advertisement
follow us
Newsletter signup
Get a little Crawdaddy! right in the inbox once a week:
Straight to Video
Rock Art Rock
The Decemberists
September 19, 2009
Terminal 5, New York, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "The Decemberists played a special one night 'lottery show,' where the songs played were picked at random by a master of ceremonies, played by John Wesley Harding..."
Ra Ra Riot
April 4, 2009
Webster Hall, New York City, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "This show was, at the time, the biggest one Ra Ra Riot had sold out as headliners, and it was clear to me after watching it that the band is destined for even bigger and better things..."
Florence and the Machine
October 28, 2009
Bowery Ballroom, New York City, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "Florence Welsh and her backing band delighted and mesmerized a sold-out crowd at Bowery in her first official NY headlining show..."
Dirty Projectors
July 19, 2009
Williamsburg Waterfront (Brooklyn, NY)
By Amanda Hatfield "I was skeptical about how well Dirty Projectors' gorgeous, complex vocal harmonies would carry over outdoors, standing under hot sunshine..."
See more in the Rock Art Rock gallery.
Most Read Articles
- The Smoke-Filled Room: Music and a Woman’s Right to Choose
- What Goes On: Liam Gallagher Reveals Post-Oasis Plans, and Other News
- My Life Is the Road: Clarence White and Jim Morrison Stretch on a 747
- It Shows, What Goes On: Live Show Review: Devo at the Regency Ballroom, San Francisco
- What Goes On: This Just In: Steven Tyler Is the Rainbow
- Reviews: Weezer: Raditude
- Introducing: His Name Is John Michael Rouchell
polls
Loading ...-
Search results for: pink floyd
Revelations About Music Pirates, and Other News
It seems pretty obvious that people who illegally download music are also the ones who spend the most money on music… right? Those who take the greatest lengths to track down coveted new releases or obscurities online are generally the same folks who care the most about the music that they are, well, stealing. A new poll done in the UK supports this theory, also stating that about one in 10 admit to downloading illegally. Pushing back on piracy could ultimately hurt the industry. Seems like across the board, subscription services are looking more and more like the way to go in terms of how to monetize online music content. Thoughts? (Independent)
Carly Simon, who rarely performs live (but will accompany her surgeon boyfriend to work to sing for his bedridden patients) will, despite her fear of flying and debilitating stage fright, be doing a series of concert hall dates to support her forthcoming new album. (Reuters)
It’s being reported that the three original Sugababes are possibly going to reform here soon, and each of them has been offered separate solo deals as well to entice them into the reunion. (Idolator)
The Pixies plus Conan O’Brien equals a pretty sweet combination for a Wednesday evening of TV. (Pitchfork)
Read more news after the jump.
XTC’s Psych Side Project Gets an Acid Flashback
First, the bad news.
“At this point,” announces Andy Partridge over the phone from his Swindon, England home, “XTC is pretty much a memory, I’m afraid. I don’t think it’s ever going to be a going concern again. I certainly have a dislike of older bands that re-form; they really, really shouldn’t do it.”
For fans of the legendary British post-new wave group—who managed to survive a good 20 years longer than most of their contemporaries, with the possible exception of REM—this news comes not so much as a shock but rather a grim confirmation of the end of an era. Yet, as Partridge continues, it becomes clear that, while XTC the band may be strictly a historical concern, XTC the brand is in the middle of one of its busiest years in quite some time.
Spirit: Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus
Spirit
Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus
(Epic, 1970)
When people think of real classic rock albums, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon are two that immediately spring to mind. For me, LA-based Spirit’s wonderful eclectic psychedelic masterpiece Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus fits neatly between the two. It’s kind of a distant cousin to those drastically different albums, in that it has the production and arrangement qualities of the aforementioned Beatles album and the daring instrumentals and precision of the Floyd set. Also, it was released right in the middle (three years after the former and three years before the latter). It was the fourth and last album by the original five-piece band (not counting a mediocre ’80s reunion effort). Amazingly, it has never been out of print since its original November 1970 release. It stayed available in its vinyl edition until the advent of CDs in the early ’80s, then was subsequently released as a CD, an expanded CD edition, a Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab audiophile CD edition, and it has been released again as a 180-gram vinyl disc from those bastions of quality at Sundazed, which made for a good excuse for me to revisit one of my favorite albums of all time. It’s even been the subject of a complete and quite exhilarating tribute/reinterpretation album by Seattle-based band 13 Dreams in 2006.
Sardonicus is an enigma, a prime example of quality winning out in the long run. The sales of the album (which went gold in 1976) are simply based on its quality and propelled by word-of-mouth over time, as opposed to any publicity blitz or hype. Most of its accolades seem to come from fellow musicians. On its release, it achieved the poorest chart position of any of their albums, peaking at 63, but has gone on to be the band’s biggest selling album by far and has remained a major cult album.
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
The Smashing Pumpkins
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
(Virgin, 1995)
As a historical artifact, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness proves that life was vastly different in 1995. Digitally encoded songs weren’t traded freely between digital networks of digital peers; they were professionally pressed onto shiny silver discs. These discs were purchased for entertainment purposes, not social contracts with the artists that made them. And, perhaps most incomprehensibly in the present, Billy Corgan wasn’t a hopeless weirdo that wrote whiny poetry books and reunited bands without any original members other than himself. He was a solid songwriter, interesting vocalist, and unrelenting guitarist who unearthed a well of creativity deep enough to spearhead a mostly-decent double album of 28 songs (and still had 28 left over for the singles box set).
To Indie or Not to Indie, An Existential Crisis
A gentleman named Snacky let us stay at his house after our show in Connecticut in exchange for an interview for his college radio program. This was far from the strangest situation we’d been in on our most recent trek; we were late for the show that night because our van was searched for drugs at the Canadian border, and the night before, we spent over two hours hiding in the basement of a bar in Québec City while a meeting of anarchists took place in French above us. As we sat in Snacky’s living room and pet his two gray and orange kittens, he asked us the dreaded, “How do you describe your music to somebody who has never heard it before?” As usual, the inquiry started a chain of rambling and back-tracking and an eventual rant about the impossibility of describing music without resorting to genre clichés or comparisons to other bands.
A week later, I was interviewed over the phone with a St. Louis paper about our album while pacing around a strip mall outside of a laundromat when a similar question was asked. After the interviewer and I said our goodbyes and my phone flipped shut, I waited for the comforter to get clean while my brain did a spin cycle of its own. Why can’t I just say that So Many Dynamos is an indie-rock band?
The true meaning of “indie” has been the topic of too many record store clerk discussions. That isn’t what this article is about. The roots of indie took place in the 1980s, when independence in music was actually a rarity. With the advent of home digital recording systems, mp3s, and that crazy little thing called the internet, independence is the norm. Indie means everything and nothing at the same time, and by some quantification all music is indie: Nu-metal bands without record labels, folk singers who play in coffee shops for tips, dudes with frosted tips and rayon shirts with too many delay pedals, and the Garden State soundtrack. To say your band is indie is to say absolutely nothing.
The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle
The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle
(Industrial, 1977)
It’s hard to know what to make of the fact that Throbbing Gristle are still around, more than three decades after they first came together. It’s also hard to know what to make of the fact that they’ve released an audiophile-quality vinyl version of The Thirty-Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle in a framed limited edition.
This was done, as the group notes on their website, to mark “the 30th anniversary of the release of Throbbing Gristle’s first album The Second Annual Report, as well as to mark and celebrate the official re-activation of the Industrial Records label.” The blurbage goes on to note that the framed edition is limited to 777 copies, as was the original pressing, and can be had for £120 and shipping. Which is odd, though not nearly as odd as the vending of such nifty keepsakes as the “Limited Edition Industrial Records penknife,” which can be yours for only £15. (Thanks, but I’m saving my pennies for a Second Annual Report pencil case).
Music Books of the Last Six Months: Summer Edition
Well, it’s that time of year again where we all collectively attempt to slow down the pace of our roundabout lives, and for good reason. Shit, we all need to partake in some summertime activity, like some going to the beach or pool, or some eating of some hot dogs and drinking of some beers at a baseball game, or, you know, in some being especially lazy. Let the summer breeze blow through the jasmine of your mind, as it were. Record releases come to a proverbial halt, so we’re following their lead, however inanimate they are. What we’re trying to say is that we aren’t publishing for the next week, due to a twice-a-year necessity to hit the reset button and come back refreshed and ready for more rollickin’ rock journalism. The good news is that we’re keeping up the tradition of our bi-annual book review! This summertime edition features music-related books that have come out in the last six months. You should pick up a few and add them to your summer reading list, and really, really focus on taking things down a notch. Enjoy!
Family
Photographs and text by Lauren Dukoff
(Chronicle Books)
Pink Floyd: The Final Cut
Pink Floyd
The Final Cut
(Columbia/Capitol, 1983)
And now, it’s time for another edition of Point/Counterpoint, the online rock ‘n’ roll game that invites you, the reader, to play along at home. This week’s installment is brought to you by the good people at Fletcher Memorial Home, who would like to remind you that death—while tragic—is just another fact of life. And so, without any further adieu, Crawdaddy! is proud to present Point/Counterpoint:
Today’s topic: Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut (original US release date: April 2, 1983).
Strobe Stomping: The Intricacy of Tuning Instruments
The technology around rock music is a vast sea of wires and inspiration, great successes and forgotten failures. The mothers of invention were often electronics geeks as much into diodes as they were into music. Sometimes science inspired the technology, sometimes music did, and in some of the best cases, it was both together. There is much we take for granted, big and small. The instruments are obvious, the supporting gear not so much, unless you are a gearhead.
My first rock band had no tuner, so we “earballed” it, meaning, on our best days, we were only slightly (but still intolerably) out of tune with each other. We would do our best to align our A strings so that they sounded the same, then we would go off to our corners and tune the remaining strings. By the time we got to our high E strings, we would be way off one another, having to independently earball from A to D, D to G, G to B, and B to E. While tuners weren’t a sexy purchase compared to flangers and wah wahs, it was clear we had to have one.
For years I used a Boss TU-12, one of the first affordable electronic tuners. It was popular because of its price point and because it detected incoming pitch, so you didn’t have to manually select which note and octave you were tuning to. The compact device had two bold, arrow-shaped LEDs to show if you were flat or sharp (both would light if you were in tune), and a needle that swept across a small arced graph for even more precision. The problem with this tuner and others of its ilk was that the margin of error was significant. I remember having debates on stage with the bass player on whether we should follow the needle or the LEDs, since they sometimes gave different readings. I went with the LEDs because you could see them easily on stage. He went with the needle because it was most accurate. Even with an electronic tuner, we remained close and yet so far. It was still better than earballing.
Radiohead Backlash Coming to a Proverbial Head, “Stupid Lists” Backlash Just Getting Started
by: Jocelyn Hoppa
Flavorwire has an article up titled “The Radiohead Backlash: Why Now?” that explores the boomerang effect (my term, not theirs) of Radiohead’s popularity and supposed “critical acclaim” to the current backlash cropping up lately. This question comes after a recent article in Spin that debunks certain rock myths, most of which are ones we already know, from Ozzy not really biting the head off a bat to Pink Floyd not writing The Dark Side of the Moon as a soundtrack to the Wizard of Oz. Way to crack the case on those things which have been shot out of the same bland cannon for years. However, their #1 rock myth debunked is “Radiohead Can Do No Wrong” with the subtitle “Reality: Radiohead Kind of Blow.”
The Spin article certainly has its points, like this one: “After a two-hour set, with the crowd screaming for more, Yorke retook the stage alone, sat at a grand piano, and played a quiet, minimalist nocturne. For five minutes. Before 20,000 people. The song, “Cymbal Rush,” from his 2006 solo album The Eraser — titled in an apparent gearhead reference to some sonic effect or software patch (probably between “Amp Fuzz” and “Element Isolator”) — amplified the sense that this man was so far up his own formalist ass we might as well have not even been there. It’s a valid outlook, but an odd one for someone making populist gestures in his business life and performing on such a giant stage.”
Sure, but this is coming from the magazine that easily knocks Radiohead while at the same time instinctively knowing that putting them on the cover will sell issues… like the time they put them on their November 2000 cover asking if they were “The World’s Greatest Rock Band?” How’s that for revisionist criticism? read more
by: Jocelyn Hoppa
published: November 19, 2009 in column: What Goes On
no comments yet