Guerrilla artist extraordinaire Banksy has made the news again for his latest prank- replacing 500 copies of Paris Hilton's latest album with his own doctored versions, complete with all-new artwork (warning: slightly NSFW) and music- in the form of a 40-minute long track titled "That's Hot", mixed by DJ Danger Mouse (the same man who produced the infamous and brilliant Grey Album- get yourself a copy here if you haven't already- and, more recently, Gnarls Barkley). You can find the track here as well as here (though honestly you can hear all the good bits in the following video, where Banksy shows us exactly how he pulled off the stunt).
The video for "Weird Al" Yankovich's new song, Don't Download This Song, is directed by none other than the phenomenal Bill Plympton!
The song, a parody of your typical inspirational ballad (with lyrics that lampoon the RIAA's attempts to deal with music piracy by suing the heck out of music downloaders), is pretty funny. The video, a cautionary tale of a boy who illegally downloads music and is subsequently chased down by the police as a hardcore felon, is truly hilarious. If you'd like to see more cartoons by Bill Plympton, check out this blog entry by Shawn, which lists all the Bill Plympton videos that he found on Youtube (including the Oscar-nominated short Guard Dog). Thanks, Shawn!
Well, it looks like "Weird Al" has recruited some truly awesome animators to work on the videos for his new album (for which Don't Download This Song is the lead single). John Kricfalusi, creator of the famed Ren & Stimpy cartoons, is working on one of them (along with the talented illustrator Katie Rice)! I can't wait to see it.
I submit the following songs as proof of the above statement:
Ted Leo's acoustic cover of Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone." The perfect trash-pop song, covered by my favourite rocker. He even one-ups the original by smoothly segueing into the chorus of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Maps about halfway through.
Speaking of which, here's the Arcade Fire's cover of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's "Maps". It's a pretty good take on what I consider one of the best rock songs in recent years.
I've saved the best for last. An absolutely gorgeous acoustic cover of Gnarls Barkley's Crazy by American folk singer Ray Lamontague. Not knowing who the man was, I didn't expect anything from the cover so I was floored when I heard this gorgeous, husky voice singing with raw, emotive passion. I'm actually going to buy his debut album on the strength of this song!
Colour me shocked. Stunned, even. A fledgling online music company by the name of SpiralFrog has announced that they're going to make Universal Music's entire North American music catalogue available for free downloading on their website. A test of the service is supposed to start in North America (USA + Canada) by the end of the year, with Britain and other European countries following next year.
Of course, all this free music isn't really free. Instead of spending money, you'll have to spend time to download these songs, and I don't just mean the download time. See, you'll have to watch or listen to ads on their website in order to download the songs and if you want to keep the songs, you'll just have to keep watching ads on the site regularly. As long as the service offers fast download speeds and little to no server downtime, I think people won't mind that too much.
A bigger problem is that SpiralFrog's music offerings will be encoded in Microsoft's WMA format, which isn't compatible with the iPod. Oho. That's a large segment of the digital-music market they're shutting out right there. Is SpiralFrog insane? With a name like that, you'd be tempted to think so, but it looks like they didn't have much of a choice. I'm sure they'd like to support iPod compatibility, but the iPod isn't compatible with any DRM systems but Apple's own FairPlay technology- which isn't and probably can't be used by anyone but Apple.
This leads to an interesting possibility: services like this (I'm sure more- including a yet-to-be-announced service from Kazaa- will be along the way soon) might just erode Apple's dominant position in the digital music market- but only if other hardware manufacturers can get their acts together and start offering compelling alternatives to the iPod. Microsoft's upcoming Zune doesn't count because apparently its only going to support it's own proprietary DRM encoding instead of Microsoft's existing technologies (unless they do an about-face following this news, or try to one-up SpiralFrog with their own free music service). Maybe it's time for Creative to shine?
Still, the big question for me now is simply this: When will we get services like this down here in Asia?
My favourite English-language rock band, Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, have released 2 new demo tracks: "Army Bound" and "Some Beginner's Mind," on their official site. Fansite Timorous Me has an MP3 of another new song he's been playing at his live shows- La Costa Brava. Despite the crappy quality of the audio, it's my favourite song out of the three- though the other two rock too. New Ted Leo is always a good thing.
Update: NBC's at it again! They've forced Youtube to take down the video, but they have put it up on their own site. The video player STILL doesn't work in Firefox. Note to NBC: HIRE A BETTER WEB CODER!
The Lonely Island boys are at it again. After their phenomenal Lazy Sunday video (which, curiously enough, is no longer available on Youtube. Oh, apparently NBC forced the site to take it down. It's still availabe on NBC's website... except that the video player doesn't work in Firefox. Works on IE- for a change- but the video's really choppy. Oh heck. Just find the video on P2P. It's well worth it.) and their funny though not amazing Chuck Norris video (which I embedded in this earlier post), they've now recruited the gorgeous Natalie Portman to do a hilarious gangsta rap parody. First V for Vendetta, now this. That girl is busy cementing her status as the most awesome actress of her generation. Respect. Heh.
Vikings. Rock & Roll. Giant Robots. Need I say more?
Well, the song is War Photographer by Jason Forrest (go buy his album Shamelessly Exciting- it's great!) and the animation is by Joel Trussell, who is clearly some kind of animation demi-god.
The year was 2004. Still jetlagged from a return trip (was it from India? Or the Maldives? Fickle memory can't decide), I entered my room eagerly anticipating the prospect of a nice warm shower. Oh but a surprise awaited me! My sister had bought a few new CDs, most by artistes we already listened to (like Badly Drawn Boy's Have You Fed The Fish- an OK but not overly exciting album) but one stood out. A black CD jacket with the words Franz Ferdinand on it. According to my sister, they were the hot new stuff. Oh boy. Were they ever! Franz Ferdinand were very much a part of the new wave of bands led by The Strokes (of whom I am a minor fan), but they had an infectious, dancecy vibe which was just brilliant. It really was a very fun album to listen to, the only downside being that a lot of the songs tended to sound a little similar.
Cut to 2005- the boys in stripes release a new album- You Could Have It So Much Better. True to it's title, it really was a marked improvement over their debut. It rocked harder, they played around with new sounds (particularly on the excellent Beatles-esque song Eleanor Put Your Boots On) and the first single, Do You Want To, was pure glee. Yep, Franz's sophomore album was a grade-A effort which earned regular rotation on my iPod.
So when they announced they'd be playing in Singapore this year, it didn't take me a nanosecond to decide to go. Well, the deciding factor was the price actually- $50 tickets was too good to be true! Though on hindsight, the $88 free-standing tickets were the way to go. The seats I got for me and my friends were up in the balcony- pretty far away from the band. But no matter. This was the first concert I'd ever paid to go see and it was so worth it!
I know understand the term ELECTRIFYING as applied to a band. These boys were the very definition of electrifying. Up on that stage, they weren't mere mortals like the rest of us in the audience. They were gods. Gods of Rock and Roll. Alex Kapranos, the lead singer, was a whirling dervish on stage, prancing, strutting and leaping about like he was jacked up on a barrel of Red Bull. The rest of the band was equally awesome. It seemed like each member of the band played at least 2 instruments each- for one song (I forget which) drummer Paul Thompson actually switched places with guitarist Nick McCarthy. And near the end of the 2-hour set (in which they only took 1 break, amazingly!), they did this thing where another dude- I think it was their concert drummer- started drumming along with Paul, creating a crazy-cool ruckus of percussive zing! As if that wasn't enough, a 3rd person (no IDEA who he was!!!) leapt onto the drums (not literally) to create a 3-way drum attack of epic proportions. It looked and sounded brilliant.
Perhaps the coolest part of the concert was seeing how sincere and likeable the band really was. They talked about how much they loved the food here and they actually invited EVERYONE to go down to their hotel with food so they could have a "food party" after the show! How cool is that??? Me and my friends didn't go cause we were kinda tired and I had an assignment to hand in the next day, but reportsindicate that they were really friendly and chatted with all the fans who turned up for quite a while. Darn it I missed the chance to meet em! But I'm definitely catching them when they next come down, so maybe I'll get another chance then.
I didn't take pictures that night but lots of other bloggers did. Let's see, one guy got loads of photos and the setlist up on his blog. Someone else's blog has a very professional photoset of the concert. And somemoreonFlickr. Finally, a blog named Cirkusflea's put up a few VIDEO CLIPS of the event. Sweeeeeet.
Epitonic.com, despite not having been updated in a long, long, long time, remains one of the best sites on the Internet to find quality music by lesser-known artistes. What makes the site particularly cool is that it provides at least one MP3 from most of the artistes featured on the site. After all, there's no better way to learn about a band than actually listening to their music. There I discovered great bands like Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, Rocket From the Crypt, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Sleater-Kinney and 50 Foot Wave, the subject of this post!
What made me sit up and pay attention to 50 Foot Wave were their singles "Long Painting" and "Clara Bow", available on Epitonic.com. The songs were loud, aggressive, punk rock, full of vim and vigour. Just my kinda thing. So I got their 2005 album "Golden Ocean", expecting it to be full of rockin' goodness. It did not disappoint.
Now, as if to prove their complete and utter rockingness, 50 Foot Wave have released a new EP (actually it was released in December and I didn't know about it til now :P) entitled "Free Music." Which is available, for free, on their website. Too cool. And if you like the music, just click on the little donation box on the top of the page. I know I will. Bands who are brave enough to give away their music on the web deserve to be supported. Well, not if they suck. But these guys are the very opposite of suck. They rock. And therefore, deserve to be supported so they can keep on rockin'.
One of the coolest things about living on the 44th floor of a building in the middle of Singapore's business district is being able to observe the flow of human traffic on the streets down below. When I was 6 years old, I'd sit by my window after waking up in the morning and count the cars that drove along Robinson Road. Yeah, everything was exciting back then. On a weekday I'd count upwards of a 100 cars in 10 minutes, easy. On a weekend I'd be lucky to hit 50 on in half an hour.
Today's a public holiday (Happy Chinese New Year, one and all! It's the year of the dawg!) so there's even less traffic in this area than usual. Chinese New Year is one of the few public holidays in Singapore when most (not all, but most) shops are gonna be closed so it's more or less a sit-at-home-and-relax kinda day for me. Well, actually, I'd go out and watch a movie with my sister normally, but she flew off to the UK early this morning- she's gonna be there for the next two and a half months for a training thing- so I took the opportunity to go through all the RSS feeds I subscribe to on my Rojo account.
I'm currently listening to Gackt's new single Redemption- it's the theme song for the FFVII spin-off game Dirge of Cerberus (both the song and the game came recommended by the mildly-infamous-on-the-Internet gonzo journalist Tim Rogers). The song's pretty damn good! I'm surprised. I really enjoyed his songs with his old band, Malice Mizer, but nothing the man's done in his solo career seemed very interesting. Gackt's last album Diabolos, in particular, was pretty awful. It's cool to see him finally on-form. I wonder if he can keep this momentum? Well, seeing as how the man is a 400+ year old vampire (I kid you not, go read his Wikipedia entry :p), time is on his side ey?
Speaking of music, I've been meaning to integrate my Last.fm account with my blog and it looks like there's finally a way to do that! Must be a new feature. Coolness. So I've added a Last.fm chart of my most-played artists of the week to my sidebar. As you can see, I've been listening to The Strokes a lot lately. I bought their new album First Impressions Of Earth last week. It's got some great tracks, like opener "You Only Live Once," "Heart in a Cage," "On The Other Side," "Killing Lies," and "Ize Of The World." Though I think their last album, "Room on Fire," was more consistent overall, I really like that the band experiments with their signature sound a bit here instead of just doing the same thing over and over (randomize songs from "Room on Fire" and their first album "Is This It" and you wouldn't be able to tell which song came from which album. They're that similar.).
Back to my Last.fm chart- if you click on it, you can go to my Last.fm page and see what songs I listen to the most every week and also what artists and songs I've played the most overall. Last.fm's nifty, but the charts aren't perfect- the site's software plugin only checks what I've been listening to on my iTunes, but not my iPod. And apparently it doesn't count repeated plays of the same song. Oh well.
I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds. So many, in fact, that it can take me more than an hour to go through them all once every 2 days. Well I haven't checked my Rojo for a week so I've ended up with a mountain of unread entries. But I read em all anyway because I never know what gems I'll find in there.
Like these really cool pictures of upcoming Batman Lego figures and sets. The 8 year old me, who was equally obsessed with both Batman and Lego, would have fainted on the spot upon seeing this Batcave playset. Isn't it awesome? I may actually have to buy some of these when they come out (apparently in April).
Another thing I've noticed while reading all my feeds is that everybody's talking about Chuck Norris these days. I hadn't heard anything about the guy since Walker, Texas Ranger (reruns of which are actually showing on TV these days!) which I never really watched anyway. The only thing I knew about the man was that he fought with Bruce Lee, which is actually really cool. But late last year he exploded onto the Internet as a sort of thought-virus. As far as I know, it all started with this page of "facts" about the man, compiled from a thread on the Something Awful forums. Well, the guys who hang out on those forums are nothing if not bizarrely creative, which is why we get gems like "Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting infers the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing." Or "If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death." Or "The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain."
OK I'll stop now. After this one! "The original theme song to the Transformers was actually "Chuck Norris--more than meets the eye, Chuck Norris--robot in disguise," and starred Chuck Norris as a Texas Ranger who defended the earth from drug-dealing Decepticons and could turn into a pick-up. This was far too much awesome for a single show, however, so it was divided." Yep. I'm done with the quotes. But that's not all the Chuck Norris stuff I've seen online lately.
It seems Conan O'Brien's gone Chuck-crazy- he's been playing random clips of Walker: Texas Ranger on his show. But the culmination of all this Chuck-related madness (which includes people digging up old Chuck toys, comics , a cartoon series... What? Even Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't have a cartoon show and he was the toughest dude alive in the 80s! Not to mention the 2nd toughest robot, after Optimus Prime, of course.) has got to be this SNL skit about the young Chuck Norris:
It's actually pretty funny, though far inferior to the SNL Narnia rap skit which made the rounds on the Net last year. Both these skits, by the way, were made by these guys. Wow. Saturday Night Live's actually funny again. Anything's possible in TV Land I guess.
There's just one last marginally-related-to-Chuck thing I've got to write about: this video, titled The Ultimate Showdown, on the Flash portal Newgrounds.com. It's a surreal flash animation where Godzilla, Batman, a zombie Abraham Lincoln, Optimus Prime and several other characters/celebrities (including everybody's favourite Chuck Norris) fight to prove... err.. who's the baddest. Or something like that. Yeah, it makes no sense at all. But it's decently-animated (in a South Park sorta way) and all the carnage is set to a really catchy-song! Ok now I've gotta go away from my PC before my brain leaks out my head because of all this rampant weirdness.
1. M.I.A.- Arular 2. Sambomaster- Sambomaster wa kimi ni katarikakeru 3. The New Pornographers- Twin Cinema 4. Gorillaz- Demon Days 5. Super Furry Animals- Love Kraft 6. The Decemberists- Picaresque 7. Sigur Rós- Takk... 8. Kupek- Awkward Songz 9. Franz Ferdinand- You Could Have It So Much Better 10. Madonna- Confessions on the Dance Floor
Warren Ellis's Superburst Mixtapes were easily the best podcasts of the year for music lovers- they showcased really excellent independent bands from a wide mix of genres. Each new episode promised brilliantly unpredictable auditory delights. Sadly, he ended the series with number 25.
BUT!
He's back with a new podcast- Apparat. Needless to say, it's brilliant. Programmes one through four are available on his website.
Yesterday, I read this Kaiju Shakedown about Jackie Chan's iTunes playlist. I don't pay attention to celebrity music recommendations unless it's from a musician I like, but this made me too curious. What does Jacky listen to? Well, first thing I found out is that the man sings! Indeed, he's got an album out. Interesting, but nothing I'd want to listen to.
Then I spotted the name HANG ON THE BOX. I knew them! An all-girl band from Beijing whose short, snappy punk songs I'd rather enjoyed listening to a few year ago (the songs are still available on their old Sister Records site. But I'd forgotten about them for a while. Time to see what they'd been up to lately! So I googled them and lo and behold, they've got a snazzy new site! I discovered they had a new lineup- with the addition of male guitarist Xiao Gan, they no longer qualified as a girl-band. They'd released a couple of new albums out since I last checked. But best of all, the site had new songs to listen to! I checked out the song Rollercoaster (streaming WMA there), described on their site as an "electro-spacerock number." Intriguing!
Whoa! This song was so different from their old stuff! Punk no more, they were. Electro-spacerock was apt. Sounded... experimental. Bit like Mars Volta (no surprise- their guitarist is a fan!). But very enjoyable! It's been a while since a band really surprised me and HANG IN THE BOX have done just that. I look forward to their next album!
Though, impatient to hear more of their stuff, I took the liberty of downloading their last album- Foxy Lady (actually an EP with a cover of Jimi Hendrix's Foxy Lady and 2 new songs, padded out with older songs. Not that I mind!). Great stuff! The albums on my to-buy list, along with their previous album "Di Di Di" and their compilation album "For Every Punk B**ch & A**ehole". I'll see if I can't cajole a local music store into bringing in their stuff.
What does all this have to do with African Trance, though? Well, while perusing their site I took a look at their links section and spotted a link for "Konono No.1 (the African Neubauten!)." I have no idea who Neubauten is but I clicked the link anyway! And so I ended up at the site for KONONO N°1, a band from Congo whose music is out of this world!!!
The band uses traditional instruments called likembés or thumb pianos, microphones made out of recycled car magnets and a percussion section made of junk! And they use this unusual setup to make totally funky music. But don't take my word for it! Listen to this MP3 and check out this video of the band performing.
I've been hunting for mashups (remixes where 2 or more songs are mixed together) after listenin to the excellent M.I.A. vs Madonna mashup I linked to yesterday. There's quite a few DJs doing this mashup thing nowadays and some of them are pretty darn good. Here's a few tracks I like:
Radio Hollaback- Clash vs Gwen Stefani (2nd song in the list. check out the other tracks too!) by Party Ben. Oh yeah, this one's fun. The Clash's superbly dancey 'This is Radio Clash' mixed with Gwen's 'Hollaback Girl'. Funky!
Since you ain't me- Kelly Clarkson's vs Frank Black (4th from bottom) byDivide and Kreate. I love Kelly Clarkson's Since You've Been Gone- total guilty pleasure. I haven't listened to Frank Black's solo work but the Pixies is, you know, legendary. His music adds a gritty edge to her singing. Nice mix.
Her new song, Hung Up, is eminently danceable pop bliss. Listen to it on her site. Then get an awesome remix, featuring the ubercool M.I.A., here.
Even cooler than the song is its video! Madonna calls it a tribute to dance, and it shows. It's got a supremely-flexible b-girl (who is she???), le parkour (which isn't dancing, but its such a beautiful expression of human motion that it fits right in), a gorgeous sequence set in a Chinese restaurant, some krumping and DDR! Sadly, nobody plays the game- they just dance on the machines. But its still cool. In fact, its very cool.
On a related note, POPJUSTICE's got a rather good interview with the producer of Madonna's new album, Stuart Price (his name, not the album's- which is Confessions On A Dance Floor).
Elliot Smith commited suicide on this very day, 2 years ago. He was one of the very best singer-songwriters in America, writing songs that were haunting, lyrical and very very beautiful. Celebrate the music of this late, great musician by downloading this set of 22 unreleased songs by him that were leaked online last week. The track 'New Disaster' is particularly stands out for me.
Edit: And there's more! The blog The Rawking Refuses To Stop! has a compilation of live performances from Elliot Smith's album From A Basement On The Hill available in a link on this post. Download it and share it with all your friends! Spread the Elliot Smith love!
I've been keeping busy of late. Been working on loads and loads of school projects. It's been hectic, but pretty darned fun too! No time for a proper post but here's a few of the media I've been consuming lately:
TV: Densha Otoko (Train Man)- a very cool Japanese TV series based on the most fascinating Internet phenomenon I've heard of in years. This warrants it's own longish post sometime in the future!
Eureka Seven- new anime by the director of Rahxephon. It's got robots who surf through the air. Very nice.
Music: Goldfrapp's Supernature- A very sexy album indeed.
Sigur Ros's Takk- Absolutely beautiful new album from the Icelandic band. The 1st single Glosoli is a masterpiece. It's got a great, GREAT video too!
Kate Bush's The Kick Inside, The Dreaming and Hounds of Love- I lament never having heard of this lady before! Pure class, this. Some of the finest pop music I've ever heard.
Harvey Danger's Little by Little- What an awesome rock album! And you can download it free on their site! I love you, Harvey Danger!
Super Furry Animal's Love Kraft- I didn't quite like this at first but it's really grown on me! Good stuff, this.
Movies:
The Corpse Bride- Tim Burton's return to stop-motion animation is an absolute delight for an animation fan like me and packs a sweet story to boot! Loved it, loved it, loved it.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory- Deeeeeeeeeeeeeelicious! Danny Elfman's score and songs are out of this world!
It's been 3 years since t.A.T.u's debut album, 200 km/h in the Wrong Lane, which I thought was rather excellent. Sure it was dumb pop music. But it was supremely catchy dumb pop music. Pure candy. And then they disappeared... Only to resurface in 2005- with a new manager, and a hella cool video for their new single "All About Us" which you can dowonload here. Mind you this is the uncensored version- not for it's PG-rated fully-clothed sex scene (not between the girls, ha) but for a rather shocking NC-16 (usin Singaporean ratings lah :P) scene of sudden violence. The video's skillfully directed by James Cox (Wonderland) and the song's pretty great too. It's the kind of disposable pop candy you can listen to over and over and not get sick of. Or it could be just me. ;-) So unless you have a chronic allergic reaction to pop music (or are easily disturbed by violence), download it and watch it now! (found via Pop Justice)
