ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: TO THE EXTREME BY VANILLA ICE
We all had braces. When we smiled or laughed, we flashed steel and colored rubber bands. We shared a language.
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music
Nick Cave Monday #28: “Jack The Ripper”
Jack the Ripper killed women in real life. He is known as Jack the Ripper, and was never caught for his violent crimes.
Nick Cave kills people in his music. He is known as the greatest singer in the world, and is in a band called The Bad Seeds.
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Albums of Our Lives: Songs: Ohia’s Magnolia Electric Co.
The news of Jason Molina’s death came to me in a storm. I was about to teach a class when I saw the first posts announcing that he was gone.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #43: Formative Experiences
Often, I find, the musical experiences that have had the most lasting impact on me were not immediately apparent to me at the time.
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Sympathy for the Devils: Review of Crossfire Hurricane
The Rolling Stones, who as a band turned fifty in 2012, have survived almost everybody.
...more“Has the Vinyl Revival Gone Too Far?”
A.V. Club contributor Jason Heller places his bets on the (suspected to be short) future of the vinyl revival in this article about the reissue of Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler.
Observing a risky trend in artificial rarities, Heller argues new traditions like Record Store Day are leaning more towards manipulative marketing than celebration of nostalgia.
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Deep Throat #2: On Being and Unbeing A Singer
My face burned with rage, with shame, with humiliation. I was failing openly, blatantly, at the one thing I still somehow, in the back of my mind, expected to be perfectly capable of doing after more than a decade’s silence.
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“A Secret of the Heart on the Sleeve:” Jason Molina, 1973 – 2013
Now I’m in that rootless void of grieving the loss of someone I never really knew.
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ROCK OUT WITH YOUR BOOK OUT #1: JOLIE HOLLAND
I once read an interview with Jolie Holland in which she mentioned how her songs come through her from some other world.
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Nick Cave Monday #27: “Tupelo”
It was a dark and stormy night in April 1936. The city of Tupelo, Mississippi was ravaged by a tornado that killed more than 230 people. It is ranked as the fourth deadliest tornado in U.S. history.
Tupelo is also the birthplace of Elvis Presley.
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Nick Cave Monday #26: “Brother, My Cup is Empty”
When the the relationship is over, when your heart is cracked open and leaking blood on your pinstripe suit, when you’re out of cash and you need something to numb the pain of a break up, tell that wretched dude at the bar to buy you a drink.
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Diamonds and Rust #1: Nostalgia, Form and Noise
“We both know what memories can bring, they bring diamonds and rust.” –Joan Baez
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The Rumpus Interview with Jesse Sykes
The first thing you notice about Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter is Sykes’s voice. It’s a stunning blend of contradictions, cutting and vulnerable, breathy and scratchy, enigmatic and bare.
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Nick Cave Monday #25: “Abattoir Blues”
Sometimes things get murky in our brains. The depression takes hold. It’s more than melancholy, it’s to the point of absolute despair.
“Abattoir Blues” is the title track on the double album released with “Lyre of Orpheus” by The Bad Seeds in 2004.
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ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: RUN DMC’S RAISING HELL
It was a cassette copy with no case, and my dad gave it to me a couple of years after he’d moved out. I was about nine. I knew enough about the album to yelp “This is priceless!” as I ran to my bedroom.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #42: Hey Man, I Thought That You Were Dead
They Might Be Giants had that quality, the glorious-about-human-life quality on December 30th
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Nick Cave Monday #24: “Mack The Knife”
One night in January 1995, you may have been alive and lucky enough to have tuned your TV to “Great Performances” a special featuring the music of Kurt Weill.
It was the coolest of the cool performing Kurt’s music including Elvis Costello, William S.
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Deep Throat #1: On Being and Unbeing a Singer
When I shut my mouth I lost a part of myself so ingrained, so accustomed, so integral I had not even known it was possible to lose it.
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Nick Cave Monday #23: “Hard On For Love”
It was 1994. Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds were performing The Fillmore in San Francisco. I was crushed against the stage and Blixa Bargeld strummed his guitar in front of me. Midway through The Bad Seeds set I summoned the courage to yell,
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THE RUMPUS INTERVIEW WITH ERIN MCKEOWN
McKeown’s crowd-funded new album, Manifestra, is a dizzying ten-track blend of political blues and party songs, featuring radio-friendly handclaps, a New Orleans-style funeral march, and a jam she co-wrote with Rachel Maddow.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #41: Utopian Communities
Bands, those funny little plans, that never go quite right, is a line from a really great song by Mercury Rev (“Holes,” from Deserter’s Songs), a song that rightly probes the mixed feelings that you might have about bands had you ever tried to imagine a band into being.
...moreRumpus Sound Takes: Creeping Familiarity
Essentially a one-man band—the project of Oregon native and current Oxford, Mississippi resident Deepak Mantena—Junk Culture here explores traditional pop song forms in lieu of the heavily sampled dance music Mantena created on two previous EPs.
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Nick Cave Monday #22: “Jubilee Street”
Goth girls everywhere will soon breathe a collective sigh of relief causing a variance in the Earth’s orbit.
We have been waiting since 2008 for a new Bad Seeds record and we are so very close. “Push The Sky Away”, the 15th release by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds is available next week.
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Albums of Our Lives: The Thermals’ The Body The Blood The Machine
It begins with an act of divine intervention. “God reached his hand down from the sky,” sings Hutch Harris.
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Nick Cave Monday #21: “Nature Boy”
We’re stuck in a world where bad shit happens all the time. Nick Cave, our Nature Boy, watches the news with his dad and sees “ordinary slaughter” and “routine atrocity.” Dad tells Nature Boy not to look away, be strong and bold because beauty will save the world.
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SONGS OF OUR LIVES: JOY DIVISION’S “LOVE WILL TEAR US APART”
She drew cartoon sketches of herself. I sent more mix-tapes. Within a few months, in the middle of a five- or six-page letter, she wrote that she loved me.
...moreNew Music from Thao & The Get Down Stay Down
Thao & The Get Down Stay Down’s new album, We the Common, comes out Feb. 5, and we definitely recommend giving it a listen.
Stephen Thompson, in his NPR review, describes Thao’s music as:
...moreQuirky but cutting, playful but forceful, controlled but ragged, Thao Nguyen is one of the most commanding and distinctive young singers around.
Nick Cave Monday #20: “Henry Lee”
Today we learn a valuable lesson. If you have a girlfriend, but you are in love with another girl and you tell your girlfriend that this other girl is way hotter than she is, do not stick around when she starts to make out with you.
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Why Country Music Loves Me
In a lace-curtained living room of a cabin by the Greenbrier River, four men I had just met picked up a banjo, a guitar, a mandolin, and an upright bass and cracked my world open.
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Nick Cave Monday #19: “Straight To You”
Leave it to Nick to create a love song amidst the horrors of judgment day.
When God strikes vengeance on us for our sins at Armageddon, Nick isn’t looking for survival, he’s looking for the woman he loves for that one last moment.
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