Noooooooooooooooooooo?

LCD Soundsystem R.I.P. ?

/off Daily Swarm

Cross' still got it; Chris... not so much.

Locally renown music geek Alan Cross has a new project called ExploreMusic, a website and radio show dedicated to selling CD's at HMV introducing people to terrific new music.

I caught a bit of the show last night, which was on CFNY during the 8:00 hour. It's an interesting mix of news and new tracks, and differs from the Ongoing History of New Music in that it's much more timely, and covers current music events.

Here's something from the show's news section that really caught my attention: Timbaland is producing tracks for Chris Cornell's new album. You read that correctly.

Timbaland is producing tracks for Chris Cornell's new album.

And yes, it's just as awful as you imagined.

PLEASE, sit down for this:



So what's worse, Timbaland's Jesus complex or Chris Cornell's Jesus complex? Yeesh.
This one has been a long time coming for Mr. Cornell.

Anyway, ExploreMusic should be interesting. I've already bookmarked it, even though I don't buy anything from the iTunes store.

Might as well shoot me in the face

Toronto Star: New Kids on the Block awaken '80s nostalgia

Seriously, why fucking bother? Gawd. Kill me now.

Rick Rubin strikes again

Analysis: Metallica's Death Magnetic Sounds Better in Guitar Hero
[via Dailyswarm]

According to this analysis, audiophiles would be better off recording the songs from the videogame than buying the album because the Guitar Hero version has far more dynamic range than the hyper-compressed CD version.

If you're an audio file, you're probably not buying the album in the first place. It's also utterly ironic that a video game is highlighting the band's total irrelevancy, considering the way they infamously railed against new media at the turn of the century.

And no, I'm not bitter because I got caught with a "Master of Puppets" mp3.



Speaking of autotune, the production team went to town with the robotics, making Hetfield sound like Wall-E. Where are the killer riffs? Attitude? Backmasked Satanic messages?

And this video... Yawwwwn.
What the fuck is going on here? Have you ever seen a band prove that they are just a fucking shell of the artist you once loved? I would say this is it, but that god damn Mission Impossible song a few years back already took the torch on that one.

Kanye Meltdown

I'm not really sure what to make of this piece of garbage.

While it could be seen as a bold move by a major mainstream artist towards minimalist hip hop. One of the maddeningly frustrating things about the hip hop genre is its inability to absorb new trends or musical directions. The music simply does not reward free-thinkers and iconoclasts.

That being said, this music is more like a severe castration of musicality. The nauseating use of auto-tune suggests Kanye is taking a dangerously stupefying trend and exacerbating it to its unwanted conclusion.

I'm still hoping that this is all some elaborate ruse on his part, that he's testing the waters before putting out the "real" first single. We shall see... his three-album streak of brilliance just might be over.

WTF

Cut Copy rolls into Toronto next Friday the 19th, and I can't help but wonder why the fuck they even bother making music videos?

What a piece of garbage. Seriously boys, stop making videos and spend the dough on gear. This looks like a bad Steve Perry video from the 80s.

I know I linked to it, but seriously don't waste your time unless you're a student looking for an example of what not to do in a video. It makes no sense and doesn't jive with the feel of the song.

Breaking: Hanson clones released into society; Matt has too much time on hands

There was a right kerfuffle down at the MuchMusic building today, as "throngs" of batshit fucking insane fans of popular girl group The Jonas Brothers gathered to hear the "band" play Bay City Rollers covers.

Check out the report on Disney's latest spawn infesting the city of Toronto here

New copyright law: links do the talking

boing boing
CBC
Toronto Star
National Post

Complete with the usual spin & accompanying ideology-specific photos!

Isn't anything sacred?

There's still tickets remaining for My Bloody Valentine's reunion tour stop in Toronto, September 25th. At first that almost sounds weird, except for the part about the show being at one of the worst concert venues in the city, Ricoh Coliseum. I'm not sure who the band hired to plan this tour, but they should consider firing them immediately.

I think I'll skip out on this one, and leave one of my favourite albums, Loveless, where it belongs, headphones & stereos.

If you haven't heard of the band or the album, it's probably time you caught up with the rest of the cool people on the planet and gave the album a listen. If you're into British rock, shoegazing or music that takes you into a dream, there's no excuse to have missed them!


Loveless @ Wikipedia
-Not a bad article, especially since most of the entry was taken from the excellent 33 1/3 series.


A Master's thesis on My Bloody Valentine? [Wired music blog]


My Bloody Valentine - Soon

Kanye North

It looks like we've found ourselves someone eager to take on the long-discarded cover-crown of Pat Boone.

Colin Monroe is a Toronto based singer whose new single is an anemic take on Kanye West's brilliant "Flashing Lights". Mr. Monroe's version provides the spoonfuls of sugar to soften the track up enough to sell it to middle school suburbia, the perfect Pat Boone formula: The song retains only the catchy hook, and covers it with a delicious white fudge coating.

Toronto's Yonge & Dundas Square gets served up with a moderate helping of cheese, in the form of a Blade Runner/LSD trip treatment, and an entirely expected "flashing light" motif.

Overall, the video does exactly what it set out to do, because now you know who Colin Monroe is. Who? Exactly.



On the YouTube page, the song is listed as a "Remix", which serves as a solemn reminder of just how stupid people are.

It's not a remix. It's a cover. A remix takes elements from the original and re-interprets them. This is more of a re-marketing.

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Links:

Kanye West - Flashing Lights

I'm a weirdo

I will always defend the greatness of Prince, despite (and perhaps because of) all his eccentricities, but the Purple One should put down The Watchtower and pick up a copy of Wired.

That whole thing about suing YouTube and its users for posting his intellectual property was pretty bad, but now he's taking the time out of his busy schedule of purifying himself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka to block his performances of other people's songs... Namely, Radiohead's "Creep", which he added to his live repertoire at this year's Coachella, ostensibly to endear himself to the festival's young audience.

According to this article from Billboard, "Thom Yorke said he heard about Prince's performance from a text message and thought it was "hilarious."

Intrepid YouTube users continue to post the video, so here's the infamous performance at Coachella. The video totally sucks but the audio is actually not that bad for a bootleg.

Maybe if the artist formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince would cool it with the legal action he could stick to what he does best, playing the fuck out of the guitar... which is what he's stopping people from seeing. Doesn't make much sense to me.

"Let's Hear It for Rock Bottom"

Apparently The Offspring are still making "music".

Too bad, because the well has run dry. The new single, "Hammerhead", finds Dexter Holland riding the cutting edge, with lyrics about school shootings. Someone should let him in on the secret... you know, the one about how he's no longer the most relevant pop culture 'Dexter'.
(editor's note: mind the volume...)
Probably time for a new pseudonym.

Tepid, un-listenable single aside, the new album & cover is a real piece of work. The title is Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace, which is dangerously close to the Foo Fighters' Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace...

and the plot thickens further. Check out the album artwork:

And check out the cover of another Foo Fighters album.

Is this just me being picky/paranoid, or do The Offspring wish they were spawned from Dave Grohl's perfect rock and roll sperm?

Let's hunt and kill Miley Ray Cyrus

From Rant in E-Minor:



Bill Hicks is spinning in his fucking grave!

The dark philosopher could never have foreseen the terrors unleashed on us here in the early years of this new century.

You reap what you sow, and big thanks have to go out to everyone who bought a copy of Billy Ray's Some Gave All back in 1992. It was your hard earned dollars you sank into a shiny cassette copy of the nine times platinum album featuring one of the most efficiently evil memes in the history of pop music. AND it was your waning interest in the subsequent years that allowed him more time to raise his daughter, the new generation Tiffany, the demon spawn herself, Miley Cyrus.

Yes, it's all your fault for giving up on poor Billy Ray. If he hadn't experienced such a brutal backlash, he wouldn't have had so much free time to instill those hardcore Christian-capitalist values into his daughter, a little Debbie Gibson wannabe...

It may be too late for little miss Cyrus, but there's still time to prevent Michael Bolton from having kids! The very future of Planet Earth is in our hands!

Like a shot in the head

The Fall Out Boys dig deep, waaaay deep for their new single, a cover of Jackson's "Beat It" with John Mayer subbing in for Eddie Van Halen. I hope this one crashes and burns like the complete train wreck that it is, completely devoid of the irony it so desperately tries to evoke.

Luckily, there are the demon netizens of YouTube who will help keep this one alive. As the brilliantly named 'sk8ter4233244'(I'm guessing that's her phone number?) claims, "this song is awsome i love it falloutboy does a much betetr job!!"
I couldn't have put it better myself.

Also from the shot in the head category, George Michael brings 25 Live Greatest Hits tour to North America this summer. Insert 'third leg' joke here.

---

Links:

Fall Out Boy - Beat It

Fickle me El Mo

EYE: Queens Of The Stone Age @ El Mocambo, May 9

"the crowd weren’t as into it as they might have been had it not been a once-in-a-lifetime show...the band cut their set short as a result."

---
Toronto fans weren't into Queens rocking out at the fucking El Mocambo... hmmm... why is that not surprising? The band had every right to cut their set short for a group of ungrateful rock poseurs who were only there for the trend factor. And when Josh Homme says "let's get drunk", he's not talking about grabbing a second ice cold domestic, but the thirteenth or fourteenth. A couple years ago, it seemed the band loved playing here... the big guy's comment was something like "last time we were here, we drank the whole fucking bar"... and now it's come to this. Maybe the Hummingbird Centre show from last October made most of this city's tepid rock fans forget what the band is all about. Shame on you all.

But I guess last night all the cool kids were over at the Phoenix for the Cut Copy show... it was probably only the second time I've actually seen a whole room full of T.O. fans bouncing along and actually having a good time, the other being the LCD Soundsystem/M.I.A show at the Opera House back in 2005. This was a great concert, helped in part by the fact that there was a third, unannounced band that opened, Mobius-something or other, who came on before the oh-so-hip Black Kids (the group is actually made up of kids of assorted ethnicities).
This allowed for extra time with my good friend, beer.

Before the concert, Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" came on... maybe it was just a coincidence, but it foreshadowed not the show we were about to miss, but the show we were about to experience.

---

ROCK!

Queens of the Stone Age - 3's & 7's

Concert woes

The other day I learned that Queens of the Stone Age, one of my all-time favourite bands, are playing a surprise show in Toronto on Friday. At the El Mocambo! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Trouble is, I'm already going to see Cut Copy on Friday. Bahhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Ahh well. There's absolutely nothing I can do, as going to both would be a logistical impossibility. The last time I missed a Queens show, I think it was a private show for a beer company, and I wasn't interested in giving them a bunch of demographic information, email, etc. just to see the band in a venue filled with the stench of mooks and Molson. And the time before that they hadn't started playing all ages venues.

But back to Cut Copy, they're streaming the first five tracks (in order) from their new album, In Ghost Colours, up on their myspace. The album is a marked progression over their previous LP, Bright Like Neon Love, and features awe-inspiring production from DFA's Tim Goldsworthy.

Portishead is also back with a dark, progressive trip-hop album (can they make any other kind), and while the video for their first song isn't anything special, stylistically, it fits the mood of the song well, with punishing aggression in the foreground and fragile beauty filling the background.

Find a way to smile

Every once in a while a band comes along that makes you say "Well, at least things can't get much worse than this", to which the response always is - "Yes, yes it can."

Hedley is that type of band. This mook-fueled puke-fest of a band, cut from very similar cloth to Ruben Studdard, has managed to make Simple Plan seem like a group of mature singer-songwriters. The Canadian Idol excretion's latest single, "Never Too Late", is making its way up the CTV music charts with the steady ease of a third-string Nickelback single.

The best part about the whole thing is their SHOT-BY-SHOT REMAKE of Duran Duran's "Rio" from 1982. I could not make this stuff up if I tried. I wish I could, because then I'd be a very, very rich person... which in Canadian music industry terms amounts to getting pulled over in your Lamb for a DUI.

In any case, I can't see how this tribute (read: ripoff) has anything to do with the British New Wave sensation. If my English language training up to grade four taught me anything, it was how to read. Applying that exact skill of reading to the lyrics of "Never Too Late", and applying the skill of "compare and contrast", we find that the two songs have less in common than ever imagined! Jacob Hoggard's whiny, cold, and calculated attempt at an emo-anthem falls flat on its eye-liner and crushed face.

But if cultural bellwether Wikipedia is any indication, the music-loving public is eating this stuff up - "The video was parodied by Canadian rock band Hedley for their song "Never Too Late."

Tough to top that one.

---

Links:

Duran Duran - Rio

Burning out his fuse up here alone

I'm going to take a wild guess and say that Mindy McCready has seen more video hits on YouTube in the past couple days than she has seen in the past decade. It turns out that the Rocket Man himself, Roger Clemens, had a "relationship" with the country singer, dating back to his Red Sox days, though it wasn't physical. :|

The gossip mills and sports journalists are going nuts with this one, as the greatest pitcher of all time continues his monumental slide, and things are only going to get much worse.

I'm planning on pitching a reality show, tentatively titled "Rocket of Love".

---

Links:
Mindy McCready - Guys Do It All The Time (#1 Billboard Country, Sept. 14, 1996)

Mindy McCready [Wikipedia]

Indestructible Huxtable

CBC: Bill Cosby to release hip-hop album

His album is "the opposite of what I think is the profanity for no particular reason, the misogyny for no particular reason," he said. "It really looks at the frustration and the anger that a young man may have."

I hope this turns out as well as Mr. T's rap career.

---

Links:

Mr. T - Treat Your Mother Right

Calling out Timbaland

People give Nickelback a bad rap for writing the same song over and over, but Timbaland is definitely guilty of the same crime.

First, here's the track he produced for Madonna, featuring one of his puppets-du-jour, Justin Timberlake. Listen to the chorus.

Bear in mind, the "official" video hasn't been released yet... I recommend the following should be picked up as the official video, like the way that Apple fan video became an official commercial for the iPhone or whatever it was.



Now, here's "Elevator" as sung by Flo-rida. Listen to the chorus.



I know! What was he thinking?