New Music: Santogold - "Big Mouth"

Now this is something totally new for 2012. Eagerly awaited for, literally, years, the first single from Santigold's forthcoming Master of My Make-Believe is called "Big Mouth." 

It sounds nothing like her first album, rules just as hard, and hopefully will find its way into the clubs so Santi can be a huge pop star. It's not gonna happen but a man can dream, right? At least we're finally gonna get a follow-up to the still perfect Santogold.

Download "Big Mouth" for free by singing up for Santi's mailing list at her website. (Worth it!)

Buy Santogold at Amazon and welcome yourself into the year 2008. 

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New Music: Orbital - "Never"

Never by Orbital Listen on Posterous

Almost two years ago to the day, I posted a live version of Orbital’s “Halcyon,” which has one of the greatest pay-offs in live electronic music EVER. Today comes the announcement that the Hartnoll brothers, Paul and Phil, are back together and have a new album on the horizon.

“Never” is the first single from Wonky, due out in April, the duo’s first new album in eight years. That alone is exciting news. Even if the track feels a bit run of the mill.

I can vaguely remember seeing a video for the track pop up early fall last year but there wasn’t an announcement or news, just the track. The tapping beat and revolving melodies are what Orbital does best and, as the video suggests, sounds like a very late night drive home from a very late night.

Nothing monumental from Orbital, other than the standard, high level of quality the Hartnolls have always maintained. But we’ve only heard one track, so there’s no telling what else they’ve pumped out of those brilliant bald heads.

Orbital’s official website.
Buy Orbital’s music at Amazon.

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Heems of Das Racist drops new album

It seems that Heems, of Brooklyn hip hop visionaries* Das Racist, wants everybody to have a new album today, so he’s giving away a new one, called Nehru Jackets, for free.

According to the email I just got, the album/mixtape includes members of the Queens, NY, community organization SEVA which is working to raise awareness of redistricting efforts in the borough. Also included on the tape are Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, Action Bronson, and Childish Gambino, all of whom were branded underground hip hop heroes via 2011 year-end lists.

Grab the mixtape here. I haven’t listened to it yet, or even downloaded it, but I’m sure it’s no waste of time...

But wait, here's a track from the tape: "You Have to Ride The Wave” (ft. Danny Brown and Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire)"

*I’m calling them visionaries because Relax got a lot of spins in my world. There’s a pretty good chance it’ll be on that slow-to-appear Top 11 of ‘11 I’ve been posting, but you never know...

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Sleigh Bells - "Comeback Kid"

param></object><span><a href="http://soundcloud.com/sleighbells/comeback-kid">Comeback Kid</a> by <a href="http://soundcloud.com/sleighbells">Sleigh Bells</a></span>

New track from Sleigh Bells? I may have the day off work but this would make any day better. You can't beat Alexis Krauss over some new overmodulated guitar stabs and pounding beats. It sounds like they're going a little pop. Not that Sleigh Bells weren't a little pop before. Or maybe it's just that I'd like to see an Adele-like rise to superstardom for noise pop. Yeah, I know it's not gonna happen. This is one of those albums that has expectations high for 2012, and now the second single is as good as the first one.

I'm not sure what I'm more excited for, the mini-tour of Florida with Diplo (wooooooo Fort Lauderdale stop on February 11) or the new album, Reign of Terror, which is out February 21, and thus far is living up to the promise of the 2010 debut, Treats.

Buy Treats from Amazon. And, maybe go see them in concert.

(via A/V Club)

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Sleigh Bells - "Comeback Kid"

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Weezer - 'Say It Ain't So' (Live on Letterman circa 1995)

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The reason there are so many people in their mid-20s to mid-30s who hate Weezer isn't because the band sucks, because they don't. The reason is because they were so good, putting out the blatantly perfect Blue Album and Pinkerton and never recovering - either from Rivers Cuomo's crushing depression that the latter didn't arrive with the same massive gigantic splash as the former, or because Matt Sharp just got sick of Cuomo's bull shit.

This, to be honest, is an argument I've made before, and will make until the end of time. Even now, there is no song on either album that fails to wake me up and lock me into whatever speaker it pours out of. Each of the 20 songs on the official, original releases of the album, and most of the b-sides from the era, are great songs with no explanation needed. The crunching, fuzzed guitar sound. Half-emo cynicism in the lyrics. For three glorious years, Weezer was a band apart.

"Say It Ain't So" was one of those early hits, and one of ten tracks on the Blue Album, that converted pretty much everybody to a fan. The hate is all about knowing that Weezer will never write songs as good as they did on those two albums. Well, unless Matt Sharp rejoins the band and shocks the world.............

Weezer put out deluxe editions of the Blue Album and Pinkerton in 2010.

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Ted Leo on new music, Obama and OWS

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There's no questioning that Ted Leo is true to his punk ideals. There's also no questioning that he's a great damn songwriter. This piece from ABC News, while not too deep, covers his thoughts on OWS, starting out in a new band, and writing new songs. If it wasn't on his Facebook page, I'd have never seen it, so thank The Zuck for that great social timewaster.

Check out some of Ted Leo's albums at Amazon.

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The War on Drugs Bring "Missiles" to Fallon

(Part two in an 11 part series to spotlight "Feller's Albums De L'annee" Unlike all those other bloggers, I refuse to evaluate the year until it's over. Also, I got kind of lazy in December. Full disclosure, you know? Enjoy...)

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The War on Drugs hit up Jimmy Fallon last night to play "Baby Missiles," one of the tracks from last year's great Slave Ambient. I caught them at The Black Cat in Washington, D.C., last August and they filled a small room with rock and roll while the tightly packed crowd jumped and danced. The steady stream of PBR helped a bit too.

I'm partial to their first album, Wagonwheel Blues, just because it's great, but Slave Ambient builds on the airy rock and frontman Adam Granduciel's Dylan-like drawl and delivers on exactly what is great about that first record. Singing about freedom and the road and strange reactions to people, you (or I, obviously) get the feeling of being on the road, watching America crawl by through a bus or train window, as if running from or to something. And there is a lot to find comforting in that kind of rock album. Maybe I'm just itching for that kind of road trip. Which doesn't change how good the album is anyway.

Before hitting that show, though, I wasn't convinced enough to spread the word. The fact is, they jam, letting the songs fly, just as they do on Fallon's stage, with the help of ?uestlove there. If they come through a town I'm in, and I'm not required to see be somewhere else, I plan to occupy a space in front of the stage they're on. In the case of "Baby Missiles," I'm especially a fan of the harmonica. And that guitar sound during the solos. Mmmmmm. Good stuff.

Buy Slave Ambient at Amazon. (It's only five bucks and worth every penny or more. Go buy it!)

The Jimmy Fallon clip is thanks to Some Kind of Awesome, a blog all of ya'll should be reading.

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Refused - The Deadly Rhythm (WOOOO! Coachella!!)

The Deadly Rhythm by Refused Listen on Posterous

The line-up for this year’s Coachella festival was announced yesterday. The list is pretty amazing, what with Radiohead, The Black Keys, Dre and Snoop, The Hives and a very long list of bands and artists that are sure to have the festival sell out quick and fast.

Of the entire line-up, and it is a deep, deep line-up, the two eye-catchers come from bands that fans have long wanted to reunite, one of which has sworn up and down for more than a decade that they were over forever: At The Drive-In and Refused.

The post-punk heroes, each of which has had a somewhat profound affect on punk and music as a whole, will play their first shows together at the gigantic festival.

At The Drive-In gained popular attention once Grand Royal Records (AKA The Beastie Boys) signed them and got “One-Armed Scissor,” from their pretty widely loved album “Relationship of Command” on MTV. Then the band splintered into the prog-metal mindfuck of The Mars Volta and more straight forward rock of Sparta. While TMV will release a new album this year, Sparta hasn’t put out a new album since 2006, though they’ve been playing live recently.

ATDI getting back together is not the most shocking thing though since they’ve been teasing it for at least two years. The problem with the band was that Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez felt held back, so they left and formed another band, in addition to writing, recording and releasing about 10,000 projects a year.

Refused, on the other hand, imploded and swore they’d never come back after their ground-shaking The Sound of Punk To Come changed the face of hard music - at least in retrospect. The album turns from melodic to blistering hardcore on a dime, with a series of political statements that show the band’s preference for socialism over pure capitalism, and is universally lauded for sounding so unlike anything else at the time, despite hardcore not being a new idea.

Check out “The Deadly Rhythm.” Yeah, hardcore from an album whose name is stolen from an Ornette Coleman classic (“The Shape of Jazz To Come”), and a song that samples Bo Diddley’s “I’m A Man,” but sounds like getting your face kicked in, rebuilt and then kicked in again. Punk. As. Fuck.

These bands matter, and now they have returned. This is a big deal people. Melodramatic enough for you?

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The Shins reveal "Simple Song"

The first single from the long-awaited, heavily-anticipated fourth Shins album, Port of Morrow, has been posted as a stream at The Shins website. What's the best part of "Simple Song?" It sounds like The Shins. Considering that band leader James Mercer dismissed the entire band after its last effort, this could have been a crap shoot. Not really. Mercer was gonna write a bunch of great new songs, which is what he does every time out. Alas, we get what we want.

What's nice about The Shins maintaining a constant sound - not that "Simple Song" sounds necessarily like anything on the band's previous three albums - is similar, to keep with the indie sound, Spoon. Is anybody breaking new ground? Well, Britt Daniel has a tendency to do a few new things, but for the most part what you get is a new set of songs that sounds different from the old ones but completely like Spoon. That's what this is. I, for one, am thankful for that.

Port of Morrow is out March 20. Preorder it from simplesong.theshins.com.

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The Black Keys - Hell of a Season

Hell Of A Season by The Black Keys Listen on Posterous

(Part one in an 11 part series to spotlight “Feller’s Albums De L’annee.” Unlike all those other bloggers, I refuse to evaluate the year until it’s over. Also, I got kind of lazy in December. Full disclosure, you know? Enjoy...)

One 2011’s biggest releases came toward the end of the year, from a band that has quietly become one of the biggest, most consistently great bands in the country - The Black Keys.

What the blues-rock duo has done over the last decade, without compromising anything, really, is evolve their sound from a somewhat derivative melding of the two music forms into a sound all their own. From their first album, The Big Come Up, the Black Keys have become adept at writing more and better songs every year since, with their sound evolving to balance the blues based attack that made that gritty first effort so addictive.

The new album, El Camino, is the first to feature Danger Mouse behind the boards for every track since Attack and Release in 2008, and it solidifies the partnership as just enough pop has been added to what probably started off as pretty hooky rock songs anyway.

El Camino finds Dan and Patrick finding their groove, literally, on most every song. Even where the lyrical content is a little heavy, as it can be with these blues guys, the up tempo riffage has everything moving.

The consensus among reviewers was that Brothers, the 2009 blockbuster from the Black Keys, was a down record, this rediscovers their rocking side. I don’t quite get that, but whatever. Maybe everyone just wanted a party record. Considering all the influence on here, what with echoes of all sorts of pop songs, in a good way, this should be a party record.

Coming in on the second half of the album, “Hell of a Season,” covers both those sides: lyrically, it’s a bit heart-wrenching, but sonically it kicks your sad ass off that ledge you’re looking out from. Or maybe it’ll pull you back off the ledge. Either way, it’s good. And so is the rest of the album. There’s no great mystery to it: Just good rock and roll.

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Diplo - Express Yourself EP sampler (ruuuuuuuuuuuuules)

 <span>DIPLO express yourself EP sampler by diplo</span>  

Diplo is preparing to launch a short but useful tour with Sleigh Bells that will see the underground heroes trouncing the state of Florida by hitting all the important locations - Gainesville, Jacksonville, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, Miami and Tampa. Much like his tourmates, the producer has a new album ready go. Based on the eclectic, exciting sample above, he's making sure Sleigh doesn't totally steal the shows.

Posted via email from One Stupid Mop