This is so good. I really like MASSEDUCTION but I’d love to hear her do the entire album like this. Although she’s known for shredding her electric guitar, the latest St. Vincent album subverts those expectations to a certain extent by burying her guitars under programmed beats.
And this Tiny Desk Concert goes in the opposite direction entirely. No pre-recorded beats, no electric instruments at all. Just Annie Clark and an acoustic guitar. She’s awesome. And that Elvis snarl? 100% badass.
Set List: “New York,” “Los Ageless,” and “Slow Disco.”
Aimee Mann is so stinkin’ good it’s ridiculous. Her new album, Mental Illness, has provided great comfort to me in these awful, awful times. Her Tiny Desk Concert features a stripped down run through of four songs from it: “Rollercoasters,” “You Never Loved Me,” “Goose Snow Cone,” and “Patient Zero.”
This is so great. I love these guys. They exude the righteous joy performers feel when they know they’re doing something awesome. RTJ can be fun and playful and serious and cutting all within the same verse. I wonder if Mike and El realize how much we need them right now and how perfect they are for this moment in time.
Songs performed:
“Talk To Me”
“Legend Has It”
“A Report To The Shareholders”
On The Media is a great weekly public radio podcast on everything media. This week, they explore something close to the hearts of Glorious Noise readers – the digital age of music. From Napster to the Pirate Bay, Hank Shocklee to Girl Talk, they break down the past 10 years of the music industry and it’s a really good listen that we highly recommend. Check it out:
Cat fight! This is awesome. Over on her Monitor Mix blog for NPR, former Sleater-Kinney guitarist (and general badass) Carrie Brownstein succinctly lays down exactly why Weezer has sucked for this entire fucking decade:
I don’t know if Weezer hates its fans or just the (apparently) stifling concept of sincerity, but you should listen to these two new songs if you weren’t already convinced of Weezer’s contempt for music.
Ding ding ding. You can check out the terrible new songs after jump… I couldn’t make 20 seconds into either of them.
The students at Lexington High School say they haven’t just written a play based on this album, or a play about Anne Frank. It’s about art and music coming out of terrible things. And it’s about being transformed by that process of creation. A junior, whose parents did not want her identified, found herself transformed.
“There was one rehearsal where we were using the music a lot, and I just remembered this thing that I had forgotten, which is that there were two Nazis in my family,” one Lexington student says. “And I just had this realization that I had to make reparations, I had this just huge debt all of a sudden, which I had forgotten I had. And after that day everything’s been heavier and also lighter at the same time and I feel like the music just like draws things out of weird places that you didn’t know were there.”
Heavy shit, for sure, but listen to the recordings of the rehearsals on NPR’s site and you can hear the pure joy these kids are getting out of the music, as well. Don’t be simplistic enough to mistake their laughter as not taking it seriously. Teenagers are complex like that.
They have a new album—Wilco (The Album)—coming in late June, but you won’t have to wait until then to get yourself some new Wilco. A new cover of Woody Guthrie’s “The Jolly Banker” is available now on their website with suggested donation of $2 to the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives. (GLONO donated $10, so a couple of you can slide by without guilt if you can’t scrounge the dough.)
Jeff Tweedy talks about how Woody’s Depression-era song is once again timely on American Public Media’s Marketplace.
Good, chooglin’ reverb-drenched blues pop. Zooey Deschanel takes a back seat, so this is definitely more M. Ward than She & Him, but it’s still up that same alley. NPR is streaming the whole album.
They have a new album—Wilco (The Album)—