Sleigh Bells Interview

Sometimes the hype machine accelerates out of all control. Take Brooklyn based two-piece Sleigh Bells, for example. Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss formed the band with a love of pop structure, hip-hop oriented grooves and a heavily overdriven guitar sound in mind, all topped off with the ballsiest female vocals you’ll hear this side of a Bikini Kill record. The band was suddenly ubiquitous after a few CMJ shows in 2009, with blogs, print media and fellow musicians striving to be affiliated with the group—all achieved without Sleigh Bells actually releasing a record.

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Sweet Apple - Love & Desperation: Review

Sweet Apple’s Love & Desperation promises much. Firstly, there’s the fact that it’s the debut collaboration between J. Mascis, Dave Sweetapple from retro metalheads Witch, and Tim Parnin and John Petkovic from glitzy punk band Cobra Verde. Then there’s that album cover, which appears to be an attempt to recreate Roxy Music’s Country Life sleeve with a couple of Suicide Girls. Throw in the touching story of Petkovic writing much of this material while overcoming the death of his mother, add the excellent leaked first single ‘Do You Remember’, and it appears we’re onto a winner. Right?

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The Fall - Your Future Our Clutter: Review

The pro forma approach to reviewing a new album by The Fall in the 21st century is to declare it a return to the band’s glory days, wherein Mark E Smith recruits a group of young bucks who really ‘get’ the groundwork laid down by the likes of Craig Scanlon and Steve Hanley, while simultaneously riddling Smith's lyrics with just the right amount of spit and bile. There won’t be any such claims for Your Future Our Clutter here. These are certainly strange times for The Fall — a lengthy gap between releases, a relatively stable band lineup, and even rumours that new label Domino rejected an earlier version of this album. But it would be difficult to call this a return to form when that ‘form’ has rarely ebbed since Are You Are Missing Winner in 2001.

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The Remarkable Career of Malcolm McLaren

The music world has lost one of its most influential, eccentric and (at times) maddening figures. Former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren passed away on April 8, and he continues to confound and confuse in death, much as he did in life-—the announcement of his demise was compounded by conflicting reports on the location of his passing, which could have been in a clinic in Switzerland, or may have been in New York City. Just one last little dab of chaos from a man who positively thrived on pulling a strange, raucous and compelling kind of beauty from disorder.

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The iPad and the Publishing Industry: A Match Made in Heaven?

Stephen Fry has posted a lovely reminiscence on the TIME website, which looks back on his early days playing with a Mac computer back in 1984. Fry and author Douglas Adams were the first two people to own Macintosh computers in England, and they would regularly meet up to exchange floppy discs and rearrange their desktop icons. The article discusses how those early dalliances with the Mac brand were the first time that computing had been a fun experience for both Fry and Adams—-something Steve Jobs and his team would ultimately build on as they produced the iPod and the iPhone. But expectations for the iPad, released this past weekend, inhabit some strange middle ground in the suite of Mac products, with a certain industry banking on it to blow some much needed air into the lungs of its failing business model.

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Malcolm McLaren R.I.P.

The music world lost one of its most charismatic figures yesterday (April 8) when former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren passed away. His influence spread far and wide, from work with the New York Dolls to the controversial near-nude pictures of 14-year-old Bow Wow Wow singer Annabella Lwin that decorated the band’s debut LP cover. McLaren also had a notable music career of his own, which principally centered on the 1983 Duck Rock album. The record helped spread the word about hip-hop to some far flung corners of the globe, and that work pinged right back to the United States as his “Buffalo Gals” single became a much-sampled staple. His other single from that album, “Double Dutch," paid warm tribute to a group of high-school age New York skipping champions, and remains a song of unbridled joy—it even pre-dates Vampire Weekend’s pilfering of “African” guitar rhythms by several decades.

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High Places Interview

Their origins may be in the still-thriving DIY scene in Brooklyn, but Mary Pearson and Rob Barber of High Places have always had a glassy pop edge to their music. Subtle stylistic shifts marked the transition from their earliest singles to their self-titled debut album, and further changes are afoot on the new High Places vs. Mankind. Their live set now features plenty of guitar playing from the pair, occasional vocal interjections from Mary’s sister, Laura, and even that most un-punk rock of instruments—the bassoon. DiS called High Places in their adopted home of Los Angeles, where we spoke about Judas Priest and Saturday Night Fever, their work on Liars’ Sisterworld, and how they felt about moving from New York to California.

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High Places - High Places vs Mankind: Review

High Places were always something of an anomaly in the Brooklyn scene. If music and art is intrinsically linked to the environment in which it is made, Rob Barber and Mary Pearson took one look at their surroundings and veered in the polar opposite direction. They appeared to be using their bucolic take on electronic music as a means of primitive escapism, as a way of wiping the grime of New York from their faces, to disappear for an hour or so into songs flooded with a rustic, agrarian light that you could never find in the city.

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