Blood Red Shoes - Cold

D-d-duh-d-d-duh-d-d-d-duh-d-duh-drums! Snarlin’ geetars! Oh! O! Uh! Oh-oohs! (Uh-uh-ohs!)

Read: Hard Times for Guitar Music? by Steven from Blood Red Shoes

via NME

The way I see it is here’s the problem: The Public at large love guitar music just as much as ever. The tidal wave of successful reformations is testament to that (The Pixies, Blur, My Bloody Valentine, Black Sabbath, Stone Roses, even At the Drive-In now). But access to anything decent is totally masked by the weight of promotion thrown at bands that are never going to connect to a wider audience because they’re just no damn good.

— Hard Times for Guitar Music? by Steven from Blood Red Shoes

The Twilight Sad ‘Another Bed’

We’ve had a few bits of news relating to The Twilight Sad in the past few months, what with the release of various singles and albums. Today sees another video, which is taken from their new album, No One Can Ever Know. It’s for the track ‘Another Bed’.

The video was done by Craig Murray, by the way. The band are off on a full-on UK tour in February. See down there for the dates.

February:
9 - Glasgow, Grand Ole Opry
10 - Manchester, Ruby Lounge
11 - Sheffield, Queen’s Social Club (DiS show w/ Let’s Wrestle)
12 - Birmingham, Hare and Hounds
13 - Bristol, Fleece
14 - London, Cargo
15 - Nottingham, Stealth
16 - Leeds, Brudenell Social Club

 via DiS and also the folks who promote our events in Sheffield…  

drownedinevents:

Here’s a new video from The Twilight Sad, who release their new album No One Can Ever Know on the sixth day of next month and land at Queens Social Club five days later, on Saturday 11 February. Support for this show comes from the equally great Let’s Wrestle, and right now you can even win a pair of tickets thanks to our good friends at Counterfeit. Not feeling lucky? Grab some online or from the usual physical outlets, but for goodness sake don’t miss out on this one - it’s going to be a corker.

ERRORS - Earthscore

A track from the Scots third album which is out next week and streaming in full on DiS. We said:

Have Some Faith in Magic is the sound of a band who’ve truly found their stride. It’s not that they weren’t marching like robotic bastards before now but there’s a definition to this, the Scots third album, that hits you like an ebbing gust of joy and wonder. It thrusts along and occasionally bursts into a cloud of pixels but in a sort of dazed slow-motion… And there’s a real magic to that.

Stream in full Have Some Faith in Magic, the third album by the band ERRORS by clicking right here.

Does this track remind anyone else of ‘Let’s Do the Timewalk (again)’?

becoming real - Paramnesia 

Spending my Saturday flicking through Soundcloud and this devastating new becoming real track just ripped me head off. Ice cold twinklings and never-ending throbbing. 

Released 27th FEB as a split 12” w/ DAM MANTLE

If you talk about books you come across as a wanker even if they’re really important to you.

— DiS meets The Horrors

via Watch: Errors - ‘Pleasure Palaces’ / Music News // Drowned In Sound

Shearwater - You As You Were (Sub Pop)

A DiS premiere from earlier in the week… words by Luke Slater.

Back at the beginning of last month Shearwater announced the release of a new record, Animal Joy, through Sub Pop. The release date is soon upon us and we’ve got a track from it for you to hear, in advance of the album’s release. The track in question is ‘You As You Were’ and you can get your ears around it below, via that SoundCloud player. You can also download it from here.

It’s kind of what you’d expect from Shearwater. But that is absolutely OK because Jonathan Meiburg’s voice is something else, and Shearwater’s music is quite like nothing else around. To my ears, in any case. It careens quite lovely, so it does. The band are heading this way in the Spring, and we’ve handily compiled a list of their tour dates. See below:

March:
28 - Amsterdam, Bitterzoet
29 - Brussels, Botanique
30 - Brighton, The Haunt
31 - Manchester, The Deaf Institute

April:
1 - Glasgow, Stereo
3 - London, Scala
4 - Tourcoing, Le Grand Mix
5 - Paris, La Maroquinerie
6 - Düdingen, Bad Bonn
8 - St. Gallen, Palace
9 - Mezzago, Bloom
10 - Rome, Circolo degli Artisti
11 - Ravenna, Bronso, Madonna dell’albero
12 - Ljubljana, Menza pri Koritu
16 - Dresden, Groove Station
17 - Hamburg, Prinzebar
18 - Berlin, Comet
19 - Istanbul, Babylon
21 - Athens, AN Club

Pushy Parents - ‘Secret Secret’ (Elefant)

Wendy Roby’s single of the week…

Pushy Parents are dirty cheats and magpies - in actual life they are a) dead old and b) Swedish musicians Amanda Aldervall, Roger Gunnarson, Daniel Jansson and Johann Emmoth. But for the purposes of pop presentation they are teenagers, gaily gidding about pretend-playing instruments and singing to you about how they ‘gave you the truth,’ but ‘you don’t know what it means’. As it is unlikely that such a grave thought would occur to youths as youthy as the ones in the video – much less provoke them to dance in front of pastel graphics, you must not be fooled. Nor must you ignore the fact that this single is so very like a modded DeLorean with no ambition; dials set for 2006, when ‘Young Folks’ and ‘You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve’ both found their home in the hearts of those too old for hairslides, but too young to throw their hairslides away. And though all three share the deliberate, self-conscious air of distilled laboratory pop; and though it is easy – especially if you are feeling cynical – to spot the strings, all are rather affecting. I am convinced that in ‘Secret Secret’s case, this is due to the power of the now oft-overlooked key-change-chorus; a musical trick that still works on me, even though it is capriciously silly.

Read about the rest of this week’s singles here… 

To date, every winner of the Critics’ Choice BRIT Award has been the proud owners of lady bits. Last year, the vast majority of all singing, all dancing popstars belonged to the gender who do not use the word ‘beautiful’ to describe a supremely good pork pie. Is this because female popstars can do ‘a Rihanna’ and appear all sexy to men and all empowered to women? Is this because male solo artists are too busy selling their souls to Radio 2 to bother with that choreography lark? Who knows and who cares because, the current status quo are knocking out some tremendous tunes and it will all be reversed by the time 2013 rolls around.

— DiS Does Pop #4: How not to be a popstar in 2012 / In Depth // Drowned In Sound

DiS thread: David Bowie is 65 today 

davidbowieaseveryone:

David Bowie as everyone at a birthday party.

It’s already January 8 over here at DBAE HQ, so we’re officially wishing David a very happy 65th birthday in our own very special way!

Above: DiS traffic sources in 2011. Tumblr providing more visitors than NME. More referrer data on Facebook and more stats below… 

DiS in 2011: Stats, Most Read, Top Threads and Editor’s Picks

DiS’ editor runs through the year’s most read, as well as his favourite things published on DiS, and elsewhere, in 2011. Plus a competition to win a subscription to the brilliant Stack magazine club.

Before we get into all of that, here are our 2011 stats. According to our Google Analytics, DiS had 3,738,066 unique visitors, who clocked up a whopping 29,955,907 pageviews, making 2011 our biggest year, ever! We published 2,512 articles, of which 829 were news stories, 831 features and we reviewed 852 records. According to AOTY only two of our reviewers awarded records 10 outta 10. The community side of DiS was really busy this year too, there were 26,346 threads started and 642,150 posts in response to them. 63% of our traffic was from the UK, 18% from the USA and 44% of our visitors had never visited the site before… If you’re curious about anything else, feel free to post some questions below and we’ll try to provide some stats for you.

Most Read of 2011

Reviews

1: Radiohead The King of Limbs
2: Jessie J Who You Are
3: Josh T. Pearson Last of the Country Gentlemen
4: PJ Harvey Let England Shake
5: Kate Bush 50 Words for Snow
6: Metronomy The English Riviera
7: Bright Eyes The People’s Key
8: Alex Turner Submarine
9: James Blake James Blake
10: Mogwai Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
11: SBTRKT SBTRKT
12: Washed Out Within and Without
13: Wild Beasts Smother
14: The Strokes Angles
15: Friendly Fires Pala

Features

1: Ten Things To Not Expect Your Record Producer (me) To Have A Cogent or Completely Satisfactory Answer For by Chris Walla
2: The Antlers’ track-by-track guide to their new album Burst Apart
3: A decade of Drukqs: Aphex Twin’s opus, ten years on
4: First Listen: Friendly Fires Pala
5: Glastonbury: DiS’ 10 Must-See Acts

Most Viewed Threads

Music Forum

1: Top 5 Dubstep tunes…
2: The PIAS warehouse burnt down
3: Primavera 2011
4: Recommended Albums 2011
5: ATP curated by Jeff Mangum rescheduled to March 2012
6: Primavera Sound 2012
7: OFWGKTA
8: Latitude 2011
9: James Blake
10: Live blog your first listen of a *classic album

Social Board

1: Help! I Caught My Dad With My GF
2: Adele Lost Weight
3: Humorous Pub Quiz Team Names
4: Nothing about Scarlett Johansson’s boobies?
5: RIOTS
6: 16-Year-Old Boy Dies After Masturbating 42 Times
7: Cool things to buy in Japan that you can’t buy here
8: Tool Academy UK
9: Musicians - Never play at THE GOOD SHIP in kilburn
10: Big Explosion in Oslo

Editor’s Picks

It’s difficult picking favourites but I wanted to highlight a few things beyond the most read above that you might have missed. So, in no particular order…

• DiSband #7: Viva Brother - Marie Wood offered Lee Newell a chance to respond to the haters…
• Mike Diver on Relationship of Command - to celebrate our 11th Birthday we looked back at some records which were eleven years old and our former editor wrote this fantastic piece about At the Drive-in’s opus.
• The Classical - this column is a must read for anyone who has ever considered listening to classical music. First two covered Mozart and Beethoven, and we’ll have more in 2012!
• Mogwai’s Barry Burns on being a bar-owner in Berlin - a surreal glimpse.
• Mixtape: Factory Floor’s Favourite Non-Traditional “Love Songs”
• Discovering the exquisite carnival of Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs - David Edwards’ piece about this classic album sat alongside words from the likes of St Vincent and Ed Harcourt as part of our series of pieces to coincide with the event at the Barbican.
• From John Cage to Liars via Nurse With Wound - A Brief History of Post-Industrial
• “Why The Luminaire was important” - tribute piece by Andrew from Fuck Buttons.
• Disappearing & keeping it all in…DiS meets Tom Vek
• Playing records with Neil Hamburger
• Subliminal Transmissions 06: R’n’Bass - Rory Gibb explored an emerging sound.
• “A lot of people have grown up with us” - DiS meets Deftones
• The Insider: The Stone Roses & The Resurrection Blues
• Record Store Day: Let’s Get Physical - Wendy Roby on her love of tangible records.
• Interview: Adam & Joe’s Adam Buxton on music vids and 6Music
• Chill-rave and leaving behind ChristianAIDS: DiS meets Stay+ - John Calvert on one of DiS’ tips for 2012.
• Latitude 2011: The DiS Review - Wendy Roby shares her experience of one of the UK’s bestest festivals.
• Aidan Moffat on Getting Older…

And, here are five things I read elsewhere in 2011 that I really enjoyed…
1: Stool Pigeon Interview - Tyler, The Creator ‘HE ALMOST HIT ALFIE! ARSEHOLE!’ THE DAY THE PRESENT TURNED ODD FOR TYLER by Kev Kharas 2: Guardian piece - Adam Curtis: Have computers taken away our power?
3: New York Review of Books: Mind Control & The Internet
4: New York magazine: We Must Be Superstars - In defense of pop (and maybe narcissism, too). By Nitsuh Abebe
5: London Review of Books: It Knows - Interesting Piece on The Googlisation of Everything

crossesmusic:

†2012†

fuckyeahstvincent:

St. Vincent - Champagne Year