Single Minded: Jack White Duets With Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Lily Allen, Of Montreal and More Every Tuesday Single Minded highlights new tracks hitting stores (or the Web) this week. On Fridays, come back for rarities, remixes, mash-ups and more. Jack White and Bob Dylan, “Meet Me in the Morning” [Live Duet] It’s genuinely difficult to figure out who this duet benefits more. It’s like God doing a duet with PJ Harvey in an all-you-can-eat burrito bar while The Big Lebowski is playing in the background. Lily Allen, “Don’t Get me Wrong” [Pretenders Cover] Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: young British female singer crosses paths with uber-producer Mark Ronson, crafts an album that’s championed by blogs, becomes tabloid sensation and slowly begins exhibiting erratic behavior. Instead of flaming out in a series of increasingly embarrassing public scuffs involving marital scratching and horse pills, this one toughs it out, stays the course and eventually turns in a charming little cover of a Pretenders song. Oh, America. Always hitching your horse to the wrong cart. Of Montreal, “Friends of Mine” [Zombies Cover] Athens costume-pop band drag a Zombies chestnut into the big, dark Romper Room of the soul. For everyone who ever wondered what a pop song would sound like if it was made out of Nerf. Elvis Costello, “Beautiful” [Christina Aguilera Cover] This version features some kind of clanging electro-percussion and lunar lounge xylophones. Also known as the “Dad, stop embarrassing me!” mix. Wale, “Good Girl” [Cousin Cole Remix] It’s obviously a little ridiculous to post a remix of a song by a semi-obscure D.C. rapper, but we’re still living in the ideal universe, remember? The one where Lily Allen beats Amy Winehouse. In that one, Wale is huge and Shop Boyz are marginal regional celebrities. So enjoy this remix of his number-one single. [Photo: Jim Dyson/Getty Images; Sean Gardner/Getty Images]
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Published: 2007-09-29
Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Single Minded
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Exclusive: Stream the Entire Les Savy Fav Live Album “After the Balls Drop” This past New Year’s Eve, while many were staring at Dick Clark or standing frigidly in Times Square, art-punk icons Les Savy Fav were preparing to bring their trademark live performance to a sold-out audience of diehard fans at NY’s Bowery Ballroom, which the band will release as a digital album entitled After the Balls Drop on April 29th. But you don’t have to wait until then to hear the live album, as we’re exclusively streaming the entire affair here. “The atmosphere of the show was unique. Our shows are known for being somewhat unique, so it was sort of a double-down, triple unique,” singer Tim Harrington says of the band’s first live album in their thirteen year tenure. It was a night for the band to delve deep into their catalogue, to bust out live renditions of their then-new album Lets Stay Friends and to play a few choice covers of songs. “We thought, ‘What would a party band do,’ Harrington says of the night. “‘If I were DJing, what songs would I just play that you know everyone would just get psyched on?’” Unfortunately, Harrington’s favorite memory of his band’s post-New Year’s Eve show didn’t make After the Balls Drop, due to right issues: The day before, Harrington went to a wholesale distributor of party supplies in NY’s Chinatown area to purchase about a hundred and twenty three-foot-long tubes that shot out confetti when twisted. The tubes were handed out during that show, and fired in unison during the band’s performance of AC/DC’s “TNT.” “It was such a cacophonous mess. It was like swimming in a sea of confetti, or a Backstreet Boys video on crack,” Harrington remembers. Thankfully, covers of the Misfits‘ “Astro Zombies,” Nirvana’s “Sliver,” Pixies‘ “Debaser” and Creedence’s “Hey Tonight” remained unscathed by legalities. ̶
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Published: 2008-04-25
Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Rock News
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Fricke’s Picks: Porcupine Tree, the Future Kings of England and the Raspberries The Art of Nightmares Porcupine Tree – the long-running British progressive-rock band founded and commanded by singer-guitarist-composer Steven Wilson – are rare in their field: obsessed not with fantasy but the death of it, particularly in children. At a recent head-trip gig at New York’s Beacon Theatre, films of sickly-white preteen zombies – hypnotized by computer screens, gulping medication, brandishing handguns – were projected on a screen behind Wilson during his tangled distortion-bomb riffing in the long title track of the recent album, Fear of a Blank Planet (Atlantic), and the record’s even longer centerpiece nightmare, “Anesthetize.” A schoolgirl ran amok in what looked like a ruined psych ward during the convulsive title instrumental from the group’s new EP, Nil Recurring (Transmission). Wilson started Porcupine Tree in 1987 as a home-studio experiment that has since evolved, live and on an extensive series of records, into an aggressively modern merger of Rush’s arena art rock, U.K. prog classicism – especially Pink Floyd’s eulogies to madness and King Crimson’s angular majesty – and the postgrunge vengeance of Tool. There are no dragons evident on Fear of a Blank Planet or Nil Returning. But there are plenty of demons. And King Crimson guitarist-sage Robert Fripp plays on both records, an impeccable seal of approval. New Royal Freaks Witches and fiends run riot through the lyrics and instrumental vapors of the six extended tracks on The Fate of Old Mother Orvis (Backwater), by the Future Kings of England. The audaciously named British band’s mix of art rock and freak folk is also rife with other specters – the pastoral Floyd, ’72 Genesis, the echosoup psychedelia of Amon Düül II – whipped together with an ardor that sounds like yesterday and tomorrow at once. Seventies Rock Candy Hard and sweet, the Raspberries were never the second coming of the Beatles. They were, in the early Seventies, and still are – based on a show I just saw by the original li
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Published: 2007-11-08
Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Fricke's Picks
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