NOW PLAYING ON PHAWKER RADIO: S.F. Sorrow By The Pretty Things By 1967, Swingin’ London had gone mad — bathed in strobing mod Technicolor, drunk on the Day-Glo ambrosia of psychedelia and frugging to the blare of maximum R&B. Rock ‘n’ roll was reaching critical mass, outgrowing the three-chord friction of teen angst and expanding into the realm of art and religiosity. Pop stars, the newly minted aristocracy of turned-on English youth, were now expected to be poets and seers, and the race was on to find strange new sounds to telegraph this strange new state of mind. — The […]
HEAR YE: Elliott Smith New Moon
NOW PLAYING ON PHAWKER RADIO
HEAR YE: Porter Wagoner The Wagonmaster
NOW PLAYING ON PHAWKER RADIO * REVIEW
HEAR YE: The Son Of Dave
Dear Audience, I’m obliged to do the rounds again in the form of a U.K. tour, and between you and me, my back hurts and I will need many helpers to move things from dressing room to stage, stage to strange woman’s afterparty, party to hotel room and hotel room to train station. I will carry the vodka and portable gramaphone, you can carry the ice and blankets. Its going to be a nasty autumn. Don’t sit and wait for the bomb to go off, people. Get out and raise Hell for God’s sake. Let’s celebrate the separation of church […]
HEAR YE: Arthur & Yu In Camera
“I ran into an old acquaintance (well, “old”) at SXSW this year, and she had some good news — she just got a new gig as the general manager for a new label which has some ties to Sub Pop but not really. It wasn’t really a stretch because Sarah had worked for Sub Pop before this, but I was still intrigued because I hadn’t heard of the label, Hardly Art. To make it clear, it’s NOT an imprint label and it’s technically a separate enterprise (I think), but, well, it is still connected to Sub Pop. “Hardly Art was […]
HEAR YE: Spoon Ga Ga Ga
NOW PLAYING ON PHAWKER RADIO The new songs sound of a piece with the recent old: a boom-boom-THWACK drumbeat, some White Album-style piano chords, and a spare, hypnotic guitar chug not heard since the “Peter Gunn Theme,” singer Britt Daniel’s husky Lennon-esque bleat, and all manner of bubble-gum hand-claps, Josie & The Pussycats tambourine slaps and gang vocal sha-la-las. A typical Spoon song is usually one part ’60s AM radio nugget, one part ’80s British art-punk artifact and one part musique concrete wall of sound. Mmmm. That’s good cracker! [JONATHAN VALANIA]
ELLIOTT SMITH: Needle In The Hay
PEOPLE: But Extra reports that Wilson attempted suicide over the weekend after being depressed for several months, and that it was his brother Luke Andrew who found him.
THE BREAKDOWN: The Clash Of Civilizations
BY M. EMANUEL For the sake of hip hop, on Sept. 11, make tracks to your local music spot, your iTunes, your friendly neighborhood Target store, or wherever you legally buy music and purchase two copies of Kanye West’s eagerly anticipated Graduation. Why two? Well, the extra copy will go a long way in assuring that Kanye wins round one of his faux-WWE Smackdown-esque showdown with Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. The infamous date and ensuing hype surrounding the respective releases is to be expected, as West and 50 are considered in most circles as the two biggest rap stars in […]
THE POSTMEN: The Bag
The Japanese Fountains Of Wayne?
GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK: ‘Baby This Town Rips The Bones From Your Back, It’s A Death Trap’
BY DAN DELUCA OF THE INQUIRER For me, growing up an hour down the Garden State Parkway in Ventnor, Asbury Park was a place to escape to, a destination where there was a music scene, unlike the rest of the culturally barren Jersey Shore. We made pilgrimages to the still-active Stone Pony in hopes of catching a Springsteen pop-in. Sometimes, we hit the jackpot. Others, all we got was Gary U.S. Bonds. But when I drove there on a hot Sunday afternoon in July — stopping on the way into town at what seemed like the loneliest Starbucks in the […]
TONIGHT: Transparent Radiation
Woo-Hoo!