The Haunted Pictures

Hype Monitor: Listenlisten, Ramona Falls, Neon Indian

The Band: Listenlisten The Buzz: Finally, a band name we can believe in! Mysterious and borderline un-Googleable Houston collective proves expert at putting the ghosts back into Goth-folk. Their upcoming full-length, Hymns from Rhodesia, is a spellbinding collection of country-gospel songs haunted by loneliness and loss. It’s the kind of music cowboys might hear in the distance as they stagger dumbly to their doom. And because they use a bevy of instruments, piling on piano and trumpet and violi

Published: 2009-07-30 Provider: Rolling Stone Keywords: Breaking

HAUNTED CHANTS

IT'S hard to believe that a band best known for its sunny and romantic hit tune "California" - of "The O.C." theme-song fame - would draw inspiration from something as dark as 20th-century cults. But that's exactly what inspired Phantom Planet lead...

Published: 2008-04-22 Provider: New York Post Keywords: Greenwald, cult, album, band, happened, music

Blink 182 drummer working on a new Transplants album

Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker has revealed that, in addition to working on his own solo album, he's also working on a new album with his side-project with Rancid mainman Tim Armstrong, The Transplants. The band released two albums, 2002's Transplants and 2005's Haunted Cities, before going on hiatus in 2006. The band's new album, One Blood, will be released later this year. As previously reported, Barker's debut solo album will be released in September, while Blink 182 will finish recording th

Published: 2010-05-20 Provider: Kerrang!

Download a new Kids In Glass Houses track for free!

Kids in Glass Houses have released a brand new track from their upcoming new album Dirt (in stores March 29) as a FREE MP3 download. Hunt The Haunted will be available for 48 hours from www.roadrunnerrecords.co.uk, so move fast! The band are poised to hit the road with Lostprophets, but they have announced two headline dates of their own - February 5 at Oxford Academy 2 and February 8 at Liverpool Academy 2 - which are on sale now at www.aloud.com.

Published: 2010-01-08 Provider: Kerrang!

Breaking: Audrye Sessions

Who: Audrye Sessions, an Oakland, California-based quartet who craft gorgeous guitar-powered pop that ranges from giant, U2-style anthems to more introspective ballads that call to mind Bends-era Radiohead. Frontman Ryan Karazija started the group as a one-man outfit, gigging around at local coffeeshops before teaming up with bassist Alicia Marie Campbell, drummer James Leste and guitarist Michael Knox. As you can guess, there’s no one in the band named Audrye. “I didn’t want to play under my own name anymore,” says Karazija. “So one day when I was watching TV, there was this Sony commercial where a little blue alien burns a CD for a girl and calls it Audrye Sessions. I thought [our name] would change. But after a year, you’re like, ‘I can’t change the name because everyone will forget who I am.’ ” Sounds Like: For their self-titled debut, Audrye Sessions teamed up with rock-savvy producers Andrew Scheps (U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers) and Matt Radosevich (the Hives, Taking Back Sunday) to cut radio-ready guitar anthems like the gorgeous lead single “Turn Me Off.” But Karazija’s voice steals the show: a high-pitched, soaring falsetto that is a dead ringer for Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, one of Karazija’s biggest influences. Vital Stats: • Knowing full well what can happen when you date your bandmate, Karazija and Campbell did just that before mutually breaking up four years ago. As if that weren’t weird enough, Campbell’s new boyfriend occasionally joins the band for live shows. But Karazija’s totally cool with it. “It was weird at first but we’ve gotten through it,” he says. • Audrye Sessions wrote and recorded many early versions of the songs on their debut in a setting that belies the cheeriness of their tunes: a haunted house in Catoti, California. “Things were really weird,” says Karazija. “You’d hear strange noises every once in a while. Apparently, there’s a lady who always lurks around the house or something. But nobody told us prior to going there that it was mayb

Published: 2009-02-18 Provider: Rolling Stone Keywords: Breaking

Nine Inch Nails Bring Darkness and Light to Seattle for Tour Opener

After a headling slot at Pemberton on Friday night, Nine Inch Nails kicked off their North American tour with a 21st-century marriage of old-school showmanship and bleeding-edge technology on Saturday. With a crack four-piece band in tow — including NIN stage vets Robin Finck on guitar and Josh Freese on drums — an adrenalized, finely-coifed Trent Reznor tore through a two-hour set that leaned heavily on new material and included several choice classics. • Photos: Nine Inch Nails’ “Lights In the Sky” Tour Launches in Seattle As noted in the tour preview, at least half the show featured the band sandwiched between mesh LED curtains alternating evocative visuals, from falling rain to grainy static to an apocalyptic cityscape. The more obscured the band was by special effects, the more a detached, post-YouTube voyeurism haunted the performance. About an hour in, a solid backdrop descended at the front of the stage and the band — now a four-piece, minus keyboardist Alessandro Cortini — stepped in front of it. Standing at the lip of the stage, with Reznor on vibraphone and Justin Meldal-Johnsen on upright bass, they played a 20-minute, mostly acoustic interlude of songs from NIN’s recent Ghosts I-IV. It was a bold move, settling into a subdued, broken-down cabaret swing that was all atmosphere. Reznor swung the microphone like a weapon and ran the stage like an athlete. Twice during the set he pointed out the fact that this was the “first official night of the tour” — a tour, he said, that’s been ongoing for the last 15 years. He didn’t want it to stop, either: After closing with “Head Like a Hole,” the band returned for a half-hour encore. “Hurt” had the entire crowd singing and a few weeping; “In This Twilight,” from last year’s Year Zero ended the set in a downtrodden — but quintessential NIN — manner. Set List “999,999″ “1,000,000″ “Letting You” “Discipline” “March of the Pigs” “Head Down” “The Frail” “Closer” “Gave Up” “The Warning” “The Great Destroyer” “Ghosts

Published: 2008-07-28 Provider: Rolling Stone Keywords: Rock News, Live Shows, More News

Fricke’s Picks: Midnight Oil

During a trip to Australia in 1986, I spent a day with Midnight Oil at a mixing session in Sydney for their single, “The Dead Heart.” Part protest, part celebration, with a railroad rhythm and haunted-chant hook, “The Dead Heart” was the oils’ response to the Australian government’s return of the sacred monolith Uluru (a.k.a. Ayers Rock) to aboriginal custody. Singer Peter Garrett, drummer Rob Hirst, guitarists Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey and then-bassist Peter Gifford were also invited to play in remote aboriginal settlements. At the mixing session, the Oils suggested I tag along. I should have gone. Blackfella/Whitefella — a documentary filmed on that ‘86 tour and included in a new CD/DVD reissue of the Oils’ 1987 album Diesel and Dust (Columbia/Legacy) — is one of the most remarkable concert movies ever made, putting every hari-metal road flick you’ve seen in pitiable perspective. The poverty in the settlements is horrific. Even the Oils, hardened rock crusaders, look sober and shocked as they witness, up close, a legacy of systematic racism. Blackfella/Whitefella is also packed with rock action — thrilling performances by the Oils, in high-desert-Clash gear, and aboriginal tourmates the Warumpi Band, for sometimes puzzled but mostly joyous audiences. In this setting, everything is a fight song, including the embryonic “Beds Are Burning,” later recorded for Diesel and Dust and the Oils’ biggest U.S. hit. Many of Diesel’s songs were inspired the by the desert tour, and they have lost none of their pictorial force and smart-pop rage. The Oils broke up in 2002, and Gerrett is now minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts in Australia’s Labor government. But Diesel and Dust still resonates with urgent business — the band left plenty of room for global warming and corporatization in the end-of-days howl of “Dreamworld” and the broiling

Published: 2008-06-20 Provider: Rolling Stone Keywords: Rock News, Fricke's Picks

Dave Grohl Speaks Out About Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love-Inspired Track

Dave Grohl hasn’t tried to hide his distaste for Courtney Love over the years: In 2002, he and Krist Novoselic filed a legal motion compelling Kurt Cobain’s widow to undergo a psychiatric evaluation as they all battled over the rights to unreleased Nirvana music (he also called her an “ugly fucking bitch” at a show). Now Grohl has spoken to the Guardian about “Let it Die,” a new Foo Fighters song off the band’s forthcoming Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace (out September 25; read our sneak peek here) that seems to address the former Nirvana drummer’s feelings about Cobain’s relationship with Love. The song contains the lyrics: “A simple man and his blushing bride / Intravenous, intertwined.” “[It’s] a song that’s written about feeling helpless to someone else’s demise,” he said. “I’ve seen people lose it all to drugs and heartbreak and death. It’s happened more than once in my life, but the one that’s most noted is Kurt. And there are a lot of people that I’ve been angry with in my life, but the one that’s most noted is Courtney. So it’s pretty obvious to me that those correlations are gonna pop up every now and again,” he explained, laughing. “I still remain a little secretive about it all.” Grohl was feeling equally secretive in 1995 when the Foo single “I’ll Stick Around” included the lyrics “How could it be I’m the only one who sees your rehearsed insanity,” a line many assumed was directed at Love, though Grohl denied it. Still, Grohl says he’s not haunted by the past and considers himself to be a glass-half-full kind of guy. “Those first couple of years of the Foo Fighters when I stood there singing songs and saw kids wearing Nirvana T-shirts, I looked at it as a good thing,” the rocker explained. “Like it was almost support, for me. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life

Published: 2007-09-18 Provider: Rolling Stone Keywords: Rock News

The White Stripes Discover Small is Beautiful in Nova Scotia

“Well, you’re in your little room, and you’re working on something good,” Jack White once sang. “But if it’s really good, you’re gonna need a bigger room.” “Little Room” was just a forty-five-second ditty on 2002’s White Blood Cells, but it also spoke to the paradox of fame: Once you’re a celebrity, you can never again be the person who created the art that made you one. Five years later, the White Stripes are genuine rock stars touring the far reaches of Canada in an effort to play all the little rooms they can find — elementary school classrooms, hockey rinks, cramped pool halls, Inuit Elder meetings, fishing boats and city buses. For their tenth anniversary show on Sunday in remote harbor town Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, they managed to find one room that was nearly perfect: The Savoy, an intimate theater built in the early 1920s to replicate old Victorian music halls – and which happens to be schemed almost entirely in red, black and white, and (if you believe the locals) haunted by as many ghosts as the band’s music. Both sides of the “White family” were in attendance for the occasion, and eager fans dressed in color-coordinated outfits were rewarded with small cups of champagne by the Stripes road crew pre-show. (For details on the Stripes’ two-hour tour through the best of their catalog and more, read on.) Over two thrilling hours, Jack and Meg laid out their catalog in trash-candy collage form — stitching old riffs into new songs, teasing familiar melodies, improvising verses and balancing nostalgic rarities (“Wasting My Time”) with the majority of its new material. All the songs flowed into one viscerally played stream of consciousness, and as they bled together, the common element between them — White’s encyclopedic command of American musical traditions — became clearer. Ultimately, the only ghosts of the night were the ones White summoned from his influences: Son House (“Death Letter,” “John the Revelator”), Blind Willie Johnson (“Lord, Send Me

Published: 2007-07-17 Provider: Rolling Stone Keywords: Rock News

"Summer Above" by Speck Mountain

It's rare that a debut album is as patiently textured and consistently affecting as Speck Mountain's Summer Above. If this record belongs to any genre it's space-rock, but as the band's name would suggest, earthiness is being channeled as much as ether, with an instrumental palette that's haunted by classic soul vibes rather than compressed waves of distortion. Opalescent streams of organ and electric piano, minimal but highly melodic guitar, sax and melodica are fed through vintage amps and echo units, making it easy to imagine it was all recorded in the "Pacific sea caves" that singer Marie-Claire Balabanian alludes to in the album's rhythmically tranced centerpiece "Girl Out West." Songs build slowly, coalescing around Balabanian's slightly dazed vocals and offering an unexpected depth. The buoyant title track leads things off, seeming like the perfect, naive summer anthem until you get to the enigmatic lyric, "I feel free when I feel no one feeling me". "Hey Moon"

Published: 2007-11-09 Provider: Artist Direct

How Math Unraveled the 'Hard Day's Night' Mystery

A Canadian math professor solved a riddle that has haunted guitarists and musicologists for decades: how the Beatles played the opening chord of 'Hard Day's Night.' Evidently, the band got by with a little help from its friend and producer, George Martin.

Published: 2008-10-31 Provider: Wired

Private Sessions: Maroon 5 - Houdini Mansion

In this Private Sessions video, Maroon 5 talks about recording their new album in the haunted Houdini mansion. Only one band member stayed overnight and he thought he saw a figure going up the stairs.

Published: 2008-09-17 Provider: Arts & Entertainment TV (A&E) Keywords: Houdini's Haunted mansion,A&E Private Sessions Maroon 5,Private Sessions,Maroon 5,Maroon 5 music video,A&E Maroon 5 video,houdini,Private Sessions Maroon 5 Houdini episode,Maroon 5 Music,cat:AETV_SF_RealLife_PrivateSessions,Private Sessions Maroon 5