Can an album comprised solely of samples really be an artistic achievement?
Honestly, I'm a little bit torn about naming Girl Talk's Feed The Animals the best album of the year. After all, it is a record made up entirely of mashups, so, strictly speaking, there's not a note of new music in this banging 53-minutes club opus. But there is pretty much everything that's great about popular music, all tossed together into something joyously familiar yet excitingly new.So, while pretty much no one w
The first batch of bands for the hottest music festival around, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, has been leaked. Confirmed Artists: the Killers, the Airborne Toxic Event, the Bug, Buraka Som Sistema, Crystal Castles, Drop The Lime, Fleet Foxes, Flying Lotus, Girl Talk, the Hold Steady, the Killers, No Age, Noah and the Whale, Late of the Pier, Los Campesinos!, Peanut Butter Wolf, the Presets, Sébastien Tellier, Themselves, Tinariwen. Confirmed DJs: DJ Gina Turner, DJ Hipnotic S
Coachella's 2009 official lineup is officially out -- as of 3:15 this morning, says Michael Lopez. Here it is: Girl Talk, Crystal Castles, The Knux, Fleet Foxes, Lupe Fiasco (that's, in order, five of my 10 favorite records of 2008) plus The Black Keys, Late of the Pier, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Gaslight Anthem, Amanda Palmer, Ida Maria... oh, hell, stop reading my picks and see the list yourself. By the way, the bulk of the leaked list we published was correct, though obviously most of the "rumored
The Black Keys as they looked back when I interviewed them.With The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach's solo record, Keep It Hid, having come out last Tuesday and his protégé, Jessica Lea Mayfield coming to town tomorrow, I thought this would be a good time to share a story I wrote on Auerbach for my college paper back when his band was still an up-and-coming act in our shared hometown of Akron, Ohio. The story is on the jump.If nothing else, it goes to show that sometimes pissing off a source works ou
Jonathan McNamara
We don't normally run two pieces previewing acts from a single concert in our print edition, but last week I made an exception for Jessica Lea Mayfield and Annuals at Rhythm Room. After tonight's show I'm definitely glad I did.As the headliner, Annuals, a six-piece indie act from North Carolina, should have everything going for them. They're six years in to their career, receiving a lot of love from music blogs and scoring an appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien last fal
Tucson's Digital Leather has signed to hip Mississippi-based label Fat Possum (Wavves, The Black Keys, fellow Tucsonian Bob Log III) and is prepping for a national tour and album release. The band, a project of multi-instrumentalist Shawn Foree, who grew up in the Baha'i hippie commune of Southern Arizona, is managed by Jay Reatard, who you may recall featured prominently in last week's music feature on Tempe's Earthmen and Strangers.Tour dates on the jump.
