We’re not a filter. We don’t pretend to be the first guys on the scene. We won’t find you the hot new band that’ll probably suck in two weeks time. What we do
Here’s the way I see it: Various webcasts and television channels brought us a constant stream of top-drawer artists rocking crowds across continents and oceans. How on (live) Earth could Al Gore’s latest invention be anything but entertaining for the average viewer? Every time I turned back to it someone relatively cool straddled the stage. The artists may not have given their best performances to date (understatement of the year), yet I still enjoyed the day/night in toto.
That’s not to say I understood the point of this grandiose endeavor. Why would you fly hundreds of artists more than 220,000 miles around the world to make an old point everyone’s been hearing already for years? Will Lenny Kravitz and his directive of letting love rule really get me to take a shorter shower? Still, a global concert’s a global concert, and I ain’t complaining.
So read on after the jump for a slew of videos from yesterday’s intergalactic, 24-hour Live Earth concert, and check out what you may have missed. But before you do that, watch this backstage interview with the specially re-united Spinal Tap — did Rob Reiner just say Al Gore invented The Tap Reunion?
I thought of a great band name this weekend: Ethnic Cleanser. If you’re an aspiring band, go ahead and steal it. I’m totally cool with that. On a separate note,
As the Yankees and Angels get started on weekend beisbol, now’s the time to drop this week’s outro. This clip combines two of our favorite things: kids kicking ass and
It’s Uncle Neddy’s mix tape time, so let’s all gather ’round the campfire and listen to what our main man has in store for us this week… We all have
The good people at Destructoid are offering us the first view of Rock Band [via Gamespot], the new Guitar Hero game from Harmonix, MTV and Electronic Arts that’s sure to
Our good friend Neddy likes good music, and he wants you good folks to like good music as well. So listen to him when he preachifies about The Bad Plus.
I’ve run out of fingers counting the number of times I’ve seen The Bad Plus in the last few years, and I don’t have enough toes to count the ways in which they continue to diverge from the prototypical jazz trio. What’s left to say? And yet, each viewing brings new wrinkles and reaffirmations: They’re just really, really good.
This time around, the first twist was that they’d left the Village Vanguard and the other jazz clubs of Manhattan behind and took their act to a rock club, the Highline Ballroom, which got all dressed up like a big ol’ jazz hall. I’ve never been to the room before Saturday night and was impressed with the combination of coziness and comfort, the sight-lines and just about everything else besides the drink prices. Even though they had tables set up from front to back and forced a drink minimum on everyone, it still felt more like a rock club and one to which I’m looking forward to returning.
The Bad Plus came out nearly right on the dot of the scheduled start time of 8 pm and wasted no time getting their Bad-Plussiness on. The first tune, later identified as the new Blue Candy, felt almost like a warm-up than a typical TBP composition. It started out mercilessly slow and languid, without too much melodic form or anything else to grab onto; it almost felt like pure improv, actually.
A minute later, it zigged then zagged and all of the sudden it was too fast, like a roller coaster cresting over the initial ascent. I should have known it was a Dave King tune, the drummer whose compositions increasingly experiment with rhythmic structure — experiments whose goal seems to be the experimentation itself, like a warped kid discovering how many different ways they can kill bugs.
Read on for more of Neddy’s fanboy review of the Bad Plus at Highline…
The imcomparable and unintelligible Dr. John boasts a long list of impressive live collaborations, adding his patented brand of voodoo hoodoo to the likes of Eric Claption, The Band, The
Twenty-seven of you have entered our Win Free Ducats & Spin With Hippies in the Minnesota Summer contest. Here’s your last reminder before the giveaway concludes Thursday at midnight —
It was supposed to be Apple’s finest hour, but this weekend’s absurdly hyped launch of the iPhone brought some serious complications for Steve “Mock Turtlenecks Rock” Jobs. Customers lit up
