Nate Haduch

Back in November, Seeso ordered a new series from Tim Baltz and Ted Tremper called Shrink, and the streaming network just released the first trailer. Baltz stars in the show as “a recent medical school graduate who loses his residency and finds himself unemployed with a half million dollars of student loan debt. With his […]

The Chainsmokers, the self-proclaimed "Nickelback of EDM," unleashed the musical apocalypse last week by releasing their Coldplay collaboration "Something Just Like This." This week, the song jumped into the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, taking residence alongside the duo's other chart-mainstays "Paris" and "Closer." The Chainsmokers are now one of only … More »

There was a time -- not so long ago, though it feels ancient in terms of internet hype cycles -- when Future seemed destined to become a pop star. That time was early 2014, during the lead-up to his sophomore album, Honest. After ascending through Atlanta's mixtape circuit with street hits like "Tony Montana," "Magic," … More »

The 3rd of May is an important date in Fleet Foxes history. Six years ago, on that day, they released their last album, Helplessness Blues. In the time since, the band’s members have released solo music, started side projects, or departed the group altogether. Less obviously, May 3rd is also the birthday of founding member, guitarist Skyler Skjelset, who is the focus of Fleet Foxes’ new song “Third of May / Ōdaigahara.”

The band’s first single from their forthcoming record Crack-Up is a sober reflection on how Robin Pecknold and Skjelset’s relationship has endured success. With this issue serving as a guiding subject, Fleet Foxes present their longest and most experimental number yet. Though it’s full of all the qualities Fleet Foxes fans savor (sprawling crescendos, bellowed introspection, bucolic imagery), it feels evolved. What begins as a traditional Fleet Foxes song slowly transforms into a mournful, mystical instrumental. They retain the grand orchestration of their past work, but rather than sticking to one tone, the track dissolves into several acts across it’s nearly nine minutes: contemplation, melancholy, chaos, and resolution. Meanwhile, Pecknold’s lyrics take a similarly elaborate turn: “Aren’t we made to be crowded together, like leaves,” he sings. To him, their long friendship is as innate as seasons changing, but its absence is dire (“If I lead you through the fury, will you call to me?”). Fleet Foxes songs have certainly been devastating before, but never has their sensation of warmth been so wrapped in uncertainty.

The world has changed drastically since the days of Helplessness Blues. How do Fleet Foxes fit into a musical landscape where Bon Iver can make an electronic record and the Lumineers can sell out MSG? Fleet Foxes are literally out of the woods now that Pecknold resides in New York City, but they still choose to embrace nature’s aura. Instead of sounding like anachronisms, Pecknold and Skjelset dig into the past to find a way forward. On “Third of May / Ōdaigahara,” Fleet Foxes show that they can open themselves to an expanding world without losing themselves in the process.

 

Beloved New Jersey jangle-rockers Real Estate are returning next week with In Mind, their first album since 2014's Atlas and their first since the departure of founding guitarist Matt Mondanile. We've already heard lovely, chiming first single "Darling" and previewed "Two Arrows," and now they've shared "Stained Glass," yet another very good … More »

"Love"-ers Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust join Scott to talk about grilling auditionees for their show and why fire hydrants belong in the New No-Nos. Plus, children's entertainer Big Chunky Bubbles returns to discuss his favorite chowders and the proper methods of meat sculpting. Finally, the gang plays the Comedy Bang Bang Dating Game to see which of the lucky men makes the perfect husband for Gillian. This episode is sponsored by HBO's "Jerrod Carmichael: 8," Seeso (www.seeso.com code: BANGBANG), Stamps.com (www.stamps.com code: BANGBANG), ZipRecruiter (www.ziprecruiter.com/cbb), and JackThreads.

For almost her entire career, Taylor Swift has released a new album every two years, like clockwork. Those albums arrive in late fall, just in time for the Christmas rush, and they are full of massive pop bangers that will be utterly inescapable for nearly the next year. She did this for five albums -- … More »

Congratulations to Spotify! Today the streaming service hit 50 million paid subscribers, just a little over five months after reaching 40 million last fall. Beyond this latest milestone, the company is reportedly set to launch a Hi-Fi music tier, which would provide lossless CD-quality audio to listeners similar to what Tidal's been … More »

A campaign to make Barack Obama the president of France is gathering steam... but why?

The car that Tupac Shakur was in when he was shot in 1996 is now up for sale, as the Associated Press reports. The 1996 BMW 750iL that once belonged to Suge Knight has appeared on the website of California memorabilia dealer Moments In Time with an asking price of $1.5 million. It's … More »

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for February 19, 2017 is:

bemuse • \bih-MYOOZ\  • verb

1 : to make confused : puzzle, bewilder

2 : to occupy the attention of : distract, absorb

3 : to cause to have feelings of wry or tolerant amusement

Examples:

She had neither asked for nor expected her newfound celebrity, and was bemused by all the attention she was receiving.

"I have no interest in bemusing an audience or puzzling an audience. I don't think my plays are difficult. When they're spoken of in those terms, I'm always surprised." — Tom Stoppard, quoted in The San Francisco Chronicle, 10 Oct. 2016

Did you know?

In 1735, British poet Alexander Pope lamented, in rhyme, being besieged by "a parson much bemus'd in beer." The cleric in question was apparently one of a horde of would-be poets who plagued Pope with requests that he read their verses. Pope meant that the parson had found his muse—his inspiration—in beer. That use of bemused harks back to a 1705 letter in which Pope wrote of "Poets … irrecoverably Be-mus'd." In both letter and poem, Pope used bemused to allude to being inspired by or devoted to one of the Muses, the Greek sister goddesses of art, music, and literature. The lexicographers who followed him, however, interpreted "bemus'd in beer" as meaning "left confused by beer," and their confusion gave rise to the first modern sense of bemused above.

French far-right leader and presidential candidate Marine Le Pen on Friday furiously rejected reports that she has admitted to giving her bodyguard a fake job as a European parliamentary aide.

There's nothing quite like a Michelin star to boost interest in your establishment - and that's exactly what the team at a down to earth roadside cafe in central France learned this week.

Michael Bolton's Big, Sexy Valentine's Day Special is coming to Netflix on 2/7, and the trailer looks... nuts. Bolton stars alongside an impressive number of guests, including Maya Rudolph, Fred Armisen, Will Forte, Sarah Silverman, Eric Andre, Casey Wilson, Randall Park, Michael Sheen, Adam Scott, and Chris Parnell. To top it all off, Andy Samberg … More »

Ryan Adams has announced a ridiculously elaborate box set for his forthcoming album, Prisoner, which will be released on 2/17. It contains 12 separate 7"'s -- one for each of the album's tracks -- that feature 17 previously unreleased B-sides and unique artwork for all of them. The box set will also contain a 2-D … More »

Moving from their usual homes Subtext and Raster- Noton to the Chicago-based label Thrill Jockey, experimental electronic duo Emptyset chart new territory with their fifth album, Borders.
Originally from Bristol, England, the duo of James Ginzburg (who has since relocated to Berlin, Germany) and Paul Purgas have received acclaim for their jarring, abrasive techno tracks as well as their ambitious projects involving recording inside a decommissioned nuclear power station (2013’s Material) and bouncing high-frequency radio signals off the ionosphere (2015’s Signal).
With Borders, the duo forgoes digital processing and sequencing, instead creating music from self-built instruments, including a drum and a six-stringed object similar to a zither, as well as…

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…analog electronics used to alter and shape the sound. The duo experiments with timbre rather than melody, usually sticking to one or two notes and building up ominous drones or lapsing into stilted, lurching rhythms that struggle and occasionally seem to crash straight into the ground. Moving even further off the grid than on unhinged releases like 2013’s Recur, Emptyset recorded all of the pieces on Borders live, and it feels more spontaneous than anything else they’ve created. The duo’s recognizable heavy, fuzzy distortion is present, but there’s more of a thrashing, twanging sound here. Somehow it makes perfect sense that they’ve ended up on the same label as Lightning Bolt, although as intense as Emptyset are, their work is significantly more restrained. On some tracks, the duo mixes the unamplified, acoustic sound of its instruments with the blown-out distortion, lending the music more of an organic, handmade feel. The music is never less than tense and bracing, but it retains a hypnotic power. Completely dispensing with the conventions of dance music and embracing techniques more in tune with natural human rhythms, Emptyset have created one of their most unique works yet.

The psychedelic garage rock king Ty Segall makes a whole lot of music, so you probably will not be surprised to learn that he's got a new album coming out on Friday. Segall's new one is self-titled, and he recorded it with his Magick Band, which features Mikal Cronin, Emmett Kelly, Charles Moothart, and Ben … More »

It’s not particularly surprising to discover that the title of the latest Flaming Lips album came from a Polish book Wayne Coyne was “reading”; the sound of the words, and the imaginative leaps they might conjure up appealed. Plucking sense from a sea of confusion is the task The Flaming Lips have set their fans this time around.
On first impressions, Oczy Mlody is a confusing and frustrating listen with little in the way of melodies or hooks to grab on to. Instead, Coyne and his cohorts have created an album that is somewhat abstract. It’s a soft focus affair that can be difficult to grasp, with ideas coming into view, only to disappear into a fog of ambient electronic noise or dissipate in under a wave of reverb and delay. Coyne’s vocals retain that peculiar…

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…damaged, childlike quality, but they too are often part of the sound of the whole. He drifts in and out, almost daring his audience to pick out lyrics and make sense of them. This is an album that requires patience to get to grips with, but given time it reveals itself to be one of the band’s most thought provoking and enveloping works to date.

If there’s a theme to be found running throughout Oczy Mlody, it’s that of a fairy tale land gone awry, twisted by violence, fear and hatred. Coyne frequently speaks of magical beings and creatures over a soundtrack that might well be some of the most threatening and darkened music The Flaming Lips has ever produced. It’s hard not to equate the idea of destroying a beautiful land full of hope and amazing inhabitants with the political landscape developing in the US and here in Europe. It’s also possible that alongside Polish books, Coyne’s been dabbling with the concepts found in Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses Of Enchantment, a book that delves into the psychological depths of fairy tales, or perhaps the punks have been taking acid again, and are starting to feel the passage of time. Not only is this an album where wonder and horror clash, but the concepts of age, wisdom and idiocy, and being really, really stoned all find their place too.

Sunrise (Eyes Of The Young) documents the moment where nature reveals itself to be red in tooth and claw. “The sunrise insists on gladness, but how can I be glad, now my flower is dead…you’re showing me the truth, but I don’t want to believe you” croons Coyne as the band come close to the grandeur of Do You Realise? for the only time on the album. There is however, some peace made by the song’s close as the power of love and imagination is embraced. It’s a glimpse of hope. Also similar to the tone of the songs from Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots is The Castle, although musically it is more of a lament than a celebration. Its imagery meanwhile comes straight from the films of Hayao Miyazaki.

Far from putting away childish things Oczy Mlody suggests we should embrace the innocence of youth. How speaks about being young and killing everyone if “they fucked with us” with “baby guns” but it in this context sounds more like the gung-ho bravado of political leaders. When adults are described as behaving like children, they’re often just behaving like adults.

One Night While Hunting For Faeries And Witches and Wizards To Kill finds the protagonist on a hunt, only to have the whole thing backfire (literally) whilst attempting to blow out the brains of a wizard. The very things he’s attempting to kill fix him up. Guns and violence are, in the world of The Flaming Lips, childlike in their idiocy, wielded by morons of Elmer Fudd proportions. Healing and understanding comes from nature and wonder.

It’s not just nature and wonder that provide what ails us, sometimes a dash of acid helps too, and as a whole, Oczy Mlody feels like a powerful acid trip, with moments of insight, wonder, colour and fear appearing and disappearing constantly. This hallucinogenic voyage is first encapsulated on There Should Be Unicorns where the sun hovers above the horizon for hours, purpled eyed unicorns, day-glow strippers and re-aligned police officers embrace a future full of love. On Galaxy I Sink, Coyne sees the universe in a giant eye, and his own life in the specks floating in his own frazzled eye balls. Do Glowy recounts a night, where the world is dripping and glowing and the flowers are carnivorous.

Musically it’s about as coherent as its narrator as it constantly shifts moods never sitting still for a moment. Sometimes it brings the fear, only to suddenly become playful and elegant. The prog/classical strains that drive the explorations of Listening To The Frogs With Demon eyes redress the balance of an album that is predominantly electronic in construction, but the hippy rhetoric remains in lines like “I can’t see the moon though I know it’s there, I can’t see the end but I know it is there, I can’t see the sun but I feel it’s there, I can’t see your love but I know it is there” which encapsulate Coyne’s ability to couple the tragedy and beauty of existence.

The comedown comes in the shape of Almost Home, the musical equivalent of clicking your heels or taking long slow deep breaths. Its relaxed chiming lope comes as something of a relief after an album full of twists and hidden depths. It’s possible that Oczy Mlody will disappoint those looking for an easy hit, or the sound of old-school Lips, but for those willing to persist and explore, it’s a work of nuance and intelligence.

Is this a blurry photo of some sliced ham? Or is the ham perfectly in focus? This is a gnarly optical illusion, that’s for sure. Even when I force myself to realize the photo is in focus, that ham still looks blurry. (via digg)

Tags: optical illusions

Details are emerging about the 17 people arrested on Monday over the Paris robbery of US megastar Kim Kardashian, including some fairly elderly known criminals.

Matt Besser of improv4humans and one of the original UCB 4 joins Scott this week to talk about his off-air relationship with Scott, the new season of The UCB Show, and retiring Bjork. Then, park ranger Margery Kershaw of Pinnacles National Park stops by to warn us about a dangerous bee situation. Later, TV and radio commentator Joe “Pinions” Rudolph arrives to say what everyone else is afraid to say about pockets, Easter, and politics.This episode is brought to you by Jeff and Some Aliens on Comedy Central, Blue Apron ( www.blueapron.com/CBB ), and Lost in London Live ( www.fathomevents.com ).

Senior Splitsider correspondent Jon Bander sat down with Paul F. Tompkins recently to discuss season 2 of his Seeso Original Series Bajillion Dollar Propertie$. Splitsider was also fortunate enough to meet Tompkins’ good friend, Eric. We found Eric to be a sharp, generous guest — who we would definitely never mistake for an inanimate object. […]

Tracy Morgan’s long in-the-works FX comedy just moved to TBS. The network announced today that it’s ordered 10 episodes of the untitled comedy starring Morgan, which is co-executive produced by Morgan and Jordan Peele. Here’s the logline from TBS: After being released on good behavior from a 15-year prison stint, Tracy is shocked to see […]

Free public transport will be on offer for New Year's revellers in Paris, authorities have announced.

2016 was a very, very bad year no matter how you slice it. In tough times, comedy is often a form of escape that people turn to when they need comforting. With that in mind, we asked our contributors to pick the one piece of comedy in any form that they turn to when they […]

Fashion-conscious celebrities have been really into vintage metal band tees lately. Kanye West was photographed wearing a Testament T-shirt over the weekend, and Testament guitarist Alex Skolnick was quick to call him out for not being a real metal fan, jumping onto Facebook to criticize celebs who wear metal shirts solely for fashion. More »

It's a Christmas fucking miracle! Killer Mike and El-P weren't supposed to release RTJ3, their highly anticipated third album under the name Run The Jewels, until 1/13, but, well, here we are, and here it is. Isn't it nice? We've already heard early singles "Talk To Me," "2100," and "Legend Has … More »

The French government has confirmed that some 91,000 police, military police, and soldiers will be on duty over the Christmas weekend due to the heightened threat from terrorism.