NPR Music Crew To Rock With Them Crooked Vultures

by Lars Gotrich

When a supergroup these days consists of earnest indie folkers -- I'm scowling in your direction, Monsters of Folk -- it takes something like Them Crooked Cultures to show the world a real powers-combined rock band. Tonight, Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana), Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss) and John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) will take the stage at the sold-out 9:30 Club here in Washington, D.C., and a group of NPR Music folks will be there, rocking out and recording the concert on a fancy-shmancy multi-track. Our hopes are that the three Vultures (plus guitarist Alain Johannes) will allow us to put up the show, even before their record comes out (let alone before it's finished), because we can't contain our excitement.

Early reports and numerous YouTube live bootlegs show a riff-laden, QOTSA-y band with occasional Jon Bonham-esque fills at song climaxes. Personally, I'm excited to see what seems to be the standard live closer, the Megatron-sized riff-smasher "Nobody Loves Me and Neither Do I."

Have you seen the band yet? Excited for the new album, due out late this fall?

5:11 PM ET | 10-14-2009 | permalink

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Daniel Johnston's Weird World Now An iPhone Game

by Lars Gotrich

Daniel Johnston has an iPhone game. Johnston probably doesn't even know what an iPhone is. The bipolar singer-songwriter and visual artist has always had a different view on life and it shows through brilliantly on this game. Let's take a look at the trailer for Hi, How Are You, shall we?

Yep, pretty great. Weird Johnston creatures, yearningly joyful soundtrack (all his songs, of course), 3D cell-shaded platform (whatever that is) and tilt controls. Admittedly, I'm not much of a gamer; my latest system was a Super NES and my favorite video game of all time is Myst. But the more I fool around with my iPod Touch, the more I download quirky puzzle games and existential role-players. Hi, How Are You actually straddles both -- it's a weird religious battle disguised as an addictive puzzler.

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10:50 AM ET | 09-30-2009 | permalink

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Watch This Man Destroy His Guitar Over And Over Again

by Lars Gotrich

Okay, first, watch Creston Spiers destroy his guitar:

I was there that sweaty summer night at the Caledonia Lounge in Athens, Ga. The local band Harvey Milk had just reunited, and I was a relatively new fan. The set list ran the gamut of the band's sludge-encrusted discography, including a few songs from the then-in-the-works Special Wishes, but it was fresh to me.

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10:01 AM ET | 06-19-2009 | permalink

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Banking On The 'Black Sabbath' Brand

by Lars Gotrich

This past Friday, Ozzy Osbourne -- the heavy-metal godfather turned bumbling reality TV star turned failed variety TV host (okay, it's not technically canceled yet) -- sued his on-again/off-again bandmate Tony Iommi for rights to the "Black Sabbath" brand.

For the uninitiated, a painfully brief history: Four English blokes form the seminal rock band Black Sabbath in 1968 and release eight albums from 1970 to '78 (six of them among the best albums of the '70s, two of them among the worst). Guitarist and main songwriter Iommi fires Ozzy from the band in 1979 for not caring enough about Black Sabbath, former Rainbow/Elf frontman Ronnie James Dio takes over the mic (restoring Sabbath's good name), Dio leaves for solo career in the mid-'80s and comes back and leaves again. And then there was the '90s, which were fairly negligible.

Okay, back to the issue at hand. You'll want to note that it's the "brand" and not the "name" that Ozzy's after. As the statement below seems to indicate, Ozzy doesn't seem to care that there was a touring entity known as "Black Sabbath" without him; he just wants his cut.

So the question really comes down to: Who should own the "Black Sabbath" brand? And should that list include Dio? After all, Dio's return to Sabbath as vocalist in recent years has been overwhelmingly praised -- perhaps a bit too much.

Why Dio rules, plus Ozzy's full statement, after the jump.

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10:15 AM ET | 06- 1-2009 | permalink

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Is The 'Oots Oots' Beat The Perfect Driving Music?

By Lars Gotrich

As a music fan, you have choices in mobile sound: Do you trick out your car's system for maximum rockage? Or do you spend all that money on records? I've always chosen the latter, which means that listening to music in the car has never been a great experience.

A friend of mine recently asked me help him drive a rental car back from Dulles Airport with the promise of a free meal. No one can pass up a free meal, but as an occasional epic road warrior, the thought of driving a new-ish car was especially enticing. (Don't worry, "Maude," you're still the most reliable station wagon on the road.)

Figuring this car at least had a CD player ("Maude" kicks it old-school and rocks the cassette deck), I grabbed a stack of CDs off my desk. With a beautiful sound system, a band like bedroom new-waver Blank Dogs just didn't cut it. Icy Demons' first album, Fight Back!, fared better with a dizzying piece of fake-jazz. But Yesterday & Today, the latest from Swedish electronic music producer The Field, turned out to be just what I needed.

Hear The Field's "Yesterday & Today," from Yesterday & Today:

What is it about electronic music that makes for such great late-night driving, especially when the vehicle includes a kick-ass sound system?

When car commercials attack, after the jump.

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2:38 PM ET | 05-29-2009 | permalink

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Current 93: Doomed Folk Gets Heavy

By Lars Gotrich

My coworkers are used to loud, pounding music leaking out of my headphones, but this time it wasn't the new disc from Mastodon. Instead, it was the upcoming Current 93 album, Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain. David Tibet's ongoing exploration of haunting Gnostic folk hasn't been this loud in quite a few years, and yet Matt Sweeney's doom-riddled guitar is the perfect grating foil to Tibet's dramatic ruminations on the apocalypse. Clearly, someone has been listening to Sleep.

Hear the opening track, "Invocation of Almost," by Current 93, including a delightfully cryptic warning from a young child about the dangers of file-sharing. "God is love," indeed.

2:47 PM ET | 05-14-2009 | permalink

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