Out of curiosity, is there a reason why the month of October/early November has a habit of piling on very good new albums all at once? Is it to jockey for positioning on year-end lists? Be on people's radars to purchase going into the holiday shopping season? Whatever the case, it can feel like you can put together a solid year-end list based on releases from just the two-three weeks during this time, and not be wrong. At the same time, it's like the rest of the year doesn't matter as much.
I agree, but I also feel like part of the problem is that for many of us, we were old enough to remember when the song sampled was a hit on its own and it's difficult to separate that memory from something that makes lesser of it.
Imagine trying to consume all of this music on release day?
I actually can, because I've noticed it becoming more of a thing that my friends and colleagues will ask me if I've heard all these new albums on release day by 10am. Do they all just binge on new music at midnight or something? We always talk about binge watching, but no one talks about binge listening, which I feel can't be a good thing!
Jack? I think you mean Jacked. Turns out they've been spending the last 10 years hitting the gym, and I'm all for SWOLEM ("SALEM" + "swole", but it's a rough merger.)
https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5f63f0e9291a3fedd683eb67/2:1/w_2560%2Cc_limit/SALEM_CA_CAR_%23_REAL.jpg
And -- this is me just assuming who it's about based on nothing but observing the looks the two shared on staged when they toured together -- but then that person had to produce it for your EP on top of it! (note: not Alex G)
I began going through the related TikTok videos on this, and there was a post that addressed how much she was making off the post. Apparently there is a Tik Tok Creator Fund for those influencers whose posts go viral. It's something like $0.02-$0.03 per 1,000 views. At the time it was made, this post of hers only had a fraction of the 31 million likes it does now, and said she had already made at least $3,500 off it, and her other posts were doing well, too, so multiply that exponentially.
Dance On the Blacktop was very good, but I felt like it was the capstone to refining that style of their sound. This is back in the trenches of bleakness, but the rhythm reminds me of an early Autolux track while the guitars scale up to Explosions In the Sky-sized reach.
Does anyone know if in these reports, they measure sales by units or just the overall revenue? I would think if it's the latter, it'd be easy for vinyl to surpass everything considering the average cost of an LP is about $25, where as a CD is about $12-$14.
I was listening to The Rising a few weeks ago, and I think it had some solid singles on there, but beyond Magic, which also had some of his best late-era work, I'd agree with your assessment. I also think that The Rising and Magic resonated with me more then and still holds up because at that time in indie music culture, bands like Arcade Fire, the Hold Steady, and the National were among the "cool" indie rock bands of the moment, and it felt like Springsteen played off that with his releases around then.
Working On a Dream's "Queen of the Supermarket" fucking lost me, though.
Whether it be intentional or not, this band has always had a way of evolving in a way where I could take a pretty good guess which other bands they've been listening to:
RARE was their way of trying to be Title Fight's Hyperview.
A few of the one-off singles after that sounded like Turnover.
This sounds like Tame Impala.
Can someone write a song from Jessie's girl's perspective? So far, she's had to contend with the male gaze, and now being painted in an unflattering misogynistic light. What's her side of the story?
The new album sounds more cohesive for the better than the last few, and I assumed that was because Keuning was no longer part of writing, so while it's nice to hear the four may put their past strains behind them, I hope the momentum from Imploding continues going forward.
A venue in my area that only opened within the past few years and has been a great boost to the live music scene currently has a GoFundMe aiming for $70,000 to last them for 6-7 months. Right now, they're halfway there, but a lot has come from anonymous large donors, and I've already donated a few times myself, so it feels very daunting that they'll be able to achieve it, and how that much money still will unlikely be enough to see them survive through the fall either way. I'd really hate to see the space shutter just as it was beginning to really take off, because the area was on the downturn before that.
Surprised it didn't happen sooner. Something that always surprised me following 2015's misogynistic remarks is how other artists continued collaborating with him or performing live with him.
I'm not sure what Egedy thought was going to happen. Any kind of mass gathering has turned into a non-socially distanced shit show everywhere if you've watched the news or looked at social media. It's infuriating on so many levels how there are those of us who are sacrificing all the stuff we'd much rather be doing for the sake of the greater good, and you have these dummies -- that's basically what they are -- who are looking for loopholes in social distancing to get back out there. They tell themselves that the masks will be enough. They tell themselves it's fine because it's their friends they're hanging out with, or someone from a dating apps they've been talking to.
I'm very much feeling fatigued by the burden of upholding the social distancing work to flatten the pandemic just so these selfish morons can go out and live their lives as if nothing's going on.
I appreciate the sentiment and the artistry, but from a scientific standpoint, the song has some holes in it since last I checked, having the antibodies didn't mean you couldn't get the virus again.
Yikes. Well, then, I guess I can't imagine having so little of a life that anyone would create a parody account of the Blessed Madonna out of every artist you could possibly parody, but here we are...
Unless I missed something, it looks like she went back on her decision? It's hard for me to tell since I don' follow her on Twitter well enough if she's trolling or not:
https://twitter.com/blackmadonnachi/status/1285211016733896706?s=20
https://twitter.com/blackmadonnachi/status/1285281601241456640?s=20
(This is _ by the way, and not someone saying _ better support this cause. Take note: referring to one's self in the third person never sounds natural!)
After she got married, it seemed like her view point on a lot of things changed veering more toward "traditional" values and the punk community no longer continues to recognize her her. She wrote an article somewhere that attacked feminists because she felt judged on behalf of those getting married and desiring having children. There was also another article where she spoke about having dinner with Gavin McGuinness.
Something I've also observed about Mish Way's brand of feminism and the women she champions tend to be those who are attractive white women who equate kinks and doing porn to being radically liberal. It's really just a veiled defense for white privileged conventionally hot women, though, which is basically the template of an alt-right's dream girl.
I'm going to double down on that observation. There are so many pictures on Twitter from Brooklyn of younger people going about their lives without social distancing and maskless. Interviews on the news from Memorial Day weekend had a bunch of soundbites from young white women who probably stumped for Bernie on their social platforms. There's definitely the politicized part of it where "not wearing a mask" = Trump supporters and "wearing a mask" = liberals, but then there's just everyone under the age of 30 who doesn't care to wear a mask either way because they need to go to the gym and hookup with their Tinder date.
Imagine being one of the bands not asked to play in 2021. I get that they need to make room for the music that's happened between 2020 and then, but I feel for the artists who really didn't have a chance to support their latest music fully this festival cycle.
Along the same lines, does fashion just get stuck in the same place it was right before the pandemic happened, or do all the styles from this year's collection just get thrown away?
There was a rumor going around that the Los Angeles version was barely even booked or discussed with booking members on an industry level even before the pandemic started, and there was a good chance it was going to get cancelled anyway. I found that to be a drag to hear.
Let's talk about Newport Folk Festival for a second... It was very telling that they began to quickly reveal the rest of their lineup at a pace sooner than previous years. It just so happens to be one of their strongest indie-centric lineups in a couple of years (The National, Big Thief, Phoebe Bridgers, Sharon Van Etten, Waxahatchee, Vagabon, Muzz, EOB, Andrew Bird) alongside contemporary acts like Randy Newman, Mandy Moore, Brittany Howard, Natalie Hemby and Grace Potter, making it seem like an unnecessary tease to would-be attendees. I can't imagine that festival gets moved to autumn either, when New England weather is less predictable.
Cringy lyrics aside, I'd be down to read a feature on the effect of releasing new music during a time like this and the correlation to our emotional response. I already don't like that so many albums that have come out over the last few weeks are unfortunately going to be reminders of the time where we were all confined indoors under the threat of illness and death, and in the past, the music that I can connect to very bad memories tends to be music I no longer want to revisit.
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