Arcade Fire have just launched the new online video for their single Neon Bible, from the album of the same name. We've had the CD on fairly solid rotation here in the We Made This studio, and this is one of our favourite tracks.
Go play.
It's not often in this media-saturated, webbed up world that someone can pull something off that is (more or less) a complete surprise.
So kudos to the boys from Radiohead for pulling their new album out of the bag without anyone really knowing it was happening. They've just announced the release of their new album In Rainbows, which will be available from Wednesday 10 October.
But not content with just catching the media with a surprise release, they're also rethinking how an album is released. At liberty to do pretty much what they want as they're not signed to a record label, they're releasing it as a download only first, and they've left it up to the buyer to choose how much to pay for it. But you can also pre-order a handsome box-set of the album, designed in collaboration with Stanley Donwood, for delivery sometime on or before Monday 3 December. The set includes the ten track CD, and LP of the same, a digital download, an extra CD with eight further tracks, photos and artwork, plus art and lyrics booklets. It'll set you back £40. Then in early 2008 they'll release it as a standard CD.
This all raises some fascinating questions about the financial and emotional value we place in music, both as audible experience and tangible physical product. Obviously the guys in Radiohead aren't short of cash, so it's not a huge deal for them to release the music without asking anyone to pay for it. Does it devalue music to do so? Or at least make us rethink our expectations about what we should pay for digital downloads? And releasing a sumptuous box set reflects on the emotional worth of a physical item.
The Guardian music blog has posted about it, and the comments make for fascinating reading.
And check out Creative Review's blog for a look at the box set.
We think it's all pretty groovy. Our only problem is the In Rainbows website. Yeeurch. It looks like a migraine.
But, what we really want to know, is how much will you pay for the download? Let us know below. We paid a fiver, as that felt like a reasonable amount for a new album. But it could be that we've been brainwashed by the machine...
Sometimes you go to a gig, and come away thinking, "Ooh, that was a bit special".
We had one of those last night when we went to see the premiere of Damon Albarn's new album at the Roundhouse, as part of the BBC's Electric Proms series.
Albarn seemed pretty happy to be back on stage after hogging the background with Gorillaz, and looked like a cross between the Artful Dodger and Alexis Kanner from 60s TV show The Prisoner. The set was a full run through of the new album, The Good, The Bad and The Queen; and what a corker it is. We particularly liked, well, all of it actually, but the stand out tracks were 80s Life, Kingdom of Doom and the eponymous track GBQ, which is a bit of a barnstormer.
Fortunately, because this is a BBC gig, you can go check it out for yourself right here. Good work British Broadcasting Corporation!
The autobiography of Gorillaz, Rise of the Ogre, is being launched tomorrow (Friday 27 October) with what you might call a guerilla store opening on the South Bank for four hours only, from 1pm to 5pm. Sounds like Jamie Hewlett will be hanging out there for the duration. Here's the blurb:
After a long gestation and a torturous birth, the no-holds-barred Gorillaz autobiography Rise of the Ogre is out now. To celebrate the launch Gorillaz will be occupying an empty store on London's South Bank on Friday 27th October. The Gorillaz Pop-Up Shop will sell nothing but limited editions of Rise of the Ogre and will be open for one day only, from 1pm to 5pm on Friday. Visit the shop to pick up your special copy: Unit 9 Festival Walk, Royal Festival Hall, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX. (SHOULD WE PUT IN A CRYPTIC NOTE ABOUT JAMIE & CASS BEING THERE??) Gorillaz will also have a more permanent presence at the South Bank; images from Rise of the Ogre will be plastered all over the Festival Hall from this week for the next three months.For those of you not able to make it to the South Bank shop, the official Gorillaz shop is offering you the opportunity to try and win one of 50 editions of Rise of the Ogre signed by Gorillaz designer Jamie Hewlett and cohort Cass Browne when you purchase a copy. Buy yours here.
We're rather liking Herculean, the first single from the album The Good, The Bad and The Queen, the latest project from Blur frontman and Gorillaz vocalist Damon Albarn. (You can check them out at MySpace here.)
He's teamed up with Paul Simonon from The Clash (who did the single's artwork, above), as well as Afrobeat percussionist Tony Allen, Simon Tong from The Verve, and Gorillaz producer Danger Mouse; and they're playing a gig at Camden's Roundhouse on 26th October to preview the album.
The gig is part of the BBC's Electric Proms, a collection of gigs in London from 25 to 29 October, including Paul Weller, The Magic Numbers, James Brown, Seth Lakeman, Fatboy Slim, Kasabian, and well heck, a host of other names. You can still get some tickets from the site, via a lucky dip system, so head over there sharpish if you fancy trying your luck.
Just been reading the Guardian Technology section (every Thursday, deeply pleasurable if you're in any way geeky), and it mentions this rather fantastic website, Fab Channel.
It's basically an on-going archive of gigs filmed at a venue in Amsterdam, but it's the quality of the artists that makes it really stand out. We had a quick browse and found Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, Damien Rice, Echo & The Bunnymen, Editors and Richard Ashcroft. You can either listen to an entire gig right through, or create your own mix-tape of songs from various gigs. As they say on the site: "We record, you choose". Fantastic.
And that got us looking back at Pandora again. It's been around for some time, but for those of you who haven't experienced it, go take a look. You just select a song or band that you love, and it creates a radio station playing tracks that are similar (based on some devilishly clever algorithms). You can then rate the songs it plays, so that it continually refines it's understanding of what music rocks your world. It's like having a radio station that plays just the sort of stuff you love, playing some stuff you'll already know, as well as stuff you've never heard of. Also fantastic.
Oof. So we wandered over to the Hammersmith Apollo last night to see Radiohead, and they were on fantastic form. They played a mix of old and new stuff, with Let Down, Iron Lung and Karma Police being standout tracks. Thom Yorke was even dancing – seems like he might have got a bit of inspiration from his new side project, an album called The Eraser, out on July 12.
Favourite moment – Thom Yorke doing an acoustic track at the piano during the encore. Some drunken fool in the audience starts shouting out, and Yorke mumbles out "Shut up ya cunt" to mass applause from the rest of the audience. Drunken fool shuts up.
We went to see Hard-Fi at Brixton Academy last night, and had a jolly splendid time with the chaps from Staines. We can highly recommend downloading Move On Now and Tied Up Too Tight. Billy Bragg was there as the support act, and even called us all 'Brothers and Sisters', which felt warm and cosy.
And, in a week of big musical fun, we're off to see Radiohead at the Hammersmith Apollo on Thursday, which has got us frankly very excited (and not a little smug). It's supposed to be a set of classic tracks and new ones from their forthcoming album.
We were down at the South Bank on Friday evening, where a series of Jamie Hewlett's Gorillaz videos were being projected onto the wall of the National Theatre as part of the Inside Out festival down there. It was a tad nippy, but the animations looked great shown at that size.
Here's hoping for either (a) a Gorillaz live tour some time soon, (b) a Gorillaz movie, or (c) an animated version of the Tank Girl movie, to eradicate the memory of the terrible live-action version. Or heck, all three would be great.
(Thanks to our mate Pete for the second of the two shots above.)
Rather much liking this very much right now, for listening to. Click on the picture to find out more about them.
