Hot Chip: "Playboy" Video
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There's something odd about Hot Chip. Some fracture between conception and actuality that makes them all the more intriguing. Ostensibly Hot Chip sign up to the Hip-Hop dream as espoused by MTV Cribs and presumably as lived by, ooh, Pharrell Williams? They just seem to have some problems translating it to Wandsworth, SE London, is all. In fact they seem to have trouble squaring it with the equal, but to some extent opposite, influence of, say, Bill Callahan from Smog. Or Lambchop. Or Crystal Gayle. So, instead of doing the obvious thing and working out what sort of band they are going to be, they conclude that they will be all of them at once. And then they'll make it all in a room smaller than the box room at your Mum's house. With whatever's lying around. That is, whatever's lying around - toy trumpets, kazoos, blah. This to conform to a cherished idea of Brian Wilson's that, in the studio, anything goes.
Armor for Sleep: "Car Underwater"
What To Do When You Are Dead, Armor For Sleep's second installment due to be released February 22, 2005 is a record that will breathe new life into the carcass of thought provoking albums that has been lying on the side of the road which is the post hardcore/emo/rock whatever scene for years. Through the prism of buzz bands that flash and burn in dirty clubs under piles of screaming kids who will denounce them a month later it gets harder for words like longevity and individuality, originality and endurance to surface in the wash of MP3s and P2Ps that carry them to spread and deletion. In every band stickered corner in every smoke filled club from New York to California, Armor For Sleep has been showcasing their unique sound to thousands of kids who show up religiously and repeatedly to sing every word almost to the point of absurdity. In the past two years they have supported Fall Out Boy, Taking Back Sunday, Midtown, From Autumn To Ashes, Further Seems Forever, Bane and countless others. They have also done their own full U.S. headlining tours. If the last two years have been only a prelude to what the band is ultimately capable of, and if the success of their debut album "Dream To Make Believe" is any indication, Armor For Sleep is destined for canonization in the fluctuating music genre they have helped to create from the ground up. "We have seen our friends bands blow up overnight," says singer/songwriter/guitar player Ben Jorgensen, "and we?re always happy for them. We have just been working hard focusing on our sound and touring nonstop until we are so close to the brink of insanity that it hurts." Bands grow. Whether it's constant touring, self-reflection, or just being jaded from the crap bombarding modern rock radio, bands mature. "We?re not afraid to write the songs we want to write," Jorgensen said, admitting that the band was a little timid with their debut album. After working with producer Machine (Clutch, Lamb of God, White Zombie, King Crimson, Vision of Disorder) in an assortment of studios in Hoboken, New Jersey for two months, Armor For Sleep emerged with the 11-song album equipped with their signature evocative vocals, and hauntingly catchy melodies. Noted for his work with progressive metal bands, it was Machine's first time producing a band with a sound like Armor For Sleep, and what came out of it is sure to bring a new kind of reverence to the rock and roll community. With the first lines "Believe the news / I?m gone for good," of the opening track, "Car Underwater," listening to the album is like taking the hand of a ghost as he guides you around to the different people and places he likes to check up on, and in doing so, tells you the story of his life. Digging deeper into the musical styles of their genre, what comes out of What To Do When You Are Dead seems less like an experiment and more like what happens when everything just clicks and gears start turning by themselves, creating an album that promises to shine like fresh flowers on the gravesite of an industry of regenerated soulless music to fall asleep to. What To Do When You Are Dead offers the perfect balance between a self-contained concept album and a powerful collection of songs, completely unaware of each other?s existence. "We wanted this record to be a record where each song could be listened to individually," Jorgensen says "But still have a story flickering through every song, pointing the listener down the path we?ve paved for them." Where Dream To Make Believe dealt very much with time and space, What To Do When You Are Dead moves in cinematic scenes through the passage of life and death. The lyrics have the band's original literary presence that makes this album feel like every line was specifically written to fit with every guitar note, bass line and drum beat in perfect cadence. As the album moves from an actual death, to being in heaven and alone, to floating above the trees of a hometown and walking as a ghost through a graveyard, Armor For Sleep encompasses the feelings so inherent with youth. The feelings of loneliness, of social suicide, and of being an outsider conveyed in their songs put them in time with the music, and in the category of bands that connect with an entire generation, something the bigger bands of today seem to fall short of. But don?t expect them to realize the power they have over the people listening to their records. "We are just doing what we love," Jorgensen says, "what never crosses our minds is what other people will like... we just write music and I just write words that make me feel something in my gut. That is our only platform and always will be." The sound is delicate and combustible, using both clean and distorted guitar tones with a lot of slide power chords and punctuating notes that appear like gunfire across the appropriate tracks. The lyrics are meticulously crafted, smart and well placed and Jorgensen's voice is soaked with reverberation and infectious melody that can be both calm at times or impetuously turbulent. The ancient Greeks never wrote obituaries. Instead they asked only one question: Did they have passion? After their major success in such a short time, it is obvious that Armor For Sleep has a positive answer for that question. What To Do When You Are Dead is that answer.
Buzz Out Loud 716: Hope for old people (like Tom)
There's still time for us to strike entrepreneurial gold, we talk "malicious circuits," and Microsoft blah blah blah blah. Also, Popcorn Hour starts shipping its magical streaming box of wonder and it looks like we're in store for some wiener whistles.
Our editors have picked the best notebooks, laptops, or Netbooks--whatever you call them.
Tom Waits: "God's Away on Business"
"Real Gone" is the unpredictable follow-up to the atmospheric and conceptual "Alice "and "Blood Money," two albums that TOM WAITS released simultaneously in the spring of 2002.
In an exciting departure from the critically acclaimed Alice and Blood Money, Waits? fevered imagination has spawned a new musical hybrid, grafting together worlds both sonic and ethnic from musical traditions both old and new. The 15 track CD features: primal blues, Jamaican rock-steady grooves, rhythms and melodies both African and Latin, what Waits calls ?cubist funk.?
In that sonic cubism, Waits ingeniously finds common ground with hip hop?s cut and paste aesthetic and incorporates some of its elements into his approach. Many of the tracks on Real Gone were built on Waits? ?human beatboxing? on a cassette recorder in his bathroom and bringing those tapes into the studio to have the band play over them. As a result, there are no drums on many of the most driving tracks as his voice provides all of the necessary propulsions. And for the first time, there is no piano.
The Constantines: "Nightime/Anytime, It's Alright"
When the Constantines headlined the Sub Pop showcase at the 2004 SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas; the band's show concluded with them standing on the speaker stacks clapping and keeping time for the audience as the room sang the band's recent set closer (Lou Reed's "Temporary Thing") back at them. This scene lasted a full five minutes, five minutes of finale without the band playing a single note and thus the increasingly impatient promoters, fearful of running over their strict Texan curfew, couldn't even unplug the band to get them off the stage. But then the purpose of the stage is constantly called into question at Constantines shows. Bryan and Steve will regularly move their mic stands into the crowd and Doug frequently hands out percussion to the faithful gathered together near the band. The greatest rock and roll is always transformative, a concept that the Constantines grasped from their inception and one which was so readily on display at this show. The boundary between band and crowd is blurred; inhibitions are lost, along with voices, and ultimately you feel more alive than you did before the band took the stage, before you stopped noticing the stage.
The second promo for Panic Cell for the track "Save Me", became the most voted for promo in the history of the rock satellite channel Scuzz, remaining in the top ten for eighteen weeks and at number one for six weeks. This was another three day shoot starting with the band performance. We wanted to shoot them in a confined metallic space like a shipping container with very low light. Unfortunately the logistics of filming in a freight container were too great so we came up with the idea of using the back of a truck. The truck we had in mind was too expensive to hire so we used the AFM lighting truck. We dressed the interior and hung 40 light bulbs only three of which were actually live, then cheated the band around into different positions to give the feeling of an enclosed space. The interiors were shot in the bathroom and living room of my flat and were lit by Tim, the master of understatement, with one kino tube and a bit of reflective milar. The exteriors were shot in a drainage pit at the bottom of a field in east sussex. The week before the shoot I'd dug a hole and sunk a plastic barrel into the side of the pit, the idea being we would stand our actor in it then fit a kind of sleeve around his waste and dress the earth around him. Unfortunately the barrel filled with freezing water. Add to that, he was topless and it was January. We shot quickly.
Ep. 141: The Food Issues Episode
These days, it always seems to come back around to food, and analyzing each other's food issues is pretty enlightening. Here are some tools to appease the inner food critic.
Insider Secrets: Get your HDTV ready for football
Molly Wood shows you some tweaks and tips to get your HDTV in tip-top shape for football season, tennis season, or whatever sport you are into.
Back in 1977 Dane disco king Tommy Seebach got funky and primal with this classic Shadows' tune, "Apache," and some buckskin-sporting vixens.Even though the peak of Tommy Seebach's fame was somewhere around the late 1970s, the Danish hitmaker has returned to a lesser limelight with the viral circulation of his campy video for "Apache." From the smooth guitar riffage to Seebach's glorious main and sunshine smile, the grooving romp through the forest with buckskin-clad sweethearts is an amazing piece of work. Seebach himself died of a heartattack in 2003, but one view of "Apache" and it's clear that his legacy will live on forever.
