Wolf Parade
Hot Tickets: Beck, Tasteless Clowns, Wolf Parade
It's a perfect match, really. An artist who's made a career out of refashioning musical kitsch to his own inscrutable ends plays a venue refashioned out of a massive, gold-encrusted, Art-Deco movie-palace and former televangelism center in Washington Heights. It's Beck at the United Palace Theatre!
The pop mystic seems to be out of a record deal as his latest album, Modern Guilt, concludes his contract with DGC Records. Of course, Beck is totally chill about it. "I haven't bothered to plan anything," he told the Times Dave Itzkoff earlier this month. "I don't know where the record business is going to be in six months. read more »
Wolf at the Door
In 2008, a big day for record sales is a relative thing, for the majors and the indies alike. Physical sales are lower than ever, even for superstars; bands routinely crack Billboard’s top 10 with sales barely in the five digits. But today is a big day in the record industry.
Coldplay's newest, Viva la Vida, hits stores today; there are high, high hopes for the album. The band that broke with "Yellow" way back in 2000 has had a couple of smash records since then, A Rush of Blood to the Head in 2002 and X & Y three years later; they're as close to the sure thing (U2) as the record industry gets these days. But there's another band whose latest effort may tell more about what the future of the recording industry looks like. read more »
The Week in Music: Coldplay to Its Own Defense, Silver Jews Still Sober, and the Return of Ice Cube
Coldplay’s Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends comes out today. That's about as big as record-release news gets nowadays. But more importantly for the band, on Sunday, the album hit No.1 on charts in the U.K., where it was first released last Thursday, selling more than 300,000 copies in three days. Then there’s that ubiquitous iTunes commercial featuring the album’s title track. Yup, everything was going smoothly for Coldplay—that is until some Brooklyn band no one’s ever heard of accused them of stealing one of its songs! read more »
Hot Tickets: Neil Diamond, Bloc Party, Wolf Parade, The Butthole Surfers
It seemed odd enough when the 80's Texas psych-punk band The Butthole Surfers made something of comeback in 1996 with an album that got lots of mainstream airplay. Now they're making a comeback from their comeback? You be the judge—they're playing Webster Hall on July 29. [On Sale: Friday, May 2 at noon] read more »
