I interviewed Wilco and the Autumn Defense’s Pat Sansone yesterday, who let slip that Wilco will start writing their next record at the end of next month. Head over to Pop & Hiss for the story — more on his new photo book and its accompanying L.A. party (which will be next Thursday) in Brand X next week.
Programming note: I’m going to Las Vegas tomorrow for Matador Records’ well-deserved 21st birthday bash. I’d tell you who’s playing, but it’s sold out and I don’t want to ruin your day. If you’re going to be there, let me know and we can be hungover together during Yo La Tengo. If you’re not, I’ll be shooting/reviewing it over at Pop & Hiss, Brand X and Twitter with a recap here on Monday. (If I’m not making friends with the toilet.) Here’s the jam I’m most excited about hearing:
Guided by Voices – “Gold Star for Robot Boy”: mp3
And here are the inevitable live-tweets:
I think Belle & Sebastian’s new album, Write About Love, is incredible (also incredible: how much it sounds like Supertramp); they are the band I am most excited to see at Matador 21. Why they chose early ’00s jam “Piazza, New York Catcher” to play on “Fallon” last night over “I Want the World to Stop,” I don’t know, but hey, Questlove on drums! [Via]
This is what the song of the year sounds like unplugged. [Via TwentyFourBit]
Photo by David Greenwald
This song is an Atom bomb. Warpaint’s Tom Biller-produced The Fool is due Oct. 26 on Rough Trade; I wrote some further thoughts on this first single on Brand X.
Warpaint – “Undertow”: mp3
Previously: SXSW 2010: Warpaint at Lambert’s
No Age – Everything in Between by subpop
Everything in Between is out today. As I hope I made crystal-clear in my review, it totally rules. In what’s either terrible luck or the best day of your life, Women’s also tremendously great, tremendously noisy Public Strain is out today, too.
Photo by David Greenwald
To say I’ve been waiting for this album since 2006 would be a stretch. (At that point, I was waiting in my favorite polka-dot dress for another Pipettes set.) But since seeing Rose Elinor Dougall, formerly a Pipette, formerly “Rosay,” play a rare solo set at the Galaxy Room at SXSW in March, there’ve been few albums I’ve anticipated more. Well worth it: Without Why is a pitch-perfect collection, the Pipette’s lovable gimmicky tossed aside for Smiths-era guitar work and Broadcast-inflected moody Britpop anthems.
We’ve heard many of these songs in some form or another over the last few months, either in videos or as singles, but it’s no less impressive to hear them lined up one after another here, a murderer’s row of tracks dragging the Coldplay discography in a body bag. Dougall’s voice, confident and emotionally direct, is the star here: she sings with the full-lunged fearlessness of pop — read: songs you can actually hear on the radio — bound to actual, non-prefab feeling. “I want you, I want you, I want you,” she sings in “Another Version of Pop Song,” and as Smokey Robinson would say, I second that emotion.
Rose Elinor Dougall – “Fallen Over”: mp3
(Without Why is out now)
Previously:
Video: Rose Elinor Dougall – “Find Me Out”
All Rose Elinor Dougall posts
Greg and I were discussing the Beach Fossils album the other night, and I got to thinking about luminous, arpeggio-driven guitar records. Prettier and more artful than the B. Fossil’s workmanlike debut, Crushed Stars’ 2008 release Gossamer Days offers the simple pleasures of aesthetic richness; with a new album by the band on the way, it’s well worth revisiting.
Crushed Stars – “Spies”: mp3
Previously: Interview: Crushed Stars
