Music news
Following on from Emily's post re: unexpected musical pairings, comes the above video of Rhianna performing "Umbrella" at last night's Brit awards. "So?", I hear you say, "doesn't Rhianna perform Umbrella at, like, every awards show?". Yes - but not with The Klaxons!
So a little thing called 'the internet' is stopping people purchasing music legally hey? What better way to persuade the public to buy your music than offering signed hard copies of your new CD? That’s what The Presets and Cut Copy have done with their latest albums due to be released in the coming weeks. The Presets’ “Apocalypso” and Cut Copy’s “In Ghost Colours” are both available over JB Hi-Fi online. So you’ll probably need to order two copies of each… one for the mantelpiece and one for actually taking out of the case and listening to. Loudly.
Janet Jackson and Daft Punk go about as well together as cheese and pancakes. Yet a quick glance at your local Pancake Parlour menu will tell you that plenty of people actually prefer cheese (and potato, and ham, and pineapple…) on their pancakes just as Janet Jackson has sampled Daft Punk in her new song “So Much Betta”. So Janet follows the path led by Busta Rhymes, will.i.am and Kanye West by dropping beats from the French electro powerhouse in her latest single. And you thought Daft Punk fever left with Nevereverland! Which leads us to ask the question, who will be next to sample Daft Punk? Radiohead? Ying Yang Twins? The Veronicas? All three and more? Probably.
If your Myspace account is anything like mine, you tend to get a few friend requests from random bands/ musicians etc; while I totally appreciate what they are doing, a lot tend to be pretty ho-hum. Not the duo that requested my acquaintance this morning though. They are called Pretty Penny - two, as yet unsigned, little ladies who appear to split their time between Toronto and London and who make extremely pretty and lo-fi songs that seem inspired by all the things that inspire me also. Things like whimsy movies, airports, nostalgia, new cities, rain on windows, old things, found things etc. Also, when I say Lo-fi, I mean Lo-fi; the tracks on their Myspace pages are very fuzzy demos that sound closet-recorded. But that’s why I like them so much!
Who doesn’t
dig
If you were told any ordinary rock band
like Nickelback (if you can call
that rock)
or Franz Ferdinand were going to produce thirteen (count it, thir-teen) studio
albums you’d probably be running to the door scratching at the handle screaming
“LET ME OUT BEFORE MY EARS COMBUST AND TURN INTO NOVELTY EAR-SHAPED ERASERS”,
but instead Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds have us hoping that thirteen goes
on fourteen, goes on fifteen… and so on. You can sample the delectable first single
on the band’s official website or check out the video on youtube. The
aesthetics of the clip are a cross between that music video you made in Year 11
Media that you filmed in your mate’s garage and some kind of low budget
eighties movie that went straight to VHS, but my god Cave can make anything
look cool.
DIG IT!
Kenji Suzuki AKA Damo Suzuki is an artist of extreme prolificness. After performing with revered Krautrock group CAN in the early seventies, Suzuki went on to carve out a most productive career; forming the Damo Suzuki network in 1983 and subsequently releasing what appears to be an album every year. Damo has been a huge influence on many a generation of art-rock scenes; he’s been name-checked by fellow crazy genius, Mark. E. Smith of The Fall (in their 1985 single “I Am Damo Suzuki”) and, quite clearly, NYC rockers The Mooney Suzuki. Damo has also worked with The Mars Volta’s Omar Rodríguez-López, The Bees and Broken Social Scene. This week the Damo Suzuki Network is in Sydney, playing a show at the Annandale this Friday with local group The Holy Soul, as well as Tex Perkins and The Bumhead Orchestra. Tickets are available here or for $20 on the door. I suggest it would be worth your while to go.
Brisbane's Gameboy/Gamegirl (who kindly kept the masses entertained at last year's Curvy after party) are getting set to release their debut Ep, "Golden Ghetto Sex". With a name like that you know it's gotta be some kind of mad, hypercolour, early 90's throwback - but see for yourself. The above video has been made to give you little taste of the madness that will surely ensue when GGS is released on the new label Sweat It Out Records on March 8th.
