Some festival-lineup additions: The Flaming Lips-curated All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, set for September in upstate New York, has added Deerhoof, the Boredoms, and a set where No Age plays an entire Husker Du LP (with a “special guest” on lead vocals), as well as a few other acts. Meanwhile, the Pitchfork Music Festival has added a bunch of acts to the list of artists taking the stage in July, and it includes the awesome noise spectacle Ponytail, as well as the mysterious DOOM and hometown stalwarts Dianogah. Stuff to look forward to is nice, right? More »
Now that I am unemployed, I have all day to thumb around MTV’s excellent video archive, which hosts 16,000 videos and should really replace YouTube as the go-to video source for videos but is achingly underutilized. (I was the second view on this vintage video of Faith No More doing the Mosely-era non-hit “The Crab Song.”) I soon found myself just entering videos I vaguely remembered as blowing my mind for how noisy, disgusting, scuzzy, blown-out and awful they were in comparison to the Everclear songs they were sandwiched next to on 120 Minutes. So what was the noisiest song to ever get MTV airplay?
Do you have your Grammy office pools all straight? And your face paint? And the big tub of guacamole for the nobody who’s coming to your Grammy party? And by “Grammy party” I mean “watch a few highlights on YouTube while picking pretzel crumbs from your lap”? Well, you’re ready to check out the second installment of Idolator’s Grammy Awards Awards: Laziest Nominee, which recognizes obscene laziness on the part of the artist (“Hey, I can just re-record this song!”) or the nominating committee (“Hey, Radiohead! I recognize their name!”)
Many people find it hard to tell the great from the godawful when it comes to 21st-century mainstream rock. To help figure out which is which, here’s “Corporate Rock Still Sells,” where Al “GovernmentNames” Shipley examines what’s good, bad, and ugly in the world of rock and roll. This time around, he holds a few recent blog-rock darlings up to the harsh light of commercial rock radio, and judges their potential for success:
I suspect that the video for No Age’s “Keechie” is something of a sequel to the ’90s revivalists’ backyard-party-gone-awry clip for “Eraser,” with one man fishing through murky, shallow waters and finding a bloated, sorta-decomposed… No Age shirt. More »
Reactions to No Age’s MTV debut on last Friday’s installment of FNMTV are currently running 51/49 against of the Los Angeles duo’s paint-and-glitter-drenched backyard bash, with the “anti” faction complaining that they want more singing. More »
In the current climate of ruthless blog scrutiny, good records can easily disappear with little or no press and supposedly major albums are forgotten within weeks of release. With that in mind, we bring you Second Spin, where we’ll take a look at records that have either slipped between the hype cracks or re-evaluate albums after the press cycle has left them for dead. This time we take a look at three indie bedroom/garage/loft mavericks playing with ideas like “lo-fi” and “noise-pop” for 2007.