quite frankly, might actually need a bit of a takedown post–”Empire State of Mind.” So here goes… More
Shows You Missed, March Edition
Last month in the Village Voice, brief spots on Anamanaguchi (also covered previously), Alice In Chains, Alkaline Trio, Habib Koité (above), and Benga.
Shows You Missed
Two short items last month in the Village Voice’s concert calendar about Daniel Lanois and Little Boots. More of this to come.
Ghosts
A new piece for eMusic about Alan Lomax’s mammoth new collection of field recordings of Haitian folk music.
Attack Massive Attack
In this week’s issue of The L Magazine, I talk about Massive Attack‘s new album Heligoland, which is actually more interesting than a lot of the other stuff I’ve heard recently but nonetheless still makes me grumble a bit, not unlike Massive Attack often do themselves.
The formula behind Massive Attack’s pioneering trip-hop: the Jekyll-and-Hyde combination of Robert Del Naja’s mumbled back-alley baritone pseudo-raps and the somewhat more melodic leads, all with keyboard-laden backdrops hinting at fairly inept visions of the future. Remember that all of the above, roughly speaking, were contemporaries of movies like Hackers and The Net, artifacts from an awkward digital puberty where you’d get only one button on a mouse, if you even knew what one was in the first place.
Insofar as Heligoland still tries to be a Massive Attack record, the results are remarkable: “Rush Minute” and “Atlas Air” can stand alongside anything else this band has ever released. But those are also the only two fronted by Del Naja, and when he gives the keys to the van to guest lead vocalists, it all falls apart. The foreboding songs are usually made even more upsetting by all the confusing amorphous edges, for one thing, but these guys just enunciate too damn clearly.
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Blip In 8 Bits
Some thoughts (eight, to be precise) on the latest installment of Blip Festival, the awesome annual chiptune festival. (I went last year too.)
Fighter X: Youngish probably-hipster dudes in tight pants and floppy hair shoveling out manic, skittering Game Boy duels. Even if they sometimes came across as a sort of sleazy fun-loving Europop compared to their fellow performers (hey, there’s a place for that stuff too), the lengthy continuous set was very impressive, as was their tendency to abandon tending to the devices and instead jump around the stage or go crowd surfing, especially given that they have such small memory banks. The Game Boys, I mean. More
Too Many Teeth
My Brightest Diamond has released a very long new remix album. I have written a very short new review thereof.
The big winner is bleeding-edge composer Son Lux, who handily flips the second installment upside down largely by placing digital drums and chirps alongside perversely overeager pseudoclassical instrumentation, vaguely in the template of Björk’s remarkable unhinged-camp Sinatra-shrieker “It’s Oh So Quiet.” (He reportedly didn’t actually listen to the full songs he was remixing until he had finished his new versions, which seems to have worked out surprisingly well.) More
More Tet
I’ve been glued to Four Tet‘s lovely new album There Is Love In You for the past couple weeks (“Love Cry”, wow) and I chatted with Kieran Hebden for New York Magazine’s Vulture blog.
Many rock bands have moved toward incorporating electronic sounds over the past decade or so. Do you think that has left listeners more open to your music?
Yeah, definitely. When I started out ten years ago, people thought about electronic music and they instantly thought about quite extreme ends of it. Synthesizers and drum machines, lots of digital processing. Nowadays, everything is mixed together a lot more, and people don’t even know what they’re listening to. More
Just Blaze and Baseline Studios
Legendary hip hop producer Just Blaze just closed down his Baseline Studios facility, where a lot of crucial Jay-Z records were made over the past decade or so, and he sent out an open invitation for people to drop by on the last night. I went, and I was so struck by the way he was interacting with his fans that I wrote about it for the Village Voice.
A surprisingly small turnout all things considered (the extent of Just’s influence, in particular), but that just made it more intimate and personal: Just just sat around in his control room surrounded by everyone, giving demos on how to use his MPC and turntable, with a Rick Astley LP for the latter. (Biggest laugh of the night: He called one dude over to the MPC, only to be asked, “Hey, you got those Just Blaze sounds on there?”) Eventually he pulled together a quick and dirty beat for his fans to freestyle over, joking with them as he encouraged them all to join the cipher while rapping a little himself, liberally quoting Wu-Tang’s “Triumph,” and even reading lyrics off a flushed Queens fan’s phone. (“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” the latter gushed later.) More