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It looks like Pittsburgh’s finest loop digger is back again.
After making a smash two summers back with his first album Night Ripper, Girl Talk has released another semi-legal collection of pasted-together hooks and old school beats. And for this one, titled Feed the Animals, he’s decided to pull a Radiohead, making it available online for whatever his fans want to pay.
The New York Times clued us into the recent sale of Soul Train from its founder, the wise and esteemed Don Cornelius, to MadVision Entertainment a fresh-faced upstart.
While this must have netted the Don a pretty penny, we’re more interested in what it means for the show’s archives, a time capsule of some of the best funk and soul of the 70s, along with some of the worst jumpsuits. From the Jackson 5 (above) to Stevie Wonder and Sly & the Family Stone, we can’t think of another 70s television artifact that deserves DVD canonization more.
As always, Kempt wishes you love, peace, and soul.
We’ve been fans of the Daytrotter folks for some time, and in return, they’ve been steadily working through our favorite bands.
This time, they’ve tracked down indie stalwarts Spoon for a stripped-down set recorded in Daytrotter HQ in central Iowa. The songs are culled from Spoon’s decade-plus career (including one cut from the eleven-year-old Soft Effects EP), along with a Paul Simon cover that manages to fit right in. Of course, Simon is the musical inspiration du jour, so it’s interesting to hear what the old guard makes of him. Apparently, it sounds a lot like Spoon.
After making their name with a hell of an album a few years back, The Walkmen have gotten a lot more low-key. They started out as O.C.-bound prepsters, but they always seemed more comfortable with drunken walks home than coke-fueled house parties.
So it’s fitting that they’d turn in an EP of Leonard Cohen covers from a ramshackle studio in the middle of Iowa.
From Hard Day’s Night to Top of the Pops (R.I.P.), the Brits have always had a knack for filming music. Their latest good idea is the Black Cab Sessions, a web video series filmed from the back of a London cab.
The pay for the gig is the price of a cab ride, flagged down on the day of the shoot. The cabbie introduces the band, or often enough, just the frontman. (The cabs aren’t big, after all.) The songs are all recorded in one take, usually on the way from the hotel to the venue, so the sessions have an immediacy and intimacy that’s increasingly rare in music. The camera periodically pans across the street for a little incidental London scenery, just so you don’t forget where you are.
The word “effortless” gets tossed around a lot, but when you’re putting out a TV show from your basement, you’ve probably earned it. Producer/mastermind Nigel Godrich (the genius behind Radiohead’s OK Computer) has been doing just that for most of 2007, and after a year of limbo they’re finally making it to the small screen.
Godrich started putting episodes on his website more than a year ago »
Back before they turned into the geriatric juggernaut that seems to be on a never-ending world tour, the Rolling Stones were the coolest rock band in the universe. In 1969, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the gang crisscrossed the country in support of their album Beggar’s Banquet, culminating in the infamous free concert at Altamont in Northern California where Hell’s Angels killed a member of the audience.
Photographer Ethan Russell was with them every step of the way »
When it’s this wintry outside, the best thing to do is grab your girl and a bottle of the good stuff and just stay home for once with some great tunes. Thankfully three of the most stylish men in music—two living and one, alas, dead—have obliged with a trio of need-to-hear new box sets: Elvis Costello (pictured), Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and Nick Drake, who overdosed in 1974.
Michael Caine is one of the most stylish men in cinema, so it figures that he has good taste in music. The English actor, who’s won two Oscars and was knighted by the Queen in 2000, recently issued a saccharine compilation CD in the UK of his favorite mellow tunes, called Cained; the disc, which contains everything from Nina Simone to Doctor Rockit, is now available on Amazon as an import.
Apparently the project came about after Caine mentioned to his fellow Commander of the British Empire Sir Elton John that he frequently makes mixed tapes for friends like Sir Sean Connery, Sir Roger Moore and Baron Lloyd-Weber. With the penchant the design cabal has for seizing on anything this coolly quirky, you can count on Cained providing the soundtrack to more than one event during that men’s fashion week everyone’s babbling about.
Stylish Swedish garage punks The Hives have traded in their Vegas lounge act look and are channeling Thom Browne for their latest effort, The Black and White Album. We call it a marked improvement, especially as they’ve eschewed Browne’s signature high-water trouserings. The crested boating blazers and striped school ties worn to good effect on the album cover and in the video for the first single, “Tick Tick Boom” are straight out of Browne’s much-ballyhooed Black Fleece collection for Brooks Brothers. And though he’s hardly the first designer to employ such motifs…
