Nate Haduch

Along with Austin Brown, Andrew Savage serves as co-frontman of the great New York post-punk band Parquet Courts. And while their last album, 2016's Human Performance, was a breakup album of sorts, Savage's upcoming solo debut is all about untangling the mysteries of new love. Savage recorded Thawing Dawn in Brooklyn with members of … More »

exurb: a small, usually prosperous, community situated beyond the suburbs of a city.

Jason “Heynong Man” Mantzoukas is back to join Scott to talk about his new film The House, improvising alongside Amy Poehler and Will Ferrell, and horse rights. Then, senior class president nominee Jennifer Spot stops by to tell us about her platform and why we should vote for her. Plus, artist Jason Turley takes us through a couple of his adult coloring books that help beat the stress and heat.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 30, 2017 is:

fidelity • \fuh-DELL-uh-tee\  • noun

1 : the quality or state of being faithful

2 : accuracy in details : exactness

3 : the degree to which an electronic device (such as a record player, radio, or television) accurately reproduces its effect (such as sound or picture)

Examples:

"Fidelity to promises is a civic virtue at least dating back to ancient Greek and Roman ethics, and probably to the origins of society.… The idea that promises ought to be kept is one of our most intuitive and widely shared moral beliefs." — Khristy Wilkinson, The Chattanooga (Tennessee) Times Free Press, 29 Apr. 2017

"Perhaps some of you will recall that I didn't like Riverdale's pilot episode. Sometimes it's good to be proven wrong…. Perhaps fully suspending any sense of fidelity to the original comics allowed my opinion on the show to change." — Deborah Krieger, Pop Matters, 15 May 2017

Did you know?

You can have faith in fidelity, which has existed in English since the 15th century; its etymological path winds back through Middle English and Middle French, eventually arriving at the Latin verb fidere, meaning "to trust." Fidere is also an ancestor of other English words associated with trust or faith, such as fiduciary (which means "of, relating to, or involving a confidence or trust" and is often used in the context of a monetary trust) and confide (meaning "to trust" or "to show trust by imparting secrets"). Nowadays fidelity is often used in reference to recording and broadcast devices, conveying the idea that a broadcast or recording is "faithful" to the live sound or picture that it reproduces.

The annual Desert Daze festival is returning to Joshua Tree, California for four days of music in October. The first round of the lineup, which was announced today, includes Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile, Spiritualized, Panda Bear, John Cale, Ariel Pink, Atlas Sound, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Hope Sandoval + The Warm Inventions, Thurston Moore Group, … More »

St. Vincent has announced a new tour, presumably in anticipation of the follow-up to her 2014 self-titled album. It's called the "Fear The Future Tour," and it kicks off in October and runs through December. The news is accompanied by an announcement video, which you can check out below. More »

Following a lengthy hiatus and some apparent soul-searching from bandleader Robin Pecknold, Fleet Foxes aim for dramatic reinvention on their cerebral third LP, Crack-Up. When they debuted in 2008, they were widely designated as torchbearers of the burgeoning indie folk movement, but there was always an academic element to the Seattle band’s work that vaulted them into a class of their own. Their exultant vocal harmonies rose like a misty hybrid of the Beach Boys and Steeleye Span and their complex chamber pop arrangements recalled the autumnal splendor of the Zombies paired with the melodic complexity of early Yes.
On the band’s long-awaited third effort, it’s the latter of those two references that jumps to the fore as they deliver what is easily their most…

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…progressive album to date. Named for an essay by F. Scott Fitzgerald and bearing references to Spanish painter Francisco Goya, the American Civil War, sociopolitical anxiety, and inner-band strife, Crack-Up is dense and difficult, but ultimately rewarding. At the album’s vanguard is “I Am All That I Need/Arroyo Seco/Thumbprint Scar,” an ambitious three-part suite in which the familiar strains of Fleet Foxes’ trademark wall of harmonies become suddenly hijacked by crudely mumbled interludes and various forms of rhythmic and tonal dissonance. It’s a method employed throughout Crack-Up‘s 11 tracks, which seem to zig and zag through zones of chaos, fellowship, and transcendence as Pecknold the scholar unveils his strange architecture in layers of detail and nuance. That the nearly nine-minute centerpiece, “Third of May/Ōdaigahara,” was chosen as the album’s lead single says something about the availability of easily digestible material on Crack-Up, and yet its aspirations are the glue that holds it all together.

Orchestral, experimental, and more challenging than either of the band’s previous releases, it’s a natural fit for the Nonesuch label, whose heritage was built on such attributes. For Fleet Foxes, it represents a shift away from their more idyllic early days into a period of artistic growth and sophistication.

Podcasts about music tend to be pretty uneven and largely inessential. That's primarily because licensing fees make it prohibitively expensive to include actual music in podcasts. It's kind of unsatisfying to listen to people talking about a song without ever actually playing the damn song they're talking about. If writing about music is like More »

Evan Puschak looks at Reservoir Dogs 25 years after it was released and analyzes whether the film still holds up. I’m probably not giving anything away by saying his answer is “yes” (with a small caveat). I’ve probably watched that movie more than a dozen times, but I hadn’t seen it in 10-12 years before a viewing a few months ago. It is very much a first film, almost like a student film — it’s definitely no Pulp Fiction, but what is? — but all of the stuff that makes Tarantino Tarantino is very much in evidence.

I was way into Quentin Tarantino in the mid-90s. When I was designing my very first personal homepage, a large part of it was going to be a Tarantino fan page. There were already several QT fan pages on the web, but I thought I could do better. While I dropped the QT content and went in a slightly more creative direction with my page back then, I eventually ended up making that fan page after all.

Tags: Evan Puschak   movies   Quentin Tarantino   Reservoir Dogs   video

Scott celebrates 8 years of Comedy Bang! Bang! with his intern Gino Lambardo, Buddy Valastro aka The Cake Boss, and show favorites. We’ll hear from the writer/singer of America’s Funniest Home Videos theme song, a community activist & her world traveling sister, a construction worker, and many more special guests!This episode is brought to you by Squarespace (www.squarespace.com code: BANGBANG), Lyft (www.lyft.com/BANGBANG), Leesa.com (www.leesa.com code: BANGBANG), ZipRecruiter (www.ziprecruiter.com/cbb, and Capterra (www.capterra.com/BANGBANG).

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Take a closer look at how France voted in the first round of the 2017 election.

An entire album charting on the Hot 100 isn’t an extreme rarity in the streaming era. The Weeknd’s feckless Starboy accomplished the feat last December and Drake’s playlist More Life did the same in March. Kendrick Lamar is undoubtedly on their level of superstardom, so 13 of the 14 tracks charting on the … More »

French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron's political campaign was targeted by a group of Russian hackers last month, according to a report by a cybersecurity research group on Tuesday.

Plankton is a unique artistic collaboration between biologist Christian Sardet, visual artist Shiro Takatani and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto.

From 23 April – 22 May 2016, the three men debuted an art installation at Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art in Kyoto, Japan — as part of KYOTOGRAPHIE: International Photography Festival — showcasing Sardet’s unbelievable images of microscopic plankton paired with a video installation by Takatani and music composed by Sakamoto.

This release features the whole score composed by Sakamoto for this unique art installation. Elegant and astral, the aquatic soundscape conjures images of a vast ocean and the peaceful roll of the sea.

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01. Plankton (54:46)

As Britain lumbers towards Brexit, other parts of Europe seem to be weighing, electorally and otherwise, if the European Union is something worth keeping or whether it belongs on the trash heap of history next to The League of Nations and the Roman Empire. In this video, Kurzgesagt takes a look at some of the benefits and criticisms of the EU and considers whether the former outweigh the latter.

Tags: European Union   politics   video

A French artist who has spent three weeks sitting on 10 eggs hatched his first chick Tuesday.

Palberta are an all-female trio who play absurdist, fragmentary quasi-pop songs equally reminiscent of post-punk groups like the Raincoats and LiLiPUT as well as no wave bands like Mars and DNA. Their songs are playful and volatile, switching from playful, pre-pubescent glee to cathartic tantrums at barely a moment’s notice. All three members (Anina Ivry-Block, Lily Konigsberg, and Nina Ryser) switch instruments and combine vocals, which sound like the art-damaged offspring of the Roches. They’ve been making noise since they met as students at Bard College, and by this point they’ve released several albums and EPs on vinyl and cassette.
Bye Bye Berta is their debut for Wharf Cat Records after releases on the likeminded OSR Tapes and Feeding Tube Records, and it’s easily their…

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…most ambitious work yet, containing 20 tracks and much higher fidelity than their previous recordings. A few guest musicians join them, contributing baritone horn and bass (which is sometimes bowed). Except for a few more experimental pieces near the end of the disc, almost all of the songs are under two minutes, and many of them have basic lyrics consisting of a repeated phrase or two. Sometimes songs will start by barreling out of the gate, then quickly fizzle out. Others seem like audio games, such as “Trick Ya,” which gradually speeds up before toppling apart, with the group unable to avoid erupting into fits of laughter — but then the last half of the song consists of sparse plucking and scraping. A few tracks exhibit genuine moments of affection, such as “Why’d You Cry” and “Honey, Baby,” but then there are more intense, thrashy tracks like “Jaws” and “Sick.” Also, they throw in a slow, minute-long cover of “Stayin’ Alive,” with purposefully inaccurate lyrics, because why not? By “Get Around” they sound worn down, and the song trudges to four minutes, leading into tape collage experiment “Bells, Pt. A.” Then the album ends with “Filling Empty,” which starts out as another burst of hopscotch-punk before transforming into slow, backwards notes.

The recording console used to record Pink Floyd's 1972 classic Dark Side Of The Moon has just sold at auction for $1,807,500, Reverb reports. The 40-channel EMI TG12345 MK IV was custom-built by EMI engineers for the legendary Abbey Road Studios, and according to the Bonhams Auction House, it has also … More »

Chinese sculptor Lei Xue has made these crushed cans in the style of Ming dynasty pottery.

The pieces are part of an ongoing series titled Drinking Tea, and unlike the mechanical process of producing cans, each object is sculpted and painted by hand.

So good! See also the ingenious design of the aluminum beverage can.

Tags: art   Lei Xue

Little Orphan Blacks Kristian Bruun and Tatiana Maslany return this week to give the scoop on wrapping their hit show, the state of the Canadian military, and what it takes to get banned from Comic-Con. Then they reunite with man-woman radio combo Chazmin and Sunny to hear about the pair’s summer plans and the five reasons you never give a robot a human heart. Finally, Janice Cramps stops by to run down Scott’s godfather duties and to pick a father for her babies.This episode is brought to you by Fox Searchlight's "Wilson," Black Tux (www.blacktux.com/BANGBANG), Stamps.com (www.stamps.com code: BANGBANG), and Blue Apron (www.blueapron.com/cbb).

Great news, Master of None fans: Aziz Ansari just announced the season 2 premiere date. Ansari revealed on Twitter today that his Netflix comedy — which was renewed nearly a year ago — will return with new episodes on Friday, May 12th. Check out the teaser below, and read our review of the show’s debut […]

Last week, during the insanity of SXSW, a great record or two was always going to slip through the cracks. But I'm sorry to say that we completely slept on Glass, the new album from the Gainesville, Florida punk band UV-TV. The band plays a sort of sweet, melodic, ultra-hooky form of pop-punk, one that … More »

PC Worship are a few chromosomes shy of their own DNA strand. But the NYC band’s shakiness has long been key to their shredded charm. Since 2009, frontman Justin Frye has led shifting lineups through genre calisthenics rigorous enough that their repertoire encompasses way-out freak-flag jams, garage punk shimmy, and a Fraggle Rock cover, among other oddities. PC Worship stumble and shamble the way collectives like Harlem’s No-Neck Blues Band or Finland’s Avarus might if Captain Beefheart were sitting in. The PC Worship Experience is uncertain, splintered, alive, and never lacking in bristling forward momentum.
This makes the first song on Buried Wish a bit of a head-scratcher. No-tempo “Lifeless Rain on an Empty Moon” rubs together brass drones at…

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…peculiar angles before a zig-zagging sample burst. It’s tranquil, if uneasily so. Revisit the opening cuts from 2013’s Beat Punk, 2014’s Social Rust, or 2015’s Basement Hysteria—this is a sedate starting-point for PC Worship, signaling Frye’s move towards a more spacious sound.

Buried Wish does find moments to rollick. Stoner metal dirge “Back of My $$$” crawls forward like lava under the weight of gnashing guitars. Grease fire psychedelia and 1980s Lower East Side scum-rock collide on the sneering, accessible “Blank Touch.” Almost everywhere else here, though, the band embraces the spare or the stripped back.“Tranq,” a piano curio that morphs into a pummeling krautrock interlude, achieves the effect of its title.

The title track gently hoists a sitar-like frequency higher and higher up into the stratosphere before allowing it to plummet back down to earth in a storm of effects. Vertiginously anemic, the delirious “Help” thumbtacks atonal string whinny with spoken word. “Torched” carpets spindled guitars with constantly erupting drum rolls, like Standards-era Tortoise sound-checking. The cumulative tone at work here—aided by sharp production and stark arrangements—is one of calm, wary digression.

“Perched on the Wall” and “Flowers & Haunting” mark Buried Wish’s most radical departures, foregrounding Frye’s weary, blunt voice. Stung by glancing electric blues riffs, “Perched” stumbles and lurches languidly, a dazed quest for meaning that may or may not be there to be found. “Flowers & Hunting” strands Frye with an acoustic guitar and a pedestrian field recording to plaintively string together one daft couplet after another: “Unfortunate, and pleading/Incapable of breathing/Enraged and retreating.” The words mumble and tumble out, honest and pure in a way that mirrors, if inversely, his band’s splayed-tone. On the darkest of days, they’ll bear repeating.

Back in 2014, I posted that Norway would start using new banknotes in 2017 featuring an abstract pixelated design on the reverse of each note. Time did the only thing it knows how to do so here we are in 2017 and the bills will begin circulating later this year. The overall theme for the notes is “The Sea”:

Norway’s long, gnarled coastline has shaped the identity of Norwegians individually and as a nation. The use of marine resources, combined with the use of the sea as a transport artery, has been crucial to the development of Norwegian society.

And each particular note has its own subtheme:

The 50-krone banknote: The sea that binds us together
The 100-krone banknote: The sea that takes us out into the world
The 200-krone banknote: The sea that feeds us
The 500-krone banknote: The sea that gives us prosperity
The 1000-krone banknote: The sea that carries us forward

The final design concept by Terje Tønnessen was chosen from among several finalists. I love the final design but also really like the concept by Aslak Gurholt with a children’s drawing on the back of each note echoing the illustration on the front.

Also of note (ha!): Norges Bank crowdsourced several aspects of the design process but managed to do it in such a way as to avoid the Boaty McBoatface problem.

Tags: Aslak Gurholt   currency   design   Norway   Terje Tonnessen

Earlier this week, in his "Lavender" music video, Snoop Dogg shot Donald Trump. Except he didn't really shoot Trump; he just used one of those toy guns that has a flag with the word "bang" on it inside. And it wasn't really Trump, anyway; it was a clown version of Trump, in a music … More »

In addition to his non-stop music output, Ty Segall also paints. He’s opening his first-ever solo exhibition later this month at a performance space in Chicago. The exhibition is called Assterpiece Theater. “These aren't multi-media pieces; they are paintings, and Ty's belief in the promise of the color palette is as strong here as … More »

I was talking to Lou Reed the other day and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years. The sales have picked up in the past few years, but I mean, that record was such an important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought … More »

Jay Som is an impressionist. Taken as a whole, “Baybee,” a highlight from her debut Everybody Works, is a textured, painterly song, that exudes a pleasant warmth. The sounds she crafts here are allowed individual moments to shimmer or wiggle, and every word she utters is full and smooth. Jay Som’s music could loosely be described as shoegaze, but rather than forming one massive sound, each element could exist comfortably on its own. “Baybee,” is a wonderful example of how she can create a fully-fleshed world in just a few minutes. Though the attitude is light and sunny, and the groove fairly funky, thanks to noodly bass and glittering synth, “Baybee” is a song about sacrifice. “If I leave you alone/When you don’t feel right/I know we’ll sink for sure,” she sings. “I’ll play your game once more/If you don’t feel right,” adding a light, but cutting touch to finish the song. “Baybee” paints a hopeful scene, one that is worth soaking up.