Behold: The cover for This Christmas, the upcoming joint holiday album from the reupholstered pods that once held the souls of former onscreen lovers John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. It looks like they're having a hot-cocoa-and-gift-wrapping party, how neat.
In our piece last week about Amanda Palmer and the nearly non-existent accountability practices of Kickstarter, we briefly touched on the infamous Kickstarter project of one Josh Dibb. Dibb, a member of ballyhooed Baltimore band Animal Collective, infamously collected more than $25,000 three years ago to do a music project in Africa. Almost three years later, none of the donors to Dibb's project have received any of the rewards they were promised.
Yesterday a photograph made the rounds on the internet purporting to show Bad Brains frontman H.R. and Brooke Shields sitting together on a couch, with Shields leaning over and lighting what appeared to be a marijuana pipe. Which would be amazing. A spokesperson for Shields quickly denied that it's her. But Bad Brains' management has issued a statement to Gawker claiming that the photo indeed shows H.R. and Shields getting high together in 1983.
The best of several hilarious moments in Christina Aguilera's "Your Body" video occurs at its 2:20 mark, when she pulls a handsome man she just played pool with into a bar bathroom stall and unleashes blue paint on him...somehow? I do not know what we are to glean from this. Is she sick? A squirter? Does she pee blue and thick? Is she really bad at graffiti?
On "L.A. Again," San Fran MC K. Flay and New York/Miami producer Michna team for a sunny electronic hip-hop track that reminds me of '90s near-novelty, very focused tracks like Skee-Lo's "I Wish." There is also a really big Luscious Jackson tribute happening here, even if it's not intended.
For the past 24 hours, there has been an influx of new pop singles and almost all of them are subdued to the point of underwhelming. Here, I'll rank them in order of my faintly praised favorites.
This is so perfectly tortured, it sounds like it's from a lost John Hughes movie. Brooklyn duo Tanlines have a knack for making music that feels like dust fluttering in 3 pm sunshine beaming through giant library windows. As much as this is Gotye's song, Tanlines' takeover of it sounds like a sequel to the excellent closer of their debut album Mixed Emotions, "Nonesuch."
This week, the music industry looks something like Christmas. It's not that the new music releases are gifts, per se (quite the contrary), but there are so damn many high-profile albums after a relatively dormant summer. This kind of flurry is usually reserved for the holidays. And what's more, together they give as full of a picture of the state of label-based pop music in 2012 as any recent concurrent set of albums. Really, all this week is missing is a neo-boy band. Let's explore:
Back in June, when Amanda Palmer got $1.2 million via Kickstarter to support her new album and tour, the Dresden Dolls singer set a new record for music projects on the fundraising site. The average successful music Kickstarter asks for and receives about $5,000. Palmer asked for $100,000 and then got 12 times that. Naturally, she was thrilled, but now she's being asked to better explain what she's doing with all that money, and she's become a poster child for Kickstarter's accountability problems in the process.
To piggyback on my earlier praise of contemporary U.K. R&B, here's the new single from the U.S. native responsible for my favorite R&B album of year, Perfectly Imperfect (no really, it's much better than its title). Elle Varner's so far best known for her previous single, "Refill," a bonkers marriage of fiddles and 808s that sounds nice but, depending on how you want to read it, is extremely nasty (I haven't heard semen suggestion — "Can I get a refill?" — come off more innocently since Mariah Carey's "Honey"). "I Don't Care" probably has less classic potential, but it's a lovely, starry eyed ballad propelled by a giant, textured break beat and Talking Book-style keyboard flourishes.
Everything about the most recent single from British R&B duo AlunaGeorge is just slightly tweaked for weirdness and the effect is a surreal, woozy euphoria. Everything, that is, except for singer Aluna Francis's voice — every word of hers naturally sounds like the final one before the helium wears off. This is simultaneously stunning and slapstick, serious and novelty, soul and pop.
"You Make Me Feel" is not just a highlight of English producer Terror Danjah's second album, Dark Crawler (out Sept. 25 on Hyperdub), it's one of the most thrilling R&B songs I've heard all year. The rare all-sung track on an album full of instrumentals and rough grime tracks, "You Make Me Feel" exists in a state of flux: aggressive with its beats and ambient elsewhere, peppy in its bridge and laconic in its chorus and contemporary but strongly indebted to the '90s (multiple phases of that decade are referenced: new jill swing, 2-step, Timbaland-style wackiness). It's an appropriately satisfying series of payoffs.
I met Liván, Takeshi and the rest of their band of frikis—rock and metal fans of the punk-and-anarchist subcategory—around nine one Thursday night on the median of Havana's G Street. I'd come to Havana to write a book about what it was like to be a young adult in the post-Fidel city and, since G Street was the biggest party in town, it was where I began.
As more proof that Neneh Cherry & the Thing's wild jazz album from earlier this year, The Cherry Thing, is the gift that keeps on giving, here's a remix of the only Cherry-penned track on the album of mostly covers. Norwegian producers Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas take just a few elements from the original (some horns, a vocal sample), like Masters at Work used to back in the day, to create disco where it wasn't.
What we have here is a current Balearic remix of Aalyiah's already breezy 2001 hit "Rock the Boat," nothing more nothing less. It took me a second to hear past the slight cheese — this is actually quite lovely.
The early '90s are all over today's shallow-underground house music, but few get the decade as right as London's xxxy with his remix of British dance duo Chew Lips' "Hurricane." The original was a crunchy electro thing; this sounds like something Marc Kinchen would have squeezed in between remixing superstars in 1993 (the drum sounds are so perfectly plastic), and that is the point. This thing is teeming with hooks, my favorite being the one that opens the song/follows the proper chorus ("Don't you want a little something?...") — the jazzy phrasing mixed with the jacking house is very Herbert.
