Music

Best #indiehairbands submissions so far: Rattatat (@markweaver), My Morning Jackyl (@GoldbergHQ), Yngwie Malmsteenage Fan Club (@pdoughbrie)

St. Vinnie Vincent Invasion #indiehairbands

Slinterella #indiehairbands

Mr. Big Black #indiehairbands

Skid Low #indiehairbands

Faster Pussycat Power #indiehairbands

Kixies #indiehairbands

Girls Against Bulletboys #indiehairbands

Guns N’ Sigur Róses #indiehairbands

Yo La Bang Tango #indiehairbands

The Great White Stripes #indiehairbands

Ted Nugent and the Pharmacists #indiehairbands

Ra Ra Quiet Riot #indiehairbands

Pedro the White Lion #indiehairbands

Fleet Britny Foxes #indiehairbands

Bon Jover #indiehairbands

Arcade Firehouse #indiehairbands

Karaoke night has begun and apparently this place is overrun by musical theater people. Send arsenic.

Just Like Being There

Scout Shannon

One of the smartest things Just Like Being There does is to go out of its way not to ignore the “gig” part of “gig posters”. The film is thick with music in both the background and foreground, and the handful of live performances it features do a good job of capturing that certain kind of magic that only a great rock show can provide. Capturing that magic is… See more →

Excited to see what @Rdio unveils next week, but all I really want is to be able to get through a song without the stream crapping out.

Dude welcoming people onto the C train by playing the Superman theme on his phone, proclaiming, “The King is here!” I ❤ NY.

After playing from iOS Remote, Mac iTunes defaults to the playlist that alphabetically follows “Remote”. For me, it’s “Songs About Penises”.

Nearly twenty years later, it still blows my mind that this album was Primus’s commercial breakthrough. Not just because it is (still) the most bizarre, least accessible thing they’ve released, but also because it is a genuinely unsettling permutation of their sound. Primus’s efforts before and after touched on a variety of moods, but at the end of the day, the band was always best described as “quirky,” if only for lack of a more… See more →

This is the most fun I’ve had with Illustrator and Photoshop in awhile.

For no good reason, I pretty much left Larsen for dead in 2003. I’m so glad to see they’re still making worthwhile music that is very much their own. The cryptic tension at the core of their sound is now tempered with moments of relatively conventional beauty, which makes for a more dynamic and engaging record than Rever, where I left off all those years ago. Some songs drag a bit, and others demand your… See more →

My new favorite Drake lyric: “In this bitch all drinks on the house like Snoopy.”

I have owned LetterMpress from the beginning, but this is the first time I actually dug into it. Fun!

The original get-off-my-lawn anthem.

Dat Politics are at their best when their laptops speak for them, but vocals have had an increasing presence in their shrill digital attack ever since 2002’s Plugs Plus. The vocals work to great effect when they are approached as just another element to be sampled and rearranged for rhythmic or textural effect, but when employed in the service of actual lyrics or melody, Dat Politics’ vocals aren’t up to the task (Gaetan C. Collett… See more →

My new iPad wallpaper, courtesy of @pdoughbrie:

In case you were wondering, my favorite Turbonegro lyric is still, “So c’mon, gimme a kiss. But don’t gimme no lip.”

When I first heard that most of these songs had their origins as castoffs from David Lee Roth’s original tenure with the band, I rolled my eyes. But after hearing the album, I realized what a smart move it was. With Dave back in the fold after nearly thirty years (though sadly not Michael Anthony), dusting off old, unused songs was the closest they could come to picking up where they left off at the… See more →

Even if Björk’s work doesn’t connect with you, it is impossible not to admire her. nytimes.com/2012/02/06/arts/m…

For some reason, it’s only every few years or so that I remember how great Meshuggah is. I guess that would explain why I never picked this one up, which was a mistake since it is easily the best thing they’ve done since Chaosphere. Obzen is a great example of what Meshuggah does so well: ridiculously complicated, dense metal whose bludgeoning, mechanical constitution belies the very human energy that delivers it. Stellar stuff.

“All your music is on Spotify,” says an e-mail I received from @Spotify, who has chosen to begin our relationship with a bald-faced lie.

Left the studio just in time to catch a marching band on Jay Street playing something that sounded an awful lot like the Terminator theme.

At the behest of @fchimero and @kissane, here is my favorite hour of Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs: rd.io/x/QFyuL0tIpw

Achievement Unlocked: @AndrewWk tickets for Webster Hall on April 2nd!

Much less skeptical of musicians’ motives than I used to be. Much more skeptical of visual artists’ motives than I used to be.

Alternating song-by-song between Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street and Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville response.

Most surprising of all, none of the cover songs respondents have claimed are better than the originals have been blasphemous (to me).

Surprisingly, no one has mentioned Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”, vastly superior to and better known than The Family’s original.

Runner-up popular responses for both a and b: Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” and Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah”.