Archive: 2005

Baltimore Gas & Electric) must have experienced a huge power spike, due largely to the massive array of pedals and effect boards the band had strewn across the stage.

Now that frontman Rivers Cuomo has completed a semester of school at Harvard University, the track list for Weezer’s new album is “97% settled,” according to the band’s official Web site. The as-yet-untitled set is due in May via Geffen; first single “Beverly Hills” will hit U.S. radio outlets in late March.

The selection process is nearing completion thanks to “some heavy listening sessions between the band and producer/mentor Rick Rubin,” the site reports. “A few songs got swapped out and switched around, and there is high confidence in the final selection, which now includes a few songs from the late ’03 recording sessions that were originally left behind in favor of the new sessions in July-October ’04.”

Cuomo still has to complete his vocals for three songs, at which point the album will be ready for mixing.

As previously reported, Weezer earlier this week announced its first show since late 2002, which will come on the first day of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., on April 30. A full North American and European tour is expected to follow.

Source billboard.com.

Is music something you own or something you rent?

How music fans answer that question in coming months will help determine the viability of a new slate of online music services that offer to fill portable music players with an unlimited number of songs for a monthly fee.

While the music subscription approach has grown in recent years, far more music fans have opted to buy songs by the track, a business model popularized by Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes Music Store and its hugely successful iPod portable player.

But the release late last year of new copy-protection software from Microsoft Corp. may begin to change that. The software frees subscribers to move their rented tracks from their computers to certain portable music players.

The system works by essentially putting a timer on the tracks loaded on the player. Every time the user connects the player to the PC and the music service, the player automatically checks whether the user’s subscription is still in effect. Songs stop playing if the subscription has lapsed. If the user doesn’t regularly synch up the player with the service, the songs go dead as well.

“This is potentially the first serious challenge that the iPod is going to face,” said Phil Leigh, president of Tampa, Fla.-based Inside Digital Media. “What these devices are going to be able to do is attack iPod where it’s weak.”

Several online music purveyors see portability as selling point that can lure consumers to their subscription services. Forrester Research projects music subscription revenues will more than double this year to $240 million, largely because of portability.

RealNetworks, MusicNow and MusicNet, which distributes its service through brands like America Online and Cdigix, all have plans to launch portable subscription services this year or early 2006 at the latest.

Napster LLC and F.Y.E., another MusicNet distributor, began offering portable subscriptions late last year through the Windows Media Player software, code named Janus.

Napster plans to turn up the heat on Apple with a $30 million advertising campaign debuting during Sunday’s Super Bowl to promote a relaunch of its portable subscription service, dubbed Napster To Go.

“This is really the first subscription service supporting Janus that’s going out in a big way,” said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research. “Napster is charging a lot harder than the rest of them.”

Napster’s service is $14.95 a month

In the wake of an unfinished copy of his new album leaking onto the Internet last month, Beck will offer fans a bounty of reasons to purchase the real deal. Due March 29 via Interscope, “Guero” will be released as a standard CD, a double-disc package with two videos and a 5.1 audio mix and a third edition featuring four remixes.

Videos for “E-Pro” and “Black Tambourine” will be included on the double-disc set, while Boards Of Canada, Octet, Dizzee Rascal and, as first reported here, Royksopp, contribute the remixes on the third package.

On Tuesday (Feb. 1), Beck quietly unveiled the “Hell Yes” EP on Apple’s iTunes Music Store, featuring remixes of the title track and “Que Onda Guero” by 8-bit and remixes of “E-Pro” and “Girl” by Paza. A video for “Hell Yes” directed by Mumbleboy is also available on iTunes.

Beck has yet to confirm tour dates in support of “Guero,” but he played his second surprise show in recent weeks last Friday at Echo in Los Angeles, which featured a number of tracks from the new album.

Source billboard.com.

Galactic has announced dates for their 2005 Midwest Tour which will span the Southeast and Midwest beginning at the end of March. Some very special supporting acts are scheduled to join the band throughout. For the opening dates, Galactic will be joined by New Orleans underground hip hop collective, the Media Darling showcase. On April 8 and 9th the band will return for their now customary two-night stand at Denver, Colorado’s Fillmore theatre. As in the past, these shows will feature incredible supporting acts as Galactic will welcome Toots and the Maytals for the first night and then Maceo Parker on the second. Please stay tuned to the Galactic web site for additional tour support announcements.

Galactic Spring 2005 Tour:
3.29.05 | Headliner’s | Louisville, KY
3.30.05 | Blue Cat’s | Knoxville, TN
3.31.05 | The Orange Peel | Asheville, NC
4.01.05 | The Odeon | Cleveland, OH
4.02.05 | Vic Theatre | Chicago, IL
4.03.05 | The Vogue Theatre | Indianapolis, IN
4.05.05 | Barrymore Theatre | Madison, WI
4.06.05 | Cabooze | Minneapolis, MN
4.07.05 | Rococo Theatre | Lincoln, NE
4.08.05 | The Fillmore | Denver, CO
4.09.05 | The Fillmore | Denver, CO
4.10.05 | Granada Theater | Lawrence, KS
4.12.05 | Mississippi Nights | St. Louis, MO
4.13.05 | Cain’s Ballroom | Tulsa, OK
4.14.05 | Juanita’s | Little Rock, AK
4.15.05 | Workplay Theatre | Birmingham, AL

The Slip have announced that they will be playing three shows in Japan in February. This is their fifth trip to Japan.

Japan Tour

-Feb 18th at Shibuya O’east in Shibuya Tokyo.
-Feb 19th – catching the break at the Greenroom Festival
(“surf rock event”)in Yokohama Osanbashi Hall
-Feb. 20th the first show in the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto at MOJO WEST

Timo Shanko will be joining the band on saxaphones.

The nonpareil blues, country and bluegrass-fusion brilliance of the
Codetalkers can be traced to its legendary featured player, the
ursine, craggy-voiced guitarist and “godfather of Southern
alternative music,” Col. Bruce Hampton.

Former Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus will release his third solo album May 24 via Matador. The 11-track “Face the Truth” includes the track “It Kills,” a live version of which was recorded with his backing band, the Jicks, and released last fall on Matador’s “At Fifteen” compilation.

“I did more of it myself, a little bit like the old Pavement records,” Malkmus told Billboard.com last September. “Because the studio was in my basement, I took the helm. I pretty much engineered it myself; punching in with my toe, Todd Rundgren-style.”

A Matador spokesperson says the Jicks appear on four songs on the record, with bassist Joanna Bolme and drummer John Moen also contributing to some songs individually. Malkmus said last year that Moen “is featured quite prominently on a lot of stuff [like] backing harmonies. He did a great job.”

“Face the Truth” the follow-up to 2003’s “Pig Lib,” which debuted at No. 5 on Billboard’s Top Independent Albums chart. Because Malkmus is soon to become a first-time father, he will not tour extensively in support of the set but is confirmed to appear March 18 in Austin, Texas, as part of Matador’s showcase at the South by Southwest Music Festival.

In other news, Malkmus will appear on the first album in four years from Silver Jews, which is led by longtime friend/collaborator David Berman. The 15-track Drag City set will also feature guest spots by former Pavement members Bob Nastanovich and Steve West, singer/songwriter Bobby Bare Jr., former Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison and vocalist Azita, among others.

Here is the track list for “Face the Truth”:

“Invisible Bodies”
“Baby C’mon”
“Horslip”
“Mmmmm…”
“Loud Cloud Crowd”
“No More Shoes”
“Mama”
“Malediction”
“Pencil Rot”
“It Kills”
“I’ve Hardly Been”

Source billboard.com.

Three-time Grammy winner Lucinda Williams will release Live at the Fillmore, her first-ever live album, on May 10th.

The two-disc set, recorded at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore Auditorium last year during her World Without Tears tour, features twenty-two tracks from Williams’ twenty-five-plus-year career. Included in the set list are “Change the Locks,” from 1988’s Lucinda Williams and later recorded by Tom Petty; “Pineola,” a poignant song about a family friend’s suicide from 1992’s Sweet Old World; and “Those Three Days,” from Williams’ most recent studio album World Without Tears.

The Live at the Fillmore track listing:

Disc One:

Ventura
Reason to Cry
Fruits of My Labor
Out of Touch
Sweet Side
Lonely Girls
Overtime
Blue
Change the Locks
Atonement

Disc Two:

I Lost It
Pineola
Righteously
Joy
Essence
Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings
Are You Down
Those Three Days
American Dream
World Without Tears
Bus to Baton Rouge
Words Fell

Source rollingstone.com.

A milestone in the history of recorded music was marked on New Year’s Eve when Quantegy, the last company in the U.S. to manufacture the magnetic tape used for studio analog recording, shut its doors.

Analog recording has fallen by the wayside since the mid-Nineties, when faster, cheaper digital recording and editing programs such as Pro Tools became the norm. Still, die-hards — including Neil Young, Jackson Browne and producer Rick Rubin — swear by the natural sound of analog. “Digital has gotten really good, but it’s never going to be analog,” says Lou Reed. “People who want a vintage sound are going to have a problem.”

Quantegy’s closing caught most by surprise. “The news really freaked me out,” says Gov’t Mule’s Warren Haynes, whose band’s current album, Deja Voodoo, was recorded almost entirely in analog. “There’s no other way to get that warm sound.” The Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch worries that a valuable way of thinking about music will be lost. “With digital you might look at the sound waves and see that the bass player is a little behind the drummer and move some of those notes to make it look tighter,” he says. “But with tape you might listen to that same performance and just think, ‘That bass player has a nice feel.'”

As the news spread, analog tape reels hit eBay, and tape vendors were besieged with phone calls. ATR Services, which makes and services analog gear, has plans to launch a line of tape by summer. “There’s still a solid base of customers for analog,” says Michael Spitz, ATR’s owner. “But any company making it needs to realize it’s not the de facto recording choice anymore.”

In addition to concerns about digital music’s sound quality, questions have been raised about archiving it. “I get folks coming in here with waterlogged boxes of analog tape where there’s actual mildew on the reels, and we can still clean them up and get them to sound great,” says John Nicholson, owner of Hilltop Studios, the longest-running studio in Nashville. “You show me a hard drive that can handle that.”

Source rollingstone.com.

Big Joe Burrell, the gregarious saxophone player who towered over Burlington’s music scene for three decades, died Wednesday morning from complications following abdominal surgery. He was 80.

Burrell learned from Count Basie and B.B. King and passed his knowledge on to a new generation of musicians including Trey Anastasio of Phish. His sweet sax drifted into the ears of untold thousands across the world, across the country and across Vermont after the Michigan native arrived in Burlington in 1976. His reach went as far as blues festivals in Europe and as close to home as Halvorson’s Upstreet Cafe on Church Street, where he played every Thursday.

He was an imposing physical presence, but with his cherubic face, large spectacles and larger smile, he was a friendly presence, too, quick to support any charity event in town.

Burrell was big in name, big in size and big in reputation. If the Burlington music scene had a patriarch, a Jedi jazz master, it was Big Joe Burrell.

“He fell in love with Burlington a few years ago, and Burlington fell in love with him, and we were really blessed to have him in our community,” said Chuck Eller of Charlotte, who played for years with Burrell in the Unknown Blues Band.

Burrell entered Fletcher Allen Health Care last month for abdominal surgery and developed respiratory problems. He died about 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, a week shy of his 81st birthday. Burrell, who will be cremated, didn’t want a funeral; Eller said he is organizing a musical tribute likely to take place in May on a Thursday night – “the Big Joe day of the week.”

Source burlingtonfreepress.com.

Upon entering the Tower, I was immediately floored by the gothic architecture, the lavish lobby, and the wide marble steps leading up to the second floor. At some point during the show I remember stopping and finally soaking in my surroundings, and thought to myself,

The Secret Machines are still defining what their live shows can potentially transgress to, while finding their stage voice as a headliner. This building period is an exciting step forward for an act that is almost guaranteed to be huge upon the release of their next album. Thriving on delivering a fresh taste of rock n

The 5th Annual Jammys Awards will be held on April 26th, once again at The Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Fan voting will begin on February 18th. More info on performers and details will be released shortly on jammys.com.

So many bands come along these days and smash through the genre descriptions and make it difficult for people to recommend or describe without actually hearing it. This problem however, is not present when describing The Explosion.

Rapper Lyrics Born will offer up five new songs and eight remixes on “Same !@#$ Different Day,” due April 26 via Quannum. Among those lending a hand are producer Dan “The Automator” Nakamura on “I’m Just Raw,” DJ Shadow and Joyo Velarde on “Over You,” KRS One and Dilated Peoples’ Evidence on “Pack Up,” Morcheeba on “Stop Complaining” and Lateef the Truth Speaker on “The Last Trumpet.”

The source material for the remixes was tracks from Lyrics Born’s 2003 Quannum album “Later That Day,” which reached No. 40 on Billboard’s Top Independent Albums chart. The single “Callin’ Out,” which is remixed by Casual and E-40 on the new collection, is currently heard in a commercial for Diet Coke featuring actor Adrien Brody.

Lyrics Born will be featuring the tracks on his spring tour, which gets underway Feb. 24 in San Francisco.

Source billboard.com.

Reid Genauer, Assembly of Dust’s lead vocalist and primary songwriter, has been dubbed by critics as “one of the most vital voices, singers, storytellers and songwriters in today’s live music scene.”

For The Honest Hour (Hybrid Recordings, September 2004), Genauer and AOD keyboardist Nate Wilson co-wrote five of the album’s nine original songs, and the album proves the Genauer/Wilson collaboration is a more-than worthwhile pairing. AOD’s distinctive “hick funk” style sets up the album’s best songs as “instant classics,” while the genuine songwriting and storytelling maintains all of the edgy and fresh appeal of today’s most popular singer/songwriters.

All the songs on The Honest Hour were recorded live at Revolution Hall in Troy, NY in 2004, and the collection boasts both the open-sky breeziness and energy of a live show and the pristine production of a studio album. AOD also features bassist/backing vocalist John Leccese (Percy Hill), drummer Andy Herrick (Moon Boot Lover), and guitarist/backing vocalist Adam Terrell (Groovechild).

Assembly of Dust will begin their spring tour tomorrow, with more dates being added. The current list of tour dates is as follows:

2/2 Maxwells, Hoboken, NJ *Reid Solo*
2/3 World Cafe Live, Philly, PA *Acoustic Band*
2/4 Mexicali Blues, Teaneck, NJ
2/5 Recher Theater, Towson, MD *Open for North Mississippi Allstars*
2/10 Fox Theater, Boulder, CO *Reid and Adam Acoustic*
2/11 Frites Edwards, CO *Reid and Adam Acoustic*
2/12 Cervantes Ballroom, Denver, CO *Reid and Adam Acoustic*
3/3 Acoustic Cafe *Reid Solo*
3/4 Higher Ground, Burlington, VT
3/5 Revolution Hall, Troy, NY
4/8 Knitting Factory, NYC, NY
4/9 Knitting Factory, NYC, NY
4/20 Lupos, Providence, RI *Open for Ratdog*
4/23 Orpheum Theater
5/1 Johnson State, Vermont

Jack Johnson and some of his best musical friends will drop in on Hawaii in April for the second Kokua Festival. The shows will be held April 13 in Oahu and April 16 in Honolulu and will feature performances by Johnson, Jackson Browne, G. Love and Special Sauce, Ozomatli, John Cruz and slack key guitarist Kawika Kahiapo with his band Kaukahi.

Proceeds from the shows will benefit the Kokua Hawaii Foundation, which works to preserve Hawaii’s natural environment. Some funds have been earmarked to expand recycling programs in schools, sponsor field trips and curriculum development and establish a healthy school lunch program.

Local environmental groups will be on hand at both shows, which will also offer local organic food vendors, childrens’ activities and goods purveyed by environmentally friendly, Hawaii-based companies.

Tickets go on sale Feb. 12 via Ticketmaster, but a limited number of pre-sale tickets will be available beginning Feb. 7 via Johnson’s official Web site.

As previously reported, Johnson will release a new album, “In Between Dreams,” March 1 via Brushfire/Universal. Ben Harper appears in the video for first single “Sitting, Waiting, Wishing.”

Source billboard.com.& F

The surviving members of Alice In Chains will regroup for the first time since 1996 at a Feb. 18 tsunami benefit in Seattle. Jerry Cantrell, Sean Kinney and Mike Inez will be joined by as-yet-unannounced vocalists for the event at the Premiere nightclub, which will also feature performances by Heart’s Ann Wilson, Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic, Queensryche’s Chris DeGarmo and rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot.

Proceeds will be donated to the humanitarian organization CARE, which will funnel them into Asian tsunami relief efforts. Tickets go on sale Thursday (Feb. 3) via the Web site of event sponsor KRQI-Seattle.

Source billboard.com.

As bassist for 80s garage post punkers, The Replacements, Tommy Stinson helped forge the path for everyone from Wilco to Nirvana. Now he’s busy once again, this time with Guns ‘N Roses and another solo album – Village Gorilla Head