Category — Albums

OK, so you might need to squint and look really carefully but the cover & tracklist for Guns N’ Roses, Best Buy exclusive “Chinese Democracy” is up at Best Buy.com.

11 of the 14 songs have either leaked or been played live before, leaving only 3 un-surfaced songs. According to Billboard…

“In typical dramatic fashion, the first noise one hears on the album is a blood-curdling Axl Rose scream, according to multiple sources who’ve heard it.”

There isn’t a full list of all the musicians who have played on the album yet. If there is a list included in the album’s liner notes it will no doubt be extensive. I wonder if the album will still have Buckethead’s custom Gibson guitar featured on it. I’m not buying this piece of trash album so someone will have to let me know.

“Chinese Democracy” Full Tracklist

01 “Chinese Democracy”
02 “Scraped”
03 “Shackler’s Revenge”
04 “Street Of Dreams”
05 “If The World”
06 “Better”
07 “This I Love”
08 “There Was A Time”
09 “Riad N’ The Bedovins”
10 “Sorry”
11 “I.R.S.”
12 “Catcher”
13 “Madagascar”
14 “Prostitute”

Image via Wikipedia

Much has been discussed concerning Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” album. The album’s pay-what-you-want model sparked lots of debate, discussion and intrigue in the record industry. The album was successful, but it’s pretty obvious that as far as a business model it wouldn’t work for a band not already very successful, famous and favored by the press.

In Rainbows ended up selling 3 million across all formats. It is worth noting that the band made more money on “In Rainbows” before its physical release than they did altogether on 2003’s “Hail To The Theif.”

“Radiohead’s publishing company, Warner Chapell recently revealed some information regarding the albums actual sales. According to Warner Chappell’s Jane Dyball, the band and its management tracked the amount fans were choosing to pay with the intention of canceling the download option if the price dropped too low. Warner also revealed that licensing the digital rights directly, and not through the standard collection agencies, was a key revenue generator.”

So, they still haven’t revealed the average download price, but it is interesting that they were tracking and monitoring the amount fans were paying.

Some more statistics regarding the “In Rainbows” release…
• After being made available for free for 3 months the album was no.1 in the UK and in the US
• 1st Radiohead album on iTunes – no.1 album selling 30,000 units in the US in the first week
• The physical CD has sold 1.75 million to date and is still top 200 UK & US
• They sold 100k boxsets via W.A.S.T.E.
• Nearing 17 million plays on last.fm
• 1.2 million fans will see the tour
• The digital income from the experiment made a material difference to WCM’s UK digital revenue this year

Source.

A while back The Cure were releasing singles leading up to their new album “4:13 Dream.” Some of these songs were good, but overall they didn’t seem to excite Cure fans as they should have.

Last weekend the band played a free show in Rome, Italy at the Piazza San Giovanni, this was professionally recorded by MTV and is now available on YouTube. Stereogum has embedded all the songs in the correct order for your viewing pleasure.

The new material is definitely more guitar-centric, but I like it a lot. The Cure’s last album, the self-titled 2004 release, was actually one of my favorites.

I liked its stripped down quality and these new songs retain that kind of feel. “Underneath The Stars” is as good as anything The Cure has written in years and “It’s Over” is almost prog-rock. I’m going to be interested in this record when it comes out.

Source.

Last week Shirley Manson, front-woman for the band Garbage, appeared on “Last Call With Carson Daly” to promote her role on the Fox TV show “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.”

When asked if her band Garbage would be doing another album together, she responded “I don’t know, to be honest. We’re sort of doing our different things.” “I’m doing the TV show, Butch is producing Green Day, so he’s busy, so we’ll see.”

This comment seemed to confirm previous rumors that the man behind the boards for Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and The Smashing Pumpkins “Siamese Dream” would be working on the follow-up to Green Day’s hugely successful “American Idiot” album.

At the time of the first round of rumors surrounding Green Day’s new album, the band’s management kept quiet. As for this rumor, the band’s label Reprise and their management declined requests to be interviewed. In 2006 a representative from Reprise Records confirmed that the band had begun work on new material at an undisclosed studio in the East Bay.

If you’re a Green Day fan, the fact that Butch Vig is producing the record is great news. His work on “Nevermind” and “Siamese Dream” is amazing and he is known for pushing bands pretty far to get their best performances.

Source.

Coldplay’s Chris Martin has written a letter to the band’s fans (via their website) to offer up some info regarding new releases. It isn’t a new album but Coldplay fans will be excited, maybe…

The band is gearing up to release an EP called “Prospekt’s March” and it contains 5 songs that didn’t make it onto the band’s latest album “Viva La Vida.” Before the EP is released Chris Martin has also revealed that “In a few weeks we are going to release a version of Lost! which has a guest experience on it in the form of JAY-Z.”

This is why I said that Coldplay fans would “maybe” be excited, I think the Jay-Z collaborations will probably get mixed feelings but either way, if you’re a fan you’ve got a few new things to look out for. The tracklist for “Prospekt’s March” is as follows…

1. Life In Technicolor ii (which is a song)
2. Postcards From Far Away
3. Glass Of Water
4. Rainy Day
5. Prospekt’s March

Chris Martin continues, “We are very proud of these and are pretty excited to release them. They have been the subject of many discussions and arguments; some might be considered too catchy or too heavy for Coldplay songs but in our minds they complete the VIVA LA VIDA picture.”

If you’d like to read Chris Martin’s full letter head over to Stereogum, where they have transcribed the original letter posted to Coldplay’s website.

In an exclusive interview for “Get Thrashed: The Story of Thrash” a documentary about the 90’s thrash metal movement, Kirk Hammett discusses Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain.

Spin Magazine has the exclusive clip, that is not featured in the documentary available for viewing on their website.

In the brief clip, Hammett mentions that Kurt Cobain was a Metallica fan and loved their “Ride The Lightning” album and the track “Whiplash” from Metallica’s first album “Kill Em’ All.”

In other Metallica news, the band remains No.1 for the 2nd week in a row on the Billboard Top 200 albums chart, having sold 867,000 records in a week and a half.

Dwell Records has released a tribute to Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett entitled “Like Black Holes In The Sky.” While the singer founded Pink Floyd, he was only in the band for a few albums, but his influence has lasted much longer.

This tribute features a great lineup of prominent bands covering some of his most famous songs, as well as lesser known material. It features…Kylesa, Intronaut, Stinking Lizaveta, Jarboe, Pentagram, Jesu and Dredg among others. Unlike most tributes this is a pretty solid album. I particularly enjoy Stinking Lizaveta’s relentlessly heavy take on “Matilda Mother.” It begins with an ethereal phased out and delayed guitar which slowly begins to morph into a heavy drone, that not only does justice to the original song, but adds something fresh.

This is a release any fan of stoner or psychadelic rock will want to check out, if you haven’t already. The album is available in its entirety on MySpace (in streaming form), on CD and it is also available for download through iTunes.

Weezer’s, Drummer Patrick Wilson, says the band will be heading back to the studio to record their seventh studio album this November. They plan to work a Jacknife Lee, a producer who worked on a few tracks from the Red Album, including “Troublemaker” and “Pork and Beans.” Wilson says they have already begun working on songs, sending everything they come up with to Lee. Sounds like they must be working on some new songs, though according to Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo, “some will be covers, others will be previously released Weezer tracks.

“We might do them acoustically or with an orchestra,” he said. “I’m thinking about something like ‘Slave’ or ‘December’ from Maladroit and maybe some old songs. I see us doing heavy versions of emotional songs.”

While some people might be annoyed that they would release older songs on a supposedly new album, I think it actually sounds interesting. Perhaps a reinterpretation of their better material would be more worthy listening material than just another cookie cutter single.

As for the album title, apparently Pat Wilson is a fan of doing it rainbow style, admitting, “if I had my way, we would just use colors from now on, then we wouldn’t have to think about titles. We must’ve had a hundred titles for the (’Red’) record, and none of them felt right so we just gave up and said, ‘OK, let’s just make a color.” Hopefully with the time they gain from not thinking too hard about album titles, they can think harder about how they can write a decent song (a.k.a how much they have to pay to make Matt Sharp re-join the band).

Dischord Records founder and Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye participated in a debate/discussion with Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore at the Brooklyn Book Fair, yesterday. According to Billboard.com MacKaye and Moore discussed issues ranging from advertising and record sales to a packed audience. An excerpt from Billboard’s piece on the discussion…

“In response to the moderator’s use of the word “Google” as a verb, MacKaye began the panel with a rant about the danger of language being a branded commodity. He then discussed his band’s now-legendary $5 cover policy, saying that there are always ways for the music industry to be more efficient. At the same time, he encouraged the audience to support artists by buying their music and seeing their shows.”

“Finally, the pair addressed the hot-button issue of indie bands associating with brands. MacKaye claimed the notion that working with brands was the only way to expose music is a conceit created by advertisers, and that all bands have a choice as to whether or not to sell their songs.”

This event seems like it would’ve been really cool to attend, it doesn’t say whether or not the audience got a Q&A type setup with MacKaye or Moore but one would expect something like that to occur. It would be great to see a video or hear audio of the event, if I find out its been posted somewhere I will definitely re-post that here.

The blogosphere has been buzzing all week about Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood’s comment on BBC6 that the band has already begun to work on a new album. It seems the band doesn’t take any time off from music, having just finished a North American tour and gearing up for dates in Japan next month. “We’ve finished the main bulk of it and we’re off to Japan in a couple of weeks to finish it off,” Greenwood said.

I’m as big a fan of Radiohead as anyone, but I’m not quick to get too excited. Though some sources are saying they intend to enter the studio before the end of the month, Prefix aptly points out the fact that it could still take a while before we see or hear any new tracks, their last few albums being released about four years apart. On the other hand, the band seems to be adapting to the newer, faster, technological side of the music industry. After giving fans the option of downloading In Rainbows for free, I’m excited to see what they come up with next. Hopefully they do not heed Oasis’s advice. (At least Radiohead challenges their fans to like good music).

In other Radiohead news to not get too excited about, a ballet inspired by the band entitled Ride the Beast will open in London next month.