Last year, British pastiche rockers Django Django released their acclaimed self-titled debut in 2012 and it was good — like, really good.
Now they’re mixing it all up again with Hi Djinx, a full smorgasbord of remixes with help from Nick McCarthy, DJ Mujava, Adrian Sherwood, and others, and EW has an exclusive stream of the full album via Spotify. Take a listen below, and find the full tracklist after the jump: READ FULL STORY »
What happened to Danny and Sandy after they flew Greased Lightning off into the sky? Evidently, they landed, grew middle-aged together, bought a plane — wait, what? They already had a flying car — and separated before the holidays just so that they could make a music video about coming back together. The clip also features a family reunion that has nothing to do with Danny or Sandy because, sure, why not.
What the hell am I talking about? I’m talking about this newly-released music video for the only original tune on Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta’s fantastically cheesy Christmas album. (EW’s Nakisha Williams calls it “Grease goes to Shady Pines.”)
The song, “I Think You Might Like It,” is supposed to be the “sequel” to “You’re The One That I Want.” In the sense that it’s an up-tempo duet between Travolta and Newton-John, it succeeds. In every other way… well, maybe you should just watch for yourself:
Image Credit: Larry Hirshowitz
Back in the mid 1990s, as an 18-year-old college student living in New York City, I saw Patti Smith play her first show in 15 years at downtown punk palace CBGBs.
I was already obsessed with her music and writing — I covered songs from her rebellious, beautiful first album, 1975’s Horses, and had written a poem about her (yes, it was called Homage to Patti Smith). So I gripped a copy of the poem and a red rose to give her before the show, which I did, going back stage and handing them to her silently. She took them both, silently.
Later, pressed up against the stage with a friend, just below her microphone, I saw Smith launch into a three-hour show full of fury, power, sweat, and rock ‘n’ roll. On stage, singing with her arms raised, she tore the rose I gave her to shreds, stuffing half the petals in her pocket, and throwing the other half in the air, letting them shower down like bits of red rain.
To those who love Smith’s music — from the landmark Horses to this year’s Banga, filled with references to Russian literature, her old friend, late French actress Maria Schneider, Amy Winehouse, and 2011’s Japanese earthquake and tsunami — she’s more than a muse. She represents something else: the ability to be emotional, literary, musical, and free outside the confines of age, gender, time, and place;. She’s a constant reminder that soulful, smart music exists beyond the current scope of commercial pop for audiences who crave that kind of sustenance.
At Wednesday night’s intimate, private show at Apogee’s Berkeley Street Studio in Santa Monica for Los Angeles radio station KCRW (it will be broadcast Nov. 14 on the station’s Morning Becomes Eclectic), Smith proved her continued worth as a musician and performer. The crowd consisted of less than 200 people, including stars such as Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Tim Robbins, Ed Harris (wearing a fedora pulled over his face), and Ellen Page, who looked just as starry-eyed as everyone else in the packed space. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Frank W. Ockenfels 3
Reason #782 to love public television (no, seriously, Mitt!): the Live from the Artists Den series, now in its fifth season.
The charmingly peripatetic performance showcase has featured the likes of Adele, Elvis Costello, and Death Cab for Cutie in a host of non-traditional spaces, from a 1930s silent movie theater and the world’s oldest sailing vessel to the marble halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Watch below as Norah Jones performs “Good Morning” at Brooklyn’s Green Building in a clip exclusively available on EW.com, and tune in Oct. 5 at 10pm (check local listings for channel info) when she officially kicks off the new season with a full show.
Also scheduled to follow her this fall are the Wallflowers, filmed at Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco (Oct. 12), Rufus Wainwright at the Church of the Ascension on New York’s Fifth Avenue (Oc. 19) and Mayer Hawthorne at the historic Park Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles (Oct 26).
Anyway, on to Norah! READ FULL STORY »
“Call Me Maybe” has officially won the battle for Song of the Summer — but Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” may yet win the war. Case in point: The following video, which goes a step further than all the other Gotye covers and parodies on YouTube by mashing those clips together, forming an ear worm-y whole that’s much greater than the sum of its lo-fi parts. It’s like the Megazord of Internet culture, only not nearly as cheesy.
Best of all, the video was assembled by Gotye himself: “Reluctant as I am to add to the mountain of interpretations of Somebody That I Used To Know seemingly taking over their own area of the internet, I couldn’t resist the massive remixability that such a large, varied yet connected bundle of source material offered,” he says on YouTube by way of explanation. Gotye: songwriter, videographer, word-maker-upper (remixability?). Marvel at his handiwork below.
Frank Ocean, Channel Orange (Def Jam)
If Southern California needs an avant-R&B soundtrack, let this be it: Ocean’s hypnotic major-label debut plays like an indie movie, with songs about sun-faded palm trees, cokeheads in Polo sweats, and strippers in Cleopatra makeup. (Think Drive by way of baby-maker-pop maestro Maxwell. )
A transplant from New Orleans, Ocean is less concerned with urban realism than with his own ‘80s-noir fantasy of what the city’s like, and his music captures that vibe perfectly, pulsing with electro-soul grooves, vintage jazz-funk, and Angelino-friendly cameos by John Mayer and Andre 3000.
Orange even echoes other great odes to California glitz (“Super Rich Kids” nods to Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets,” while “Lost” references Eve and Gwen Stefani’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind”). The Hollywood clichés are intentional—there’s a song called “Forrest Gump”—but Ocean’s smart about tweaking them, especially on the love songs, where he’s just as likely to praise a girl’s double-D’s as allude to his crush on a guy.
On the gorgeous “Bad Religion,” he pours his heart out to his taxi driver, crying over a relationship he’s sick of hiding. Considering that he just recently admitted he was once in love with a man, it’s an especially poignant moment. “I could never make him love me,” Ocean broods. But with a confession this heartfelt, it’s hard to believe that’s true. B+
—Melissa Maerz
Read more on EW.com:
Def Jam: Early release of Frank Ocean’s ‘Channel Orange’ part of original marketing plan
Frank Ocean from Odd Future opens up about sexuality
Jay-Z and Kanye West’s ‘No Church in the Wild’ video: Watch it here
EW fave pop singer Pink hasn’t released a new song since last December, when she offered up the dead-on-arrival “Bridge of Light” for the Happy Feet Two soundtrack. The song went nowhere in the U.S., despite randomly hitting the Top 10 in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.
For all intents and purposes, Pink hasn’t really released anything much of note in the music realm since she dropped “F—in’ Perfect” back in December 2010. It should be noted, of course, that she’s probably been rather busy with caring for her first kid with husband Cary Hart, daughter Willow Sage Hart, who was born last June. But in good news for all the Pink fans out there salivating for some new tunes from her: She has returned! And in fine form, with the feisty, upbeat single, “Blow Me (One Last Kiss),” which is cheeky from the get-go when you consider that title.
Today, thousands of fastidious collectors are waking up way too early for a Saturday, standing in silly lines with their brethren, and diving deep into crates to pay premium bank for the privilege of owning a handful of the dozens of exclusive vinyl releases being put out as part of the sixth annual Record Store Day.
And I couldn’t be happier.
Launched in 2007, Record Store Day celebrates the independent music shop, an institution that has been under attack since well before the Internet threatened to dismantle the music business. Really, it’s a day to celebrate the relative resilience of these little shingles that could. After all, they survived the format wars, outlived massive chains like Tower Records and Virgin Megastore, and stuck out the first wave of file sharing (Napster, Gnutella, and the like).
With vinyl sales surging and interest in sprawling music discovery zones like Amoeba Records steadily growing, it’s a good time to be a fan of black discs that go around and around and around. This year’s exclusive Record Store Day features the release of several dozen exclusive pieces of vinyl, which may or may not be available at your local emporium (it pays to hit up more than one spot, if only to observe the crowds at each location). READ FULL STORY »
Music videos are a tough game — it’s impossible to get anyone but the core fan base to watch them, and just about all the ideas have already been done.
(In that sense, making a video is a lot like running for president, though slightly less expensive and way less embarrassing.)
So when Australian hardcore combo the Death Set decided to put together a video for their song “They Come For Us,” they went all in: “They Come For Us” includes just about everything in a jumbled pop-culture junkie’s skull — appropriate, since the song will run over the closing credits to the upcoming found-footage horror anthology film V/H/S, which screens at South By Southwest next week and will be on demand in August.
It begins as a simple homage to a famous scene from Back to the Future, but then quickly ups the ante, trotting out nods to The Simpsons, Batman, Troll 2, and a bevy of other ephemera. Give the clip a spin below, and see how many references you can pick up. READ FULL STORY »
Rufus Wainwright (Credit: Stefania D'Alessandro/Getty Images)
This weekend, Rufus Wainwright premiered his French-language opera, Prima Donna, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, to a packed crowd that included Yoko Ono and Anjelica Houston.
Which begs the question: what other pop star could get away with (a) writing a French-language opera and (b) calling it Prima Donna?
Well, if anyone can pull it off, it’s Wainwright. The Canadian king of cabaret pop has always had a flair for the dramatic. He loves penned-in-cursive lyrics about cigarettes and peach trees and angels on high.
Fashion-wise, he’ll gladly trade the traditional for the elaborately feathered. And, according to the recent documentary Prima Donna, he’s always loved opera. He’s been listening to it since he was a teenager, casting his sister and his cousins in elaborate versions of Tosca, which he filmed with the family camcorder.
So when the Metropolitan Opera first suggested that he might submit a libretto, he composed one with Bernadette Colomine. (When the Met insisted that they stage the opera in English, Wainwright took it to the NYC Opera, which took it to BAM.) Loosely inspired by the life of Maria Callas, it’s about an aging opera star named Régine Saint Laurent, who’s hiding out in Paris in the 1970s, anxiously preparing for her comeback after losing her voice six years previously.
“One of my favorite things that I like to say now is that I relate a lot to Mozart,” Wainwright recently told EW.com. “Not so much in terms of the genius factor. More in terms of the dead factor. It’s so, so laborious and time-consuming and emotionally draining. You can’t skimp on the work, whether it’s the first violin part or the heartstrings.”
The opera’s also a pretty hard sell, even for your average Wainwright fan. (I should know. I’ve only seen one opera, Tosca, and even now, I couldn’t tell you what distinguishes it from other operas. The death? The betrayals? All the singing about death and betrayals?) So I attended the Brooklyn premiere of Prima Donna with one question in mind: Should you spend your night listening to rising-star tenors and sopranos, delivering hard-bellowed odes to “faded glory” and “passionate love”—in French?
