For the week leading up to March 12th, 2012:
Westboro Baptist Church radicals deride Radiohead as "Freak monkey's [sic] with mediocre tunes keeps you busy and focused by lightness. It changes nothing, God is undoing and digging up and throwing down this nation." Other than the Westboro Baptist Church's apparent assumption that God does not care much about grammar, what can we glean from this? For one, they're quite astute when it comes to Radiohead's recent mediocrity. However, I really think they're attacking the wrong band.
Passion Pit is making progress on their new album, and it's going to be "expansive." I'm not sure what that means in relation to catchy synth-pop, but apparently singer Michael Angelakos is using something called a kaleidoloop to alter the pitch of his voice. Apparently he already didn't sound enough like a girl on "Sleepyhead"...
The title of Fiona Apple's new album is, drumroll please....The Idler Wheel is wiser than the Driver of the Screw, and Whipping Cords will serve you more than Ropes will ever do. As acts such as Mew and Atlas Sound have shown, ridiculously long and incoherent album titles are a right of passage for pretentious indie bands. However, the lack of brevity in Ms. Apple's latest offering his child's play compared to her 1999 release, which featured an eight line poem for an album title.
Diplo's new EP Express Yourself is being released in May. Do yourself a favor and listen to the lead single of the same name if you haven't already.
The music portion of South By Southwest (or SXSW for all you acronym-slinging hipsters) music festival, one of the several glorious musical gatherings that I desperately want but probably won't ever have the opportunity to go to, starts tomorrow. About 18,000 bands are playing, however some of the bigger acts include the aforementioned Fiona Apple, Lionel Richie, Skrillex, Bruce Springstein, Andrew Bird, Dan Deacon, The Magnetic Fields, John Mayer, and Norah Jones.
Sleigh Bells has released a cover of Beyonce's "Irreplaceable." Click here to hear the once bombastic noise pop duo further neuter themselves. Click here for a taste of what they used to sound like.
The new EP from Burial, entitled Kindred, is the third most acclaimed original release of 2012 thus far. If you're a fan of downtempo/ambient dubstep, give standout track "Ashtray Wasp" a listen.
