by Andrew Sacher

Philly neo-soul singer Bilal returned this year with his highly accessible and slightly psychedelic new album, A Love Surreal, which came out this past February. He celebrated it in NYC with a "nearly packed" release show at Highline Ballroom that month, and earlier this May he kicked off the album's world tour. That tour brings him back to NYC for a show at SOB's on June 9. Tickets for the SOB's show are on sale now. All dates are listed below.

Last week (5/14), Bilal performed with The Roots (who he's collaborated with before) on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, playing a cover of Steely Dan's "Black Cow." You can check out that video, the music video for A Love Surreal single "Back to Love," the tour trailer, and tour flyer, below...

Continue reading "Bilal released 'A Love Surreal', on tour (dates & videos)" at brooklynvegan

Well, here’s what I want for Christmas: The Clash have announced plans to reissue their entire back catalog in a new box set shaped like — wait for it — a Boombox. Due out September 9th, Sound System collects the band’s five studio albums — 1977′s The Clash, 1978′s Give ‘Em Enough Rope, 1979′s London Calling, 1980′s Sandinista!, and 1982′s Combat Rock — yes, even they’ve disowned Cut the Crap (!) — along with three discs of singles, rarities, demos, and B-sides.

There’s also a DVD featuring all of the band’s videos and “unseen footage by Julien Temple and Don Letts”, reprints, a new issue of the band’s Armagideon Time fanzine, an exclusive poster, dog tags, stickers, badges, and more. It will all be housed inside said Boombox, which was designed by bassist Paul Simonon. Guitarist Mick Jones calls it the “best box set ever,” and it’s hard to disagree.

Speaking to The Guardian, Jones digresses on the rarities:

There’s so much there that you wouldn’t have heard before. It was like discovering stuff, because the advances in mastering are so immense since the last time [the Clash catalogue] was remastered in the 90s… We had to bake the tapes beforehand– the oxide on them is where the music is, so if...

Tomorrow’s harvest: a transmission from the increasingly enigmatic duo.

Apparently, a month-long mystery was not enough intrigue for the Scottish brothers. Boards of Canada just tweeted the following date, time, and location: “May 22nd 24:00 @ 1-23-10 Jinnan Shibuya-ku Tokyo”. The address is in Tokyo’s trendy Shibuya-ku district, and searches lead to either a bank, a Hello Kitty store, or department store 109Mens. This story is developing.

Update: As Tokyo-resident Matt Lyne points out via Twitter, the address leads to “a video screen at the big crossing,” nothing that Radiohead tried a similar event in 2011 that was cancelled due to police fears about crowd size.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow’s harvest: a transmission from the increasingly enigmatic duo.

Apparently, a month-long mystery was not enough intrigue for the Scottish brothers. Boards of Canada just tweeted the following date, time, and location: “May 22nd 24:00 @ 1-23-10 Jinnan Shibuya-ku Tokyo”. The address is in Tokyo’s trendy Shibuya-ku district, and searches lead to either a bank, a Hello Kitty store, or department store 109Mens. This story is developing.

Update: As Tokyo-resident Matt Lyne points out via Twitter, the address leads to “a video screen at the big crossing,” noting that Radiohead tried a similar event in 2011 that was cancelled due to police fears about crowd size.

Tomorrow

“I told you that I’d been writing/This song is proof that I’m trying,” sings Devon Welsh on “Impersonator,” the title track off his new album. The key word in the lyric is “trying.” Through his work as part of Majical Cloudz, a Montreal-based synth-pop project with Matthe Otto, Welsh has chronicled his own anxieties about the creative process and more often than not the words he associates with it—lies, illusions, magic—are rooted in deception. His work is often self-referential and even meta-textual, but it’s rarely concerned with seeming clever, witty or cute. Welsh sings in a deep, expressive baritone—think Leonard Cohen, think Matt Berninger, think a sad owl clutching a dead mouse in its mouth—and the arrangements that surround him float around him with a stark, urgent simplicity that contradicts the band’s fanciful name. If he’s hiding behind something, it’s a simple white mask. Nothing ornate. “I’m a liar,” he sings in the album’s opening moments over a bed of processed vocal samples. “I say I make music.”

He does make music, and he’s been doing it for a while now. Welsh and Otto released the Turns Turns Turns EP last year through the small Montreal record label and artist community Arbutus, the home to cosmopolitan, experimental pop acts like Grimes, Blue Hawaii and Doldrums. These artists each have a busy, k...

As Red Bull Music Academy New York rolls into its second week, they’ve been rolling out some really interesting content for electronic music fans. Here’s some of the best:

- Four Tet explains to a crowded room how he builds his live sets, including insight into the equipment he uses and how he uses it, and some interesting comments on his approach to building tension and sound quality [watch it above].

- Night Slugs co-founder Bok Bok sits down on the couch with the BBC’s Emma Warren to talk about Slimzee and Dizzee Rascal, creating underwater spaces in night clubs and the evolution of the Night Slugs clubnight and label.

- Slow to Speak, the in-house team from NYC record store Dope Jams, which closed this year but recently reopened in a new location, contribute a mix to RBMA radio [stream it above, and it's a great companion piece to their FACT mix from last year].

- Legendary engineer Herb Powers Jnr sheds some light on the dark art of mastering, and talks through his history in the business, including mastering Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force’s ’Planet Rock’ and more.

- Stephen Mallinder of post-punk group Cabaret Voltaire sits down for a fireside chat [below].

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photos by Dana (distortion) Yavin

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers @ Beacon Theatre, 5/20/2012

Petty doesn't play a supercharged oldies revue like the Rolling Stones. Nor does he distort his catalogue into willfully eccentric renditions that separate "true" fans from mere pretenders, a la Bob Dylan. (Don't get me wrong: I love this about Dylan.) Petty doesn't perform for three and a half hours, like Bruce Springsteen, and he doesn't rely on expensive bells and whistles, like pretty much everyone else.

Monday night, at least, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers satisfied themselves with a tight, confident, two-hour set that featured a handful of hits, a few well-chosen covers and lots of deep album cuts. (You can check out the complete set list at the bottom of this post.) His band has been playing together for more than 30 years -- he was only half-kidding when he introduced drummer Steve Ferrone, who joined in 1994, as "the new guy" -- and they couldn't be more in sync. Lead guitarist Mike Campbell shreds aplenty, and keyboardist Benmont Tench unleashed a solo during "Melinda" (a staple of the band's live set that has never made its way onto an album) that ranged from Jerry Lee Lewis to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. But that was the extent of the fireworks. - [Huffington Post]

At long last one of our favourite tracks of the last 6 months, the bubbling BRTSH Knights track If I Was To, is seeing a release on Technicolour Records. It will have a b-side, Hazed, and will feature remixes by garage legend El-B and Brainfeeder’s Mono/Poly:

The-Dream’s new album IV Play is now a week away from release, and on its latest single, the slippery but heartfelt “Where Have You Been,” he teams up with the former Destiny’s Child singer Kelly Rowland. Both singers showed up on The Tonight Show last night to perform the song and to show surprising levels of onstage chemistry. Watch the performance below.

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With the 50 And Counting tour, the Rolling Stones are back on the road rocking arenas. Prior stops featured special guests Dave Grohl, Tom Waits, Katy Perry, Keith Urban, and Gwen Stefani, but on this particular night the Stones (including former guitarist Mick Taylor) shined all by themselves. Check out the photos in the gallery above and the setlist below.

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BTW alumni TEEN’s Kickstarter-funded EP Carolina is out next week, but you can stream it with us first. The sisters have crafted five tracks of complex psych-influenced but wholly unique indie pop that was produced by Daniel Schlett, who was also responsible for DIIV’s Oshin. I would tell you “Circus” is a stand-out, but I’d also tell you “Cannibal” is a stand-out and so on. Each track has exists in its own hyper-detailed, hypnotic space. Check it out below.

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photos by PSquared Photography

Iron & Wine at the Capitol Theatre - 5/19/13

Iron & Wine is currently on a tour with the Secret Sisters in support of his new album, Ghost on Ghost, which hit NYC last week (5/14) at Beacon Theater and then circled back to the area for a Port Chester show at the Capitol Theater this past Sunday (5/19). Pictures of the latter are in this post.

For the tour, Sam Beam is being backed by a 13-piece band, and also takes some time out of his sets to do some solo acoustic material. Both NYC-area shows saw him playing the bulk of Ghost on Ghost in addition to a good amount of earlier material, but he had some surprises thrown in there too, including his cover of The Postal Service's "Such Great Heights" at the Cap show.

More pictures from the Cap and setlists/videos from both shows below...

Continue reading "Iron & Wine played the Capitol Theatre & Beacon Theatre (pics, videos, setlists)" at brooklynvegan

Preview by Dan Lucas

If our Twitter and Facebook feeds are anything to go by, the boards are the heartbeat of DiS, and as such you