Not sure how I missed these guys.
You all need to look in the mirror and ask yourselves if you’re providing me sufficient exposure to all the good bands I need.
Here’s Your Chance
I know Monkeystador has been trying to attract Pussy Riot’s attention for awhile. Well, they’re playing in Tulsa!
You know it’s true because you read it in Pitchfork!
Pussy Riot will receive the Woody Guthrie Prize in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 6, and perform at the city’s Cain’s Ballroom that evening. The prize is given annually to an artist who “best exemplifies Guthrie’s spirit and work by speaking for the less fortunate through music, film, literature, dance or other art forms and serving as a positive force for social change.” The ceremony is part of the Woody Guthrie Center’s 10th anniversary celebration, which takes place from May 5 to 7.
Tulsa is a fun town. Surprisingly hip. We can go to the Dylan Archives while we’re there.
Kate Clover
Enjoy. We need more concerts in Los Angeles storm drain canals.
Power Trio
So excited to see three of my, like, four favorite muppets in the same band.
When You Hustle, You Gotta Have A Hard Shell
Pistols Ephemera Up For Auction At Sotheby’s
Check out all this cool stuff! By the way, that’s an Animation City single-cel composite for The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, c. 1978 (Estimate: 1,500 – 2,000 GBP).
From The Guardian …
If Pistol, Danny Boyle’s recent TV series, was the story of a rock band, then this collection is the story of an idea: a collaborative multimedia art project in which Reid and McLaren, who met at Croydon art school, were at least as significant as Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious. “They all brought their own unique visions and the Sex Pistols was the pot that everyone threw everything into,” Stolper says. Many of the images, ostensibly created to promote gigs and records, hold up as artworks in their own right. You could see them without having heard a note of the Sex Pistols’ music and know that they represented a radically significant moment in British youth culture. “This is all at the service of something else,” Wilson says, “and working out what that something else is is the intriguing part of it.”
Bidding opens October 10.
The Soprano
Samuel Mariño is a rarity in opera: a true male soprano.
Rather than relying on falsetto as a countertenor would, Mariño, 28, is able to comfortably sing high notes with his chest voice. Now he is branching out from Baroque parts originally written for castrati.
“The teachers were trying to treat me as a countertenor. I had to sing lower when I could sing much higher. Being a countertenor is an established thing, and they were trying to put me into that box. Then, in 2017, I met Barbara Bonney. A friend told me that I sing very much like her. I wrote to her and said: “Hi. I’m Samuel and I want to take lessons with you.” I went to Salzburg, Austria, and Barbara was like a fairy godmother. She told me to sing how I speak, to just put notes to my speaking voice. And that is what I do today.”
Your new album starts with a famous Mozart aria written for a woman who is playing a man. What do you bring to the role as a male singer?
“My voice is a light lyric soprano, with a bit of coloratura. In the score, Cherubino is a soprano role, but today it’s for mezzo-sopranos and their male-ish colors. If you talk to any mezzo, they will tell you it’s very hard to sing Cherubino, because it’s quite high — not super high notes, but sitting all the time in a high tessitura. Cherubino is a young teenager, and I do him as a boy who is innocent and confused. It’s a totally different vision of how the role can be sung.”
I Hope They Consulted Fat Elvis
I haven’t watched many of these, and almost always prefer footage of the original artists to their biopics. From Vince Mancini’s The Academy Can’t Quit Biopics, Even When They’re Bad:
Biopics now seem to exist somewhere outside of movies, belonging more to public relations; flashy advertisements for their stars and validations of their subjects’ legacies. Missing is the expectation that we’re actually going to gain any insight about their subjects… So it is we’ve gotten decidedly un-illuminating, subject-friendly portrayals such as Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman.
Broadcast
Any of you bastards heard of them? Someone put me onto them last night. They were active from late 90’s to around 2011, when their singer passed away after catching H1N1 on tour. This song’s from their first album, The Noise Made By People, which is good. If you took Forever Changes, removed the Hispanic influence, added some delightfully creepy synths, and brought in a fifteen-year-old Nico to sing, then you might have something like this album. Or not.
Update from the rabbit hole: this one, from second album, sounds like Silver Apples, but with a far better singer.
New Memphis Power Pop
Delayed by the pandemic, of course. Your Academy is a Memphis supergroup of sorts, made up of likeminded middle-agers. I think the video’s been up a year but the vinyl is new. What a set of pipes on that Brandon McGovern! (I’ve always loved his voice.)
Extensive band bio and purchasing options on Bandcamp.