The Blurbs
The Matches Album 4, Unreleased; Graphics? Title? Or not needed?
On July 9th, 2009, The Matches decided to go on hiatus to pursue other musical options and oppertunities. Shawn Harris, the band’s vocalist, refered to their band’s fanbase as “almost cultish” at their final southern California show. And with fanatics like that, it wouldn’t be right to leave them without a proper goodbye.
The Matches Album 4, Unreleased; Graphics? Title? Or not needed? is the name of their final album in which they released new songs and some previously unreleased demos. The ten track album is like a small sample of everything that is and was The Matches. Tracks like Nothing’s Going On and It’s My Day demonstrate Shawn’s lyrical brilliance. Shawn’s lyrics, throughout the band’s years as The Locals till now have always been clever and inventive. Album 4 is definately a lovely illustation of that as well. Here’s To Love and My Doe (Pt. 1) both show the band’s ability to beautifully preform acoustic songs.
The Matches Album 4, Unreleased; Graphics? Title? Or not needed? can only be described as godsent. Pop punk has never been more beautifully mastered.
Evanescence: New sound?
On february 22nd, Evanescence announced that they begun recording for their 3rd upcomming album. However, the band is planning to take their sound in a new direction. Their next album is suppose to be introducing a more electro feel. However, The band has much previous success with their previous albums. Considering that they’ve sold nearly 15 million records and earned 2 Grammys, Why mess with success? But lead singer Amy Lee seems to be quite excited with having some fun with their next album.
I am not sure how many of you are into video games enough to have picked up any of the Rock Band games as well as purchased any of their download-able content, but I am. I have been waiting for this day since its first announcement last summer. The Rock Band Network gives the tools to artists and labels in order to put out songs for the Rock Band titles. Starting today the service will be available to the public so we can start to buy the slightly over 100 available songs with your closest friends. As of right now RBN is up on the Xbox360 and hopefully next month it will be running on the PlayStation Network.
Whenever bands take a long time between records and then come back with a drastically different sound, they take a serious risk in alienating their audience and jeopardizing their career.
That’s exactly what happened with Taproot, who, after a really good debut album (Gift) and a mediocre follow-up two years later (Welcome), took three years before making their next album, Blue-Sky Research, which scrapped nearly all of the band’s chugging riffs and unique screams and instead saw the band trying to reinvent itself as some kind of radio-friendly alternative outfit. The move was a complete disaster. The music was so watered down that it just came across like a puddly mess, and more importantly it angered a lot of the group’s core audience, myself included.
Look, I’m definitely not saying that bands should never change their sound. I don’t think that’s true at all. But bands should at least be able to gauge their own strengths and weaknesses and not seek to make music that they cannot pull off – like Lil’ Wayne’s “rock” album. I mean, “Prom Queen” is one of the most hideous musical abominations I’ve heard in recent years, but I digress.
“Die Antwoord” translates from Afrikaans as “The Answer.”
But after watching the video for their song “Enter The Ninja” I have absolutely nothing but questions – the biggest of which is WTF?
Honestly, if you can explain anything about this video then you are smarter than I (or just really high).
That being said, I dare you to get the creepy girl’s chorus out of your head.
-Sam
With only a week before the release of their self-titled debut, Broken Bells are streaming their entire album on NPR untill its March 9th release date. Broken Bells is the latest collaboration between Brian Burton (or Danger Mouse as he is known) and Shin’s frontman James Mercer. You can either listen to specific tracks or stream the entire album from begining to end. This album seems to be a slight continuation of some of the moodier work that was done on the Demon Days album, which one of us seems to have mentioned.
Speaking of Gorillaz, this isn’t the only Danger Mouse related present NPR has up their sleeve. They are also streaming their upcoming album Plastic Beach. Word of warning, Gorillaz rarely stick to the same sound between major albums and this is no diffrent. I will leave it at that. Enjoy
The Black Keys released one of my favorite albums of 2008, Attack & Release. Produced by Danger Mouse, it featured a noticeable progression of the band’s sound and the songs were catchy as hell – just a bunch of really tasty southern psychedelic riffs and anguished crooning.
But after the record came out, the two band members started dabbling in all sorts of side projects like their rap-rock project Blakroc, Dan Auerbach’s solo album, and Patrick Carney’s band Drummer. It seemed like it would be a long time before we heard them together again in The Black Keys.
Thankfully, that’s not the case. And we will actually get to hear new Black Keys music much sooner than I ever anticipated. How soon? Well the band announced that their sixth album, Brothers, will be released on May 18th.
This time, however, Danger Mouse is only producing one track, “Tighten Up.” Carney and Auerbach will be handling most of the other production work themselves. So it will be interesting to see whether they can carry over the same magic from Attack & Release without a heavy Danger Mouse influence. Personally, I think they can.
Perhaps the coolest bit of news about this new album is that there will be a cover of Jerry Butler’s “Never Give You Up” (as opposed to Rick Astley’s more famous “Never Gonna Give You Up”, although a cover of that would be awesome as well.)
They chose a great album cover too:
Full track list after the jump.
Yeah, so Billy Corgan’s promise of releasing a new Smashing Pumpkins song every two weeks turned out to be pure B.S. Who couldn’t see that coming? But you can’t get too mad at the guy since he is giving away three or four albums’ worth of material for free.
And the next song up in his ongoing Teargarden by Kaleidyscope is called “A Stitch In Time.” It’s the third song of the 44 track album released so far. Is it just me, or is this starting to feel like Stephen Colbert’s “Better Know A District” segment?
Anyways, the band will be releasing the songs in groups of four as limited edition EPs. The first EP, titled Volume 1/Songs For A Sailor will be released on April 20th. The track list is:
- A Song for a Son
- Widow Wake My Mind
- A Stitch In Time
- Astral Planes
The first three tracks have already been released for free with the fourth expected in the near future.
The newest song, “A Stitch In Time,” is the weakest of the bunch. It’s got a real psychedelic vibe going on, but it’s listless and boring. It seems like it’s going to build up to something, but that something never comes and the song is over without anything really happening.
You can download all three of the released songs for free at the band’s website.
-Sam
Saturday Night Live is pretty hit or miss these days, but they seem to have some of their best successes when it comes to musical parodies; just look at Andy Samberg and The Lonely Island.
They struck gold again this past Saturday with their take on the “We Are The World” remake that was done to support Haiti.
Willie Nelson, David Crosby, and Josh Groban are my faves.
-Sam