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From Stephen Elliott
There’s one song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds that pretty much sums up every era of the band, and that’s “The Mercy Seat.”
Nick has said it’s one of his favorite songs to perform because they can do so much with it, from ultra violent execution to a sweet ballad about a man facing execution.
...moreTouring on the reissue, and building on the success of Kaputt, Daniel Bejar has the chance to give Destroyer’s Rubies the victory lap it deserves. Each song is anthemic, and the audience knows every word, taking particular joy in repeating the most memorable lines: “When I’m at war I insist on slaughter.”
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These guys gave up the dream of every fledgling college band. And yet, still, more than a decade later — they are arguably bigger than they would’ve been had they stayed together.
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A Quick Video Evolution of Nick Cave from 1979 – 1982.
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Rachel Ries is a singer/songwriter from South Dakota with a homespun style, hand-sewing fabric sleeves for limited edition EPs and selling homemade jam at shows. Her music is an exquisite blend of folk, blues, and jazz, inspired by the sounds of the 1920s and 1930s.
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It is as if a great house has fallen―sunk into the mire which seethes around the ancestral manor, amid an unrecognizable, Martian landscape. The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” has no name, no real structural substance beyond his vague association with this other guy, an old friend of his.
...moreReleased yesterday, ALEA IACTA EST, or “The Die Has Been Cast” is a new collection of music – envisioned as a “roadmap of styles” – from Reservoir Sound.
You can stream and download the album here.
...moreIn his article “Forgetting the Roots: Does it Matter Who Makes Folk Music?” Taylor Coe explores the importance of history for folk musicians and how their creation stories can influence their effect on listeners. Some prefer a little more Strictly Bluegrass when it comes to Americana music.
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“From Her To Eternity” is one of Nick’s sexiest songs. It was the title track on the first album from The Bad Seeds and really defined what was going to come with this new project from Nick and the guys. Nick Cave and Mick Harvey had recently moved on from the disbanding of their previous band, The Birthday Party.
...moreWho can resist an alliterative and engaging title like “Pussy Riot, Paul Ryan, and Protest Music in 2012 America?” Corey Beasley riffs on the contradictions of protest music in the current American pop music scene, or lack thereof despite a political climate rife with opportunity:
“But before I try to scratch my irk—this is what you do with an irk, yes?—consider another recent hot news item.
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Welcome to Nick Cave Monday, a new blog where The Rumpus lets me gush about the greatest musician in the world.
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If you did not come of age as a listener to the popular song between 1975 and 1979, you cannot entirely understand the revolution that took place among women.
...moreJakob Olausson’s Morning & Sunrise makes me wish I were writing about the album while on a plane, descending through clouds at dusk. A lucky wish, because that’s exactly what I’m doing.
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When I first heard Hickey’s Various States of Disrepair I knew I’d found what I’d been looking for. The only problem was, I’d found it too late.
...moreThere is something inherently brave about the instrumental album: the lack of a vocal line causes the listener to focus on the musical elements, to experience the abstraction of notes and rhythms as they mingle. Valley Tangents, the fourth record by Blues Control, works in this realm, weaving webs of keyboards, electronics, tape-music and beats to create a sound that, at times, is completely mesmerizing.
...moreThe opening track on MV & EE’s recent LP, Space Homestead, is a lovely, spacy instrumental called “Heart Like Barbara Steele.” It’s like something your massage therapist would put on before dimming the lights and telling you to undress and lie face down, except it has a barely perceptible thread of deep, menacing bass that makes it feel as though it’s surrounded by danger, like its namesake.
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Fast-forward all the way to the epilogue: a 2012 documentary, Searching for Sugar Man. The film is the story of what happened to Rodriguez’s music after his ostensible failures.
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A few years ago, a friend was attempting to explain why he was divorcing his wife. He said they had grown apart. That they argued all the time.
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Upon hearing that Lost in the Trees’ A Church That Fits Our Needs was inspired by the suicide of lead singer and songwriter Ari Picker’s mother, Karen, my heart instantly broke.
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I want to say that I am talking and thinking and writing about Eminem lately because he’s released another album, and it’s blowing my fucking mind, but that isn’t it. As far as I know, Eminem is not recording a thing, and instead is painting his daughter’s toenails in a lawn chair somewhere outside of Detroit
...moreToday in a Russian court, three members (Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alekhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30) of the all-female Russian punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism.”
(For those unfamiliar with the story, here is a round-up of links that we published last week.)
The trio had been facing up to seven years, but, after much deliberation, was sentenced to two years in prison for an anti-Putin song they performed in a church.
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Throughout the ’90s, Rose Melberg was everywhere,
...moreThe LA Times reports that a Bay Area bookstore will be transformed into a pop-up record shop this coming September, in connection with the release of East Bay author Michael Chabon’s forthcoming novel Telegraph Avenue.
Diesel Bookstore is an independent bookstore in Oakland, the city in which Chabon’s book is set.
...moreBeck has announced that his latest album, Song Reader, composed of “twenty songs existing only as individual pieces of sheet music” to be given life by the reader, will be released in December 2012 by McSweeney’s.
“Song Reader is an experiment in what an album can be at the end of 2012—an alternative that enlists the listener in the tone of every track, and that’s as visually absorbing as a dozen gatefold LPs put together.”
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Cuddle Magic, in my opinion, is the band most likely to succeed, these days, if by succeed you mean getting a leg up, surpassing the modest touring-all-the-time-not-making-very-much-money-hustling-constantly model of the thing.
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I must have heard about Liz Phair from Sassy Magazine, my go-to and, really, only source for anything remotely counter-culture in the early ‘90s.
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Three women of the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot are on trial in Russia for hooliganism, which carries a charge up to seven years in prison, following their arrest in March after a performance of what they’ve called a ‘punk prayer’ critical of Vladmir Putin in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, one of the most famous Orthodox cathedrals in Moscow.
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Atypically outspoken for a politically liberal contemporary country singer, Carpenter has succeeded critically and commercially while honoring her own artistic inclinations.
...moreIt must be hard to record a “highly anticipated” record.
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