Moderat, "Slow Match (feat. Paul St. Hilaire)" Judging from the play count on my laptop's music player, Moderat's record this year is well on its way to ranking as one of my favorites in 2009. Moderat is basically a...
Cinematical has just received the following title track for Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' original and haunting film score for The Road . It's simple and chilling -- just as any accompaniment to a post-apocalyptic world should be -- full of violin and piano tunes, some wind instruments and sound loops. The soundtrack is being released digitally today over at Amazon , with further digital retailers tomorrow...
The pair of angels in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire have been here forever--before Berlin and before the living. They spend their days observing the people of the divided city, reading their thoughts and instilling a sense of optimism where need be. They behave as one would expect angels to (providing, of course, one believes): as a guardian who, with just his palm, can provide sanguinity in the...
i need to find a way to block event invites from FB friends that are so distant to me, physically, that any events they might invite me to are not possible for me to go to. i hate getting event invites and then messages related to it, when its a comedy club on the other side of the world. not that i appreciate all the helsinki-based event invites either, but that is tolerable i suppose. the event called...
Clash : 1. His band didn’t know what was going on when Kurt turned up on stage in the wheelchair This one is patently not true. Aside from anything else, Krist Novoselic introduced Nirvana that evening as I appeared on the edge of the stage with the wheelchair, “…he’ll pull through. With the help of his friends and his family, he’ll pull through”. The whole stunt...
In celebration of Criterion's deluxe double-DVD and Blu-ray treatment of Wings of Desire , my Benten Films partner-in-crime Andrew Grant and I rewatched Wim Wenders ' 1987 masterpiece (and pored over the bonus features) to discuss the film's elusive magic and why a work so specific to East-West German tensions has aged so gracefully. Andrew reminisces about spending time in Berlin around the time...
EMI Music is launching a new live music recording and instant production service, Abbey Road Live, enabling live music fans the opportunity to instantly purchase high quality live recordings of shows they have just attended. Mixed and mastered on site by a dedicated crew of experts, the recordings will be made available in a range of formats including CD, DVD and USBs or via secure digital delivery...
Nick Cave put his own spin on the oft recorded story about Lee "Stag Lee" Shelton, and called his take "Stagger Lee", on the classic 1996 album Murder Ballads . I say "his take" because other recordings have various versions of the name (and details) likely due to the story spreading across the US orally in the late 1800's (Stagolee, Stack O' Lee, Stackerlee, Stackoo...
Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by the X-Files was the first album released in association with the popular television series The X-Files released in 1996. It contained both music that had been featured in the show, as well as music whose themes were in line with the concepts of the show. The album peaked at #47 on Billbord's Top 200 chart. Producers used the Compact Disc's pregap, so...
Fever Ray has premiered a music video for the song "Stranger Than Kindness", a cover of the old Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song. Directed by Andreas Nilsson, the clip incorporates much of the imagery from Fever Ray's mystical, gender-bending live show, namely lasers, a big, hairy yeti costume thing and some ominously flickering lamps. This appears to be Fever Ray's final video release and...
Hot off the press, the magnificent Magazine, reformed for 2009 and this may be their last show. Check this fuckin set out - recorded this very evening from 6 Music and features Magazine doing 'strictly A-sides and B-sides' for a stunning 45 minute show. We saw them at the Latitude festival back in July and were blown away - I'd seen the Buzzcocks at the start of the year but this was something else....
Hereditary analogies were made for Joe Gideon & The Shark , a band whose aural genome is evenly split between influences, its sound less spontaneous generation and more gametic fusion. This one’s a bit of a stretch: Mark E. Smith’s sperm fertilized Art Brut’s egg and this little band was born. Reminds us of: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds | The White Stripes | The Kills Joe Gideon...