Filed under: news, trouser shorts, video | Tags: alan pedder, argon 40, hanne hukkelberg, heather greene, lhasa, MIA, music, my brightest diamond, news, son lux, sonic youth, the veronicas
For someone who not so long ago seemed quite determined to abandon music altogether, M.I.A. hasn’t done too badly for herself since thinking better of it. Earlier this week her single ‘Paper Planes’ came top of The Village Voice’s famous annual Pazz & Jop Poll and tonight it turns out she’s up for an Oscar. ‘O…Saya’, her collaboration with ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ soundtrack mastermind AR Rahman, was among the three nominees for Best Original Song alongside another Rahman track, ‘Jai Ho’, and Peter Gabriel’s ‘Down To Earth’ from Disney/Pixar’s ‘WALL-E’. No sign of Golden Globes nominees Beyoncé or Miley Cyrus, or even the winner, Bruce Springsteen. This year’s Oscars – the 81st – take place on February 22nd.
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Sonic Youth have been Twittering away quite merrily this week as they work on the follow-up to 2006’s Rather Ripped with Patti Smith producer John Agnello, revealing a whole bunch of working titles f0r the album. Due in June through Matador Records, it’s tentatively titled The Eternal and may include the following: ‘That’s What We Know’, ‘Sacred Trickster’, ‘Calming The Snake’, ‘Massage The History’ and “something about a Malibu gas station”.
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The second instalment in My Brightest Diamond’s series of digital-only remix EPs was released on Monday in all good online stores. Shark Remixes Vol. 2 features Son Lux remixes of ‘Apples’, ‘The Diamond’, ‘Inside A Boy’ and ‘To Pluto’s Moon’, and the lovely folks at Asthmatic Kitty want you to have those last two for free.
FREE MP3: My Brightest Diamond, ‘Inside A Boy’ [Son Lux remix]
FREE MP3: My Brightest Diamond, ‘To Pluto’s Moon’ [Son Lux remix]
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Norwegian singer-songwriter Hanne Hukkelberg will release her new album, Blood From A Stone, in April. Written over a 7-month period on the isolated island of Senja in the Arctic Circle, Hanne writes in her blog that the album, somewhat paradoxically, is a much more forthright rock album than her softly experimental previous albums Little Things and Rykestrasse 68. “I would call it a mixture of new wave, no wave and indie music,” she says, “but the music is still wrapped in my personal sound: small sounds, found sounds, weird objects used as instruments and different layers…this is a record more direct, more loud and from the hip – lyrically as well.”
You can hear one of the songs – a decidedly un-rocky piano tune – and take a tour of her island retreat by watching this video.
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Australian twin sisters The Veronicas will release an iTunes exclusive EP, Untouched, on February 3rd. Lisa and Jessica Origliasso have recorded a special unplugged version of the title track and thrown in three previously unreleased B-sides – ‘Hollywood’, ‘Insomnia’ and ‘Everything’. The original version of ‘Untouched’ rounds out the tracklist, and is lifted directly from their second album Hook Me Up.
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Singer-songwriter Heather Greene has been very busy since last year’s long-delayed UK release of her 2005 album Five Dollar Dress with two different projects on the go. The tail end of 2008 was spent on finalising the release of her new album Sweet Otherwise – it came out a couple of weeks ago without us noticing! – and has been working with Adam Williams of Powerman 5000 on a new electronica project called Argon 40. Their debut double A-side single is out on March 2nd through iTunes and features the songs ‘When The Words Don’t Come’ and ‘44.66 Days’. Here’s a suitably sci-fi, Bacofoil-splattered video as a taster. Gig dates expected this summer.
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Lhasa de Sela is not the most prolific of artists. Her last album, the incredible The Living Road, was released back in 2003, and the album before that in 1998. So, it’s been 5 years…must be time for a new one, right? As it happens, yes. Aside from collaborating with Stuart Staples and Tindersticks, she’s been fairly quiet on the music front, so the news that her self-titled third album will be out in April comes as a pleasant and unexpected surprise. Her first album to be sung entirely in English, it was recorded under ‘live’ conditions at Montreal’s famous Hotel2Tango studios using purely analogue techniques. Here’s a tracklist.
Lhasa
01 Is Anything Wrong
02 Rising
03 Love Came Here
04 What Kind of Heart
05 Bells
06 Fool’s Gold
07 A Fish On Land
08 Where Do You Go
09 The Lonely Spider
10 1001 Nights
11 I’m Going In
12 Anyone & Everyone
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Alan Pedder
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