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Photo by ELIOT LEE HAZEL “Rodrigo Amarante is from Rio de Janeiro and these days lives in Los Angeles. You may know him from a few other projects: Los Hermanos is the band from Rio but even more likely is Little Joy, the Brazilian/American band that included Binki Shapiro and Strokes drummer Fabrizio Moretti. What you probably don’t know is that Rodrigo Amarante has made the most tender record of 2014. Cavalo is both sonically rich and spare at the same time: Every instrument breathes, every sound blends, yet every sound is distinct. At the core are songs of the […]

Artwork by CHUCK CLOSE FRESH AIR When composer Philip Glass started performing his own music, a lot of people didn’t know what to make of it. Some people thought it sounded like the needle of a record was stuck in a groove, repeating over and over again. Some people thought it was simplistic. Some thought it was a joke. Glass says that in the ’70s, audience members threw things at him while he was performing. “If they threw an egg, that wasn’t so bad, because the eggs would just break,” Glass tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “There was no danger […]

LAST WEEK TONIGHT: There are very few government checks on what America’s sweeping surveillance programs are capable of doing. John Oliver sits down with Edward Snowden to discuss the NSA, the balance between privacy and security, and dick-pics. MORE

  Beating up on the poor and the non-white has long been the national past time of the right. In Kansas they have raised it to an art form — the art of spite and malice aforethought inflicted on those too weak and politically-powerless to fight back.  Recently, the Kansas state legislature sent a bill to governor Sam Brownback’s desk that bans welfare recipients from spending their aid money at specific types of businesses, such as on cruises, and fortune tellers. No longer will the Kansan welfare kings and queens be able to drive their welfare Cadillacs, filled with steak […]

Artwork by JW-JEONG FRESH AIR The words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and the phrase “In God we trust” on the back of a dollar bill haven’t been there as long as most Americans might think. Those references were inserted in the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration, the same decade that the National Prayer Breakfast was launched, according to writer Kevin Kruse. His new book is One Nation Under God. In the original Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy made no mention of God, Kruse says. Bellamy was Christian socialist, a Baptist who believed in the separation of church […]

From English Graffiti, due out May 25th. NOISEY: Over the years, via a multitude of movies and scores, we’ve been programmed to accept that the only music suitable for outer space is either epic classical or weird ambient electronica, and nothing in between. Well, the new video from The Vaccines suggests the fuzzy pop rock of their new single “Dream Lover” can also ride pretty damn well amongst the stars, planets, gases and dark matter of our deep and confusing universe. The video, produced by CANADA and directed by PENSACOLA, has everything you’d want from an 80s sci-fi pastiche: big […]

  MOTHER JONES: American companies have around $2.1 trillion in untaxed profits stashed overseas, according to a new report by the Center for Effective Government and the Institute for Policy Studies. About half of that amount is held by 26 large companies like Apple, General Electric, and Microsoft. If these companies paid federal taxes on their offshored profits from 2014—and got refunds for taxes they’ve already paid to other countries—they would owe an estimated $364 billion. MORE CENTER FOR EFFECTIVE GOVERNMENT:  All businesses — large and small — rely on our nation’s infrastructure for their success. They need modern ports, […]

Photo by JON PREMOSCH/BUZZFEED NEWS BUZZFEED: The trajectory of Modest Mouse’s career from tenderfoot punks from Podunk to kings of the post-grunge Seattle scene was fairly meteoric. Not that they didn’t pay their dues. They ran their laps around the indie-rock stations of the cross: They played house parties until the cops came, they slept on the floors of strangers, they ate out of gas stations, they drove 22 hours through the night, in the snow, uphill both ways, to play for three people in Cow’s Ass, Indiana, like they were playing the Hollywood Bowl. But hordes of young bands […]

Cool vid — just one long, slow-mo pan from the sky to the bottom of Niagara Falls and back up to the sky, colorized like a mood ring. Song’s gonna take a couple listens for a definitive judgement but first reaction is it sounds like it could be on the third Fleet Foxes album, if there ever is one. And yes, that’s a good thing.

[Click HERE to enlarge] RELATED: Issac Brock Wants To Be More Than A Myth

RELATED: Father John Misty lives in a red-clay adobe pueblo on top of a low mountain in Echo Park. Good luck trying to find it without GPS and a helicopter. Down below the cloud line, the hazy glittering grid of Greater Los Angeles recedes into the infinite. From the vantage point of this fairly Olympian perch, Los Angeles looks like flecks of diamond embedded in a filthy sidewalk. Like most wise men atop mountains, Father John Misty’s possessions are few: his beard, his acoustic guitar, his vinyl copy of On The Beach and a mason jar filled to the brim […]