There’s a great essay over at Stereogum by Chris Deville about the collaboration between Elvis Costello and The Roots, Wise Up Ghost.
“The first thing to understand about Wise Up Ghost is that it isn’t a vanity project,” Deville writes. “Yes, the new LP, released yesterday on Blue Note, is a full-length collaboration between Elvis Costello and the Roots. And yes, full-length collaborations between well-known artists sometimes end up as mere historical curiosities (Jay-Z and R. Kelly’sBest Of Both Worlds comes to mind) rather than blockbuster team-ups (Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch The Throne comes to mind). But Questo, Costello, and company seem to have put their all into this album, and the results are favorable. It might be a lark, but it’s an exceedingly pleasant lark.
For the rest of the piece, head over to Stereogum.
Neko Case hung out at NPR’s World Cafe and talked about her farm, her depression, “Moby Dick,” swimming and more. Plus she performs four songs off her new album, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You. Hear beautiful versions of “Night Still Comes,” “I’m From Nowhere,” “Local Girl” and “Calling Cards.”
This link will open a window that will allow you to hear the show.
Photo from Patti Smith’s website by Angelo Cricchi.
Before her Sept. 17 appearance at the Ottawa Folk Festival Patti Smith talked about her love of the sea, Robert Louis Stevenson and being alienated as a kid in an interview with CBC’s Alan Neal. “I was always such an alien as a kid,” she told Neal. “But it’s positive alienation. I was sort of a loner and outsider since I was a child, a little different than other kids, skinnier, taller. I was just a different kind of kid but I embraced that…. Because I wanted to be an artist, poet, writer — these were vocations that had the stigma or blessing of alienation attached to them.”
Last night the British post-punk quartet Savages played Chicago’s Metro. The group released their debut album, Silence Yourself, earlier this year. The album is great, but the band live is killer, as you can see and hear if you check out the video of Savages performing “She Will” below. You can read a pretty good review about the band at the New York Timesand you might want to check out this feature from a while back in England’s The Guardian.
Next Tuesday Nirvana’s third album, In Utero, will be released with all kinds of bonus tracks and videos, depending on which ‘deluxe’ package you buy. To get a buzz going a killer video of “Scentless Apprentice” is currently featured on the website of the British paper, The Guardian. But you can watch it right here.
It sounds is great; the band is in top form. Check it out.
Neil Young, Senator Harry Reid and Senator Debbie Stabenow at a press conference today on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC last week.
Last week it was Neil Young taking a stand against the proposed Keystone Pipeline, which if build would transport tar sands oil from Hardisty, Alberta, through Montana and South Dakota to Steele City, Nebraska, according to Wikipedia. President Barack Obama has been delaying his decision regarding the pipeline.
Young spoke at a press conference in Washington D.C. with Senators Harry Reid and Debbie Stabenow. “I am against the Keystone pipeline in a big way,” Young said. “The fact is, Fort McMurray [Alberta] looks like Hiroshima. Fort McMurray is a wasteland. The Indians up there and the native peoples are dying. People are sick. People are dying of cancer because of this. All of the First Nations peoples up there are threatened by this. Their food supply is wasted, their treaties are no good. They have the right to live on the land, like they always did, but there’s no land left that they can live on. All the animals are dying.”
Today a video featuring Robert Redford protesting the pipeline was released on You Tube:
“The Keystone XL and tar sands expansion have no place in a clean energy future,” Redford said in the video. “I can understand why oil companies love tar sands. There is a lot of money to be made by strip mining and drilling the dirtiest oil on the planet.
“The oil industry is lobbying hard for President Obama’s approval to let the Keystone XL pipeline cross our border and move a river of tar sands to the Gulf Coast, where much of it will be shipped overseas,” Redford continued. “But why should the rest of us pay the price so that the oil companies can line their pockets? Developing the Canadian tar sands is destroying our continent’s great northern forest at a terrifying rate. It is producing enough carbon pollution to wreak havoc with our climate for decades to come. And the pipelines that carry this dirty fuel are a direct threat to our nation’s own drinking water supplies. If you ask me, tar sands oil is exactly the type of dirty oil we can no longer afford. It may be great for oil companies, but it is killing our planet. There is no energy security in that. The saner choice is clean energy.”
Last night (Sept. 16, 2013) Elvis Costello and The Roots played the Brooklyn Bowl and lucky for you (and me) fans video-taped the show. La Marisoul of La Santa Cecilia sings on a bunch of the songs. I’m totally digging “Spooky Girlfriend,” “Shabby Doll,” “Watching the Detectives” and a terrific version of The Specials’ “Ghost Town.” Wise Up Ghost, the collaboration between Elvis and The Roots is out today on Blue Note.
I’ve always dug Cat Power’s “Nude As The News,” which appeared on the artist’s 1996 album, What Would The Community Think. This past weekend at the BasilicaSoundScape Festival in Hudson, New York, Sky Ferreira and DIIV performed a killer version of the song. Thanks to Pitchfork for hipping me to this. Photographer Ryan McGinley was there and he shot a cell phone video of part of the performance. It’s cool.
The Linda Perhacs revival has been going on since the end of the ’90s, with Devendra Banhart, Thurston Moore and even Daft Punk helping things along. Actually revival isn’t accurate. When Perhacs debut album, Parallelograms, was released in 1970, no one paid any attention and it was gone gone gone. Thankfully the album was rescued from oblivion and is currently available.
Listen to all of Parallelograms here:
Perhacs has been working on a second album, and according to her website, The Soul of All Natural Things is “coming soon.”Thanks to Brooklyn Vegan for turning me on to this cool video, a live version of the title track of the album:
Yesterday’s review of Thomas Pynchon’s “Bleeding Edge,” in the New York Times by Jonathan Lethem is a good read, and makes me want to read the book. It’s worth your time and you’ll find it here.
