Forthcoming Album Releases

Red Hot Chili Peppers - I'm With You - New Album, August 30th

http://redhotchilipeppers.com/news/

Over five years in arriving, no John Frusciante, a reported afro-pop influence, newly-acquired Flea piano skills, a (comparatively) short count of twelve tracks, possible first single called "The Adventures Of Raindance Maggie" and produced once more by Rick Rubin. Hopefully it'll be good, and not just another established act playing it safe. Fingers crossed.

I've got Stadium Arcadium lying around the house somewhere ... never really did get around to listening to it.

Blunt Instrument wrote:

I've got Stadium Arcadium lying around the house somewhere ... never really did get around to listening to it.

Well worth a listen, as there's plenty of good stuff on it, but the running order is all over the shop, made all the more awkward that it's spread over 2 discs. Should have been 18 tracks on one disc instead of a 28 track double IMO.

RHCP wrote:

Brothers and sisters! Here are the song titles of our new record ‘I’m With You’ Yeeeeah muthafuckas!

1. Monarchy of Roses
2. Factory of Faith
3. Brendan’s Death Song
4. Ethiopia
5. Annie Wants a Baby
6. Look Around
7. The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie
8. Did I Let You Know
9. Goodbye Hooray
10. Happiness Loves Company
11. Police Station
12. Even You Brutus?
13. Meet Me at the Corner
14. Dance, Dance, Dance

There you have it.

Very happy that it's 14 tracks instead of the previously reported 12. Allows for 2 or 3 weaker tracks to be programmed out of the running order if needs be, though hopefully it'll just be good all the way with no need for skips.

Rain Dance Maggie has been confirmed as the lead-off single by Rolling Stone mag.

I haven't heard anything from them since "By the Way" was released, which I liked. I really have not been paying much attention to mainstream music of any kind since 2002. Ever since I started listening to Van Halen's debut album in Christmas 2002 I've been looking back at a lot of music of the past since then while completely neglecting the current stuff. So I missed a lot of new stuff over the years and at times it feels jarring to turn on the radio and notice how much the atmosphere has changed. Seems most of pop music these days are dominated by bass beats, as if there cannot be a pop song without a prerecorded sample of bass beats. And now what was considered truly indie rock 10 years ago is now the norm. Weird.

Also, Rick Rubin ftw.

Looking forward to it. I grew up listening to the RCP, so I'll always give them benefit of the doubt.

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Also, Rick Rubin ftw.

Anyone other than Bob Rock.

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Twenty years ago, Bono described Achtung Baby as 'the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree' while Jon Pareles of the New York Times wrote that 'stripped-down and defying its old formulas, U2 has given itself a fighting chance for the 1990's'. The album won a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance and became one of the most significant records of the nineties and of U2’s career.

To mark twenty years since its 1991 release, an anniversary edition of U2’s Achtung Baby is due on October 31, 2011.

Recorded over six months at Hansa Studio in Berlin and Windmill Lane in Dublin, Achtung Baby is U2’s seventh studio album. Produced by long time U2 collaborators, Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno with Steve Lillywhite, Achtung Baby was engineered by Flood and led by The Fly. The album spawned four other singles, Mysterious Ways, One, Even Better Than The Real Thing and Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses.

The Achtung Baby archives have unearthed some previously unreleased songs from the recording sessions. With a raft of unreleased material; video, remixes, b-sides and documentary footage discovered, a full album of demo and early versions of the final 1991 tracklisting has also been revealed. Five physical editions including vinyl, CD, DVD and digital options will be made available.

Earlier this year U2 returned to Hansa Studio in Berlin to discuss Achtung Baby in From The Sky Down, directed by Academy Award winning director Davis Guggenheim (Waiting for Superman, An Inconvenient Truth). The film has been selected to open the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8th and will be included in the anniversary edition.



FIVE FORMATS

Five physical editions of the anniversary edition of Achtung Baby will be available alongside digital only editions.

1. A limited, numbered Uber Deluxe Edition is a magnetic puzzle tiled box which will contain: 6 CDs including the original Achtung Baby album, the follow-up album, Zooropa, B-sides, remixes and re-workings of previously unheard material recorded during the Achtung Baby sessions. 4 DVDs including 'From The Sky Down', 'Zoo TV:Live From Sydney', all the videos from Achtung Baby plus bonus material. There will also be the Achtung Baby double vinyl album plus 5 clear 7" vinyl singles in their original sleeves, 16 art prints taken from the original album sleeve, an 84-page hardback book, a copy of Propaganda magazine, 4 badges, a sticker sheet, and a pair of Bono’s trademark 'The Fly' sunglasses.

2. The Super Deluxe Edition will contain the 6CDs and 4 DVDs, in addition to a 92 page hardback book and 16 art prints in a wallet.

3. The Vinyl Box Set is a limited release containing 4 LPs, two of which are pressed on translucent blue vinyl containing remixes and B-sides. The box includes a 16 page booklet.

4. The Deluxe Edition is a 2xCD set containing the reissue of the original album plus B-sides and rarities.

5. The Standard CD is the original album.

The box looks great, always loved the artwork. I can't wait to see the documentary but, as has now become par for the course with these guys, it's gonna cost me about 80-odd quid to buy the version which includes the DVDs. F*ck off U2, when's it enough?

Terrible quote attributed to their manager which just about sums the whole thing up:

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“There will be multiple formats. If you pile a lot of extra material and packaging and design work into a super-duper box set, there are people who will pay quite a lot for it, so you can budget it at a very high level and pump up the value.”

Still, great album, and obviously affordable if you're only after the 1 or 2 disc release.

I'll either go for the Super Deluxe edition or the Deluxe edition ... the 'Uber' does look like a highly covetable thing, but 385 quid? The hell with that.

I'll just download what I want from the Uber thing off the 'net. I'm not buying the 2-disc just to get a bunch of shitty remixes.

'Zooropa' better get a separate release. Bummed there's no bonus material related to it.

Louis Armstrong wrote:

'Zooropa' better get a separate release. Bummed there's no bonus material related to it.

U2 sells FLAC versions of their albums online. Zooropa is $11.

I'm more interested in previously-unheard tracks from those sessions than anything else.

Although I do like these sorts of compilations, I prefer to keep my £385 this time around.

Louis Armstrong wrote:

I'll just download what I want from the Uber thing off the 'net. I'm not buying the 2-disc just to get a bunch of shitty remixes.

Some of the remixes from that period were great IMO, especially the Steel String remix of Night And Day. And it was the remixes from this period which really put U2 out there big-time in the clubs. But it's definitely shitty in the sense that most of the fans will already have most or all of this stuff, so yep, it's not worth the extra cash IMO.

Louis Armstrong wrote:

'Zooropa' better get a separate release. Bummed there's no bonus material related to it.

I'm pissed off too over this. While I appreciate that many of Zooropa's songs originated from the Achtung sessions and/or during the subsequent tour, the album in it's full finished form is a separate album in it's own right, finished and released at least 18 months after Achtung. And it's a f*cking awesome album in it's own right IMO, right up there with the best things they've ever done, as well as it being a superb follow-up album with a continuing narrative whilst still branching out thrillingly into new territory musically, pushing the band to arguably their creative highpoint. It deserves it's own release, but I fear it's just been lumped into the Achtung box set because Zooropa (undeservedly) has nowhere near the huge reputation Achtung has, thus Zooropa would be a tougher sell in it's own right, especially as a "fleece the fans for all they've got" uber-deluxe package. Plus, the few extras they could stick on a deluxe Zooropa are by and large all commercially available and have been for some time.

But Zooropa's reputation as being merely Achtung's inferior "baby" is just so unfair and wide of the mark IMO that it's such a shame something can't be done to heighten people's awareness as to what a great album it is. It's even superior to Achtung in quite a few ways IMO; the first half of Zooropa is U2 at their most thrillingly inventive and limitless, the biggest band in the world also sounding like the coolest and the most daring, while the second half culminates in one of the best "it shouldn't work whatsoever, but instead it works brilliantly"collaborations you're likely to hear, as lead vocals are handed to Johnny Cash (not deemed cool in the slightest back then, I might add) for The Wanderer. If Achtung was thematically U2's Station To Station (and sonically their Heroes), Zooropa is clear as day their Lodger; a pile of disparate-sounding songs brought together into a cohesive whole through their unifying themes of chaos, fear, aimlessness, isolation and uncertainty. Those two U2 albums manage to evoke those classic Bowie albums, yet never ape them, which is key to them standing as great albums in their own right. Zooropa's a superb album that deserves so much more than just being tossed into a multi-disc Achtung box as a "bonus disc".

Indeed, Lazzers ... if Achtung was U2 dipping their toes into the waters of experimentation, Zooropa was them diving right on in. Still remember the 'WTF?!?' feeling the first time I heard Numb ... and then to only release it as a 'video single' felt like a bold move in those days, too.

David Lynch's debut album

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In a recent interview, moviemaker Abel Ferrara, discussing the current state of cinema said, “My kind of filmmakers don’t really exist [anymore]...[David] Lynch doesn’t even want to make films anymore. I’ve talked to him about it, OK? I can tell when he talks about it. I’m a lunatic, and he’s pushing transcendental meditation.” And certainly, that seems to bear out. It has been five years since Lynch dropped the middling “Inland Empire” and since then he’s done anything but direct a movie, instead taking on webcasts, nightclub openings and fashion ad campaigns (though last year there was a half-hearted crowdsourcing attempt to fund a documentary about himself). For better or worse, music seems to be Lynch’s new muse (his website is titled David Lynch Music Company in case you need a further tipoff as to his focus these days) and the director is now set to drop his debut album.

Titled Crazy Clown Time (a parody Lynch title if we ever heard one), Pitchfork reveals that it will street on November 8th and will feature Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O on the tune “Pinky’s Dream.” So what will it sound like? Hard to say at this point, but the director did pretty much do everything on the album by himself with an assist from engineer Dean Hurley who also plays guitar and drums on several songs. But if you want a taste of what’s to come, his pretty awful electronic single from last fall “Good Day Today” is among the tracklist and you can hear it below.

We probably don’t need to tell you we’d rather see Lynch do anything than fiddle around with a music career, but hey, if that’s what makes the guy happy these days, more power to him we guess. Sunday Best Records will drop the album, which at the very least, will be interesting. Full tracklisting follows:

Crazy Clown Time Tracklisting

01 Pinky’s Dream
02 Good Day Today
03 So Glad
04 Noah’s Ark
05 Football Game
06 I Know
07 Strange and Unproductive Thinking
08 The Night Bell With Lightning
09 Stone’s Gone Up
10 Crazy Clown Time
11 These Are My Friends
12 Speed Roadster
13 Movin’ On
14 She Rise Up

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/archives/david_lynchs_debut_album_crazy_clown_time_lands_on_november_8th_features_ka/

Can't say I cared much for his work with Julee Cruise, but America's neglect of David Lynch is lamentable.

Avarice wrote:

Can't say I cared much for his work with Julee Cruise, but America's neglect of David Lynch is lamentable.

I'm afraid the culture has passed him by. It's all about the Jersey Shore and Kim Kardashian now.

I weep for this generation.

Lazenby. wrote:

Plus, the few extras they could stick on a deluxe Zooropa are by and large all commercially available and have been for some time.

You never know, though. There might be something fun sitting around somewhere they could've released, like 'The Wanderer' with Bono doing lead vocals, or the two songs that became 'Lemon' recorded separately, or a recording of 'In Cold Blood'. Who knows?

I'm still surprised you didn't do a full-out Lazenby.Rant about this release. I think it's a complete rip-off.

Lazenby. wrote:

I can't wait to see the documentary

That's the only bit that interests me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2X8zPYhNag&t=1m4s

Achtung Baby is undoubtedly their best work, but 385 quid is outrageously expensive!

For the first time since their 1984 album, Van Halen reunited with David Lee Roth in lead vocals for the new album A Different Kind of Truth to be released in February 7, 2012.



I was pretty much looking forward to this. I became a big fan ten years ago and thought Roth rejoining would never happen. It has, but not how I expected. Bassist Michael Anthony was booted out so it's not a complete reunion and I think it's quite upsetting how the Van Halen brothers just shut him off like that. Was it just for Eddie to get his son a gig? I'm peeved, because Anthony was a good bassist and provided good back up vocals that was a part of their sound. And so a new single has finally been released.



Underwhelming. Not terrible (unlike the actual video, which seems to be aping "Jump"), but they could do better. Eddie seems too comfortable with the sound he settled with during the Sammy Hagar era. So it sounds like a Hagar era song with Roth in vocals. Weird. For the moment I'm just gonna wait til the word of mouth gets out on the rest of the album.

Salomé wrote:

Avarice wrote:

Can't say I cared much for his work with Julee Cruise, but America's neglect of David Lynch is lamentable.

I'm afraid the culture has passed him by. It's all about the Jersey Shore and Kim Kardashian now.

I weep for this generation.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love MTV Networks

New Saint Etienne album on the way, Words And Music By Saint Etienne. The lead-off single, Tonight, is available as a free download from their website. Single ain't great but, given that the lead-off single from their last album was actually the worst track on the album by a country mile, that's no big worry. One big plus is the electronic direction of the single, hopefully the album will posess much of the shimmering gorgeousness, pop savvy and class to which we've become accustomed. Looking forward to it.

I was worried about Van Halen's A Different Kind of Truth being only okay, given the track "Tattoo" and the response it got. But now the album is getting very good reviews, and the samples of the other tracks sound pretty damn good. This review seals it for me:

Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote:

Reinventing Van Halen proved to be a tricky task, so Eddie Van Halen proceeded to reunite the band…a move so obvious it should have come as no surprise that it was easier said than done. Sammy Hagar was brought in for a 2004 hits album and an accompanying tour, a project that collapsed in acrimony so noxious that founding bassist Michael Anthony left with the Red Rocker. Eddie brought in his son Wolfgang as Anthony's replacement and began a prolonged courtship of David Lee Roth that first led to a tour, and then to this, A Different Kind of Truth, the band's first album in 14 years and their first with Roth in twice that long. That's a long time, but the roots of A Different Kind of Truth stretch back even further, with several songs originating from demo tapes Van Halen made before their debut, and the rest consciously written in that style. No synths are to be found anywhere on the record, they've been swept aside along with Michael Anthony's bedrock eighth-note thump and Sammy Hagar's radio-ready pop polish, stripping Van Halen down to their core: a duel for attention between David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen. Where Sammy enabled Eddie's ambitions, Diamond Dave unleashes the guitarist's id, taunting him to play faster, harder, tougher, then fighting for space between unwieldy riffs. Certainly, there are hooks here, even some with pop propulsion, but the unexpected signature of A Different Kind of Truth is its heaviness, its 13 songs of loud, unrelenting rock. The only time it comes up for air is on "Stay Frosty," with its acoustic intro deliberately evoking memories of “Ice Cream Man.” Of course, the entirety of this comeback is designed to revive the spirit of the first five or six Van Halen records, and building the album upon those old demos turns out to be a savvy move, as they not only saved promising songs, but re-oriented the band, pushing them toward their essence. It’s akin to the Rolling Stones digging up unfinished songs and completing them for an expanded reissue of Some Girls but in reverse: instead of trying to fit into the past, Van Halen are using their history to revive their present and they succeed surprisingly well on A Different Kind of Truth.

Back to roots albums always seem to be pretty weak as they rarely recapture the magic of the music that made bands popular, but this seems to be a bit of an exception. I think I just might purchase it tomorrow.

Great Roth interview in The Guardian of all places:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/feb/02/david-lee-roth-van-halen

That's a very honest interview of Roth.

Just got the album this morning and listened to it before going to work. Overall this is a very solid back to basics comeback album. Not sure where I'd rank it with the first six Roth/Van Halen albums, definitely above DIVER DOWN. Well done.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF TRUTH is really growing on me. I can say at the moment my favorite songs out of the album are "She's the Woman", "You and Your Blues" and "Stay Frosty", maybe "China Town" and "The Trouble with Never".

Here's a live performance from a recent tour. Wish I could go to one.