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For Beacon’s track “Drive” from their debut full-length The Ways We Separate, the BTW alumni enlisted 101lbs. Pictures to create a smoky, dark clip. But instead of crafting something run-of-the-mill, they drew from another genre’s tropes. Says Will Joines of 101, “I was interested in taking elements of a R&B video and making something darker and more mysterious. The goal was to suggest and imply while leaving room for the audience to insert their own story and ideas.” Check out the video and fill in the blanks below.

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As many of you know by now, Electronic Music’s Most Mysterious Group

As many of you know by now, Electronic Music’s Most Mysterious Group

The music sounds better with them?

As part of The xx‘s Night and Day festival in Berlin, the band were joined by London pop darling Jessie Ware for a cheeky cover of Stardust’s world-beating Gallic disco hit ‘The Music Sounds Better With You’. It’s not the best quality, we admit, but you can just about get the idea, and with Jessie Ware’s belting vocals and The xx’s typically restrained production it offers a very different look at a song that for a while was its era’s equivalent of ‘Gangnam Style’.

Take a look below, and make your own mind up. [via Dummy]

by Bill Pearis

Danish quartet When the Saints Go Machine have been around since the mid-'00s, making eerie, soulful dance music, distinguished in no small part by Nikolaj Manuel Vonsild's vocals which lie somewhere between Arthur Russell and Antony. The group's third album, Infinity Pool, is out next week (5/28) via !K7. You can watch videos for "Iodine" and first single "Love and Respect" (featuring Killer Mike), as well as stream a couple remixes of the latter, below. The whole album is streaming over at Pitchfork.

When Saints Go Machine are doing the European Summer Festival circuit (including Aarhus, DE's Northside Festival that weirdly happens the same weekend as Brooklyn's Northside festival). Then, the band will jet our way next month for their first-ever U.S. show which happens in NYC at Glasslands on June 24. Tickets for that show are on sale now. It's their only announced North American show.

All WSGM dates are listed, along with those videos and stream, below.

Continue reading "Denmark's When Saints Go Machine releasing 'Infinity Pool,' making US live debut next month in NYC (dates, streams)" at brooklynvegan

Ya did it, Steve Buscemi: Vampire Weekend’s third studio album, Modern Vampires of the City, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 Album Charts after moving 134,000 copies in its opening week. It’s the first independent album to achieve such a feat in 2013.

This marks the band’s second No. 1 album. Their 2010 sophomore LP, Contra, also debuted atop the charts with 124,000 copies sold.

Read our Top Star review of Modern Vampires of the City, and watch the band perform “Diane Young” on Saturday Night Live below.

Free Pussy Riot.

In the latest fragment of news from the Pussy Riot camp, currently-jailed member Maria Alyokhina has begun a hunger strike in protest to the Russian court’s decision to prohibit her from attending her own parole hearing. Alyokhina’s Pussy Riot bandmate Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was denied parole last month, so it’s hardly surprising that she doesn’t have much faith in the system as it stands.

Forbidding her lawyers to take any further action in the parole hearing, Alyokhina has become the most high profile prisoner to date to refuse to take part in Russia’s highly-criticized justice system. She instead appeared by video-link, and was required to file all motions by fax, which clearly delayed proceedings. After a day of the hearing, Alyokhina announced her hunger strike, no doubt aware this would raise the profile before things continue on Thursday.

Alyokhina was wryly critical of the whole affair, saying ”Let the troika sitting here

Oh hey, new Daft Punk! The French robots spent so many years putting together the immaculately crafted new album Random Access Memories that it only stands to reason that there would be material left over. And a Japanese edition of the album has a bonus track, called “Horizon,” that points in a couple of the directions the album could’ve gone. The track is a meditative, instrumental, half-acoustic reverie that recalls nothing so much as Daft Punk’s onetime French contemporaries Air. It’s awfully pretty, if entirely baffling, and you can stream it at the No BPM Limit Tumblr.

photos by Sarah Gainer

The National at Mercury Lounge - 5/21/13

After The National played tiny shows at Sycamore and Public Assembly yesterday (5/21) to celebrate the release of their great new record, Trouble Will Find Me, they headed to Mercury Lounge for a third intimate show of the day. Hitting the stage around 10 PM, the band played almost the entirety of their new record plus a few older cuts too, but a shorter set than their tour kickoff show in Ithaca. Pictures and the setlist from the Mercury Lounge show are in this post.

The National will play NYC again at a show which is going to be much easier to get into when their tour hits Barclays Center on June 5 with Youth Lagoon. Tickets for that show are still available and we're also giving away a pair.

More pictures and the setlist from Mercury Lounge below...

Continue reading "The National played Mercury Lounge (pics & setlist)" at brooklynvegan

Los Angeles singer-songwriter Julia Holter will soon return with Loud City Song, due out August 20th through Domino Records. The album marks Holter’s third to date, but first recorded in a studio. That said, the songs’ origins pre-date Holter’s 2011 debut, Tragedy, born out of demos recorded in her bedroom.

According to Domino, Holter drew inspirations from Collette

Last year, the Los Angeles singer and producer Julia Holter released Ekstasis, an album of gauzy and elliptical and weirdly comforting experimental pop music. That LP turned out to be very valuable in helping some of us slow down and breathe and chill the fuck out from time to time. Later this summer, she’ll follow that album up with a new one, her first proper studio effort, called Loud City Song. And now she’s shared the slow, warm, beautiful opening track “World” in the form of a flickering, elusive video from the director Rick Bahto. Watch the video and check out the album’s tracklist below.

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