If you’ve found Yeezus, join our ongoing Comment Party, and feel free to revisit our song of the summer kick-off to nominate a song from the album. Amrit and I are at Bonnaroo this weekend, and you can follow us at @scottgum and @amritsingh for reviews, photos, and ZZ Top Vines. But first, relive your best and worst comments of the week below.
Michael Gira prefers to call the version of Swans that emerged in early 2010 a reconstitution rather than a reunion. It is easy to see why the word choice matters to him; the term “reunion” comes with a great deal of historical baggage that simply does not apply to the band’s current iteration. They have been very busy, but not with nostalgia — only one pre-hiatus song regularly appears in their set list. Instead, they have gone on a creative tear, releasing two new albums that stand tall among one of the starkest and most powerful catalogs in rock music.
Guys, Yeezus leaked. You don’t need music videos right now. You need to just play that real loud, let blood fill up your vision, luxuriate in the angry anxiety. If, however, you somehow need a break in between Yeezus sessions, or if you’re one of those weird and virtuous people who waits until it’s legal to hear something, or you’re one of those godless motherfuckers who doesn’t love Kanye West, we’ve got five good music videos for you below.
It’s here! If you’re a certain kind of internet music dork (guilty), you’ve been practically holding your breath all week waiting for this moment. Up until now, we hadn’t heard a single finished CD-quality studio track of any song from Kanye West’s new album Yeezus. Now, we get to hear all of them, if we’re willing to click around the lawless internet hinterlands. And if you live in a major urban center, there’s a decent chance you can just open your window or walk out your front door and absorb it that way. Either way, Yeezus has come to Earth. Let’s get this bitch jumping like Parkinson’s in the comments section below.
And while we’re talking about it, Kanye is going to be projecting more things on walls around the world tonight. Check the global map at Kanye’s site to find your closest location.
This week, Queens Of The Stone Age scored their first-ever No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 with …Like Clockwork, the first album Palm Desert native Josh Homme has released with QOTSA in six years. It’s a richly deserved honor, and one that had been long overdue. With a host of different bands — and different lineups within those bands — Homme has now presided over, and provided for us, a vast catalog of energetic rock music dealing almost exclusively in hooks and distortion.
In my music-consuming history, it’s the rare band that cause me to feel genuinely unsettled. MS MR and Yeasayer, however, are two bands that have somehow managed to rattle me. “The Children” from Yeasayer’s Odd Blood isn’t particularly scary, but catch it at the right moment and the slightly discordant piano line will conjure up one too many Damiens in your head. Even more personally disconcerting is the rainbow vomit-filled video for MS MR’s “Hurricane.” Here, the two groups unite, but the results are not internally jumbling in the least. Yeasayer take the cinematic track and blossom it into something kinetic and warped. Take it on an emotional bender below.
Last year, the demonic Brooklyn noise-punks (and circa-2010 BTW) Pop. 1280 released The Horror, an album of evil guitar-scrapes and anti-people sentiments. They haven’t wasted any time in following it up. Their next LP has the awesome title Imps Of Perversion, and it arrives in a couple of months. The first single is the convulsive, anthemic “Light Out,” and it will fuck you the fuck up. Listen below.
Last month, VICE music blog Noisey gave away Phoenix’s stems for Bankrupt! standout “Trying To Be Cool” and proffered their Dropbox as a beacon of seriously-however-you-want-this-song-to-sound-and-if-it’s-cool-we’ll-post-it opportunity. This means that floating in the web ether there are probably remixes upon remixes of the cut — I would deign to guess they are mostly trap — and I bet some of them have taken “Cool” to a, well, cool, new level. On the professional end of the spectrum, we’ve heard French producer Breakbot’s tinny, skittering rerub of the track and it’s certainly no slouch. Today, we have a similarly thinned-out version from electronic duo Soul Clap. But where bits of the original have been stripped, the two have added a ton of funk undertones and some serious bass crunch. Check it out below.
