wears the trousers magazine


trouser shorts: alanis morissette, deerhoof and more

Proving yet again that you can’t put your arms around a memory but you can go back and alter your songs so that radio will play them, here’s the new Alanis Morissette video for break-up ballad ‘Not As We’. Alanis walks alone on a beach, overfills her bath, writes in her journal and drinks coffee earnestly. You’ll probably want to give her a hug.

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Directed by Clyde Petersen, frontwoman of Seattle-based collective Your Heart Breaks, here’s the new video from Deerhoof, ‘Chandelier Spotlight’, taken from their new album Offend Maggie, out this week. Like it? Then download the song for free here. Sorted.

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We love Imani Coppola here at Wears The Trousers. Always have, always will. Okay, so her new project Little Jackie doesn’t quite scale the heights of brilliance like last year’s The Black & White Album or her enduring debut Chupacabra, but it’s nice to see her burning up the charts after paying her dues for all these years. The next Little Jackie single will be the title track of their debut album The Stoop, but the video for it has been taken down from YouTube. Rats. Instead, here’s Imani and Adam’s recent appearance on ‘Later…with Jools Holland’.

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This isn’t as good as we’d hoped. Oh well. It’s still better than this. And a vast improvement on this. Best post-millennial Bond theme in the bag then.

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other videos we’ve been watching this week (Australian edition):

a new promo (the second) for the brilliant ‘Where I Stood’ by Aussie singer-songwriter Missy Higgins

‘Can’t Shake It’, the first single from wacky Aussie Kate Miller-Heidke’s new album Curiouser. “I execute the moonwalk like I stepped in shit”? Now that’s what we call a lyric.

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Alan Pedder



trouser press: liz phair, saint etienne and more

– Liz Phair comes in from the cold
– Saint Etienne announce new single and compilation
– illegal downloads backed by Duffy
– Bond theme suspense heats up with new rumour
– vote in Drowned In Sound’s alternative Mercury Music Prize
– debut album on the way from School Of Seven Bells
– Finnish metallers Nightwish line up rarities
– Hilton, Lohan and Simpson get up to stuff

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After years spent in a glossed up anti-wilderness, Liz Phair has finally thrown her old fans a bone with news that her next album will see a return to “sloppiness”. Speaking to Billboard, Phair was quick to point out that she’s not making a new Exile In Guyville, her classic 1993 debut, but is fighting to keep some sort of edge to the songs. “The best way I can describe it is ‘natural’,” she says. “It has mistakes in it. It has layered background vocals of mine that just make an overall slop, but it’s perfect slop.”

Phair has already reissued Exile In Guyville in the US through new label ATO after leaving Capitol earlier this year, and has been playing a small series of gigs in which she plays the album in its entirety. The reissue, complete with three bonus tracks and a DVD, comes to the UK on August 25th (although you can currently get the bonus tracks through various digital download services).

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