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May 11th, 2009UncategorizedNokia’s Anssi Vanjoki has put the smackdown on Apple in an interview with VentureBeat. Well, kind of. “For the basic functionality, we are beating iPhone hands-down today with our NSeries products,” he says.
“We have a big jump to take in usability to make it really user-friendly. If you compare an N95 with the iPhone, we have a lot more features. Not all of them are easy for the normal consumer. You have to be a geek to make use of them. But we are taking quantum leaps to get better usability, and we will have many applications.”
The question is whether Nokia can truly deliver a phone more usable than the iPhone, though - its NSeries phones have been more about cramming as many features in as possible, as Vanjoki admits.
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May 10th, 2009Uncategorized
The bronze metallic façade of Mao Livehouse makes the venue seem like some sort of metal-working factory, a fitting place for a night of rhythmic, motorized music from Battles.
Several hundred of us, both expats and Chinese, were fortunate to catch the quirky super-group play in Beijing last Friday. Lots of us stared at all the equipment being dragged up on stage — all sorts of whirligigs and doodads and thingies with banks of flashing lights.
I’ve listened to the album Mirrored a lot, and the band’s semi-robotic mechanized sound is prevalent, but not as much as in its live show. The sounds really do come off as a series of whirs and noises looped into rhythms, layered with keyboard, bass, guitar and robo-vocals, all while keeping perfect time with the band’s metronomic drummer, John Stanier. That’s not to say they have no soul, though.
Battles clearly loves what it does, especially keyboardist/vocalist Tyondai Braxton. He was snaking, shimmying, and smiling all over the place as he played and sang. The vocals were a little too low in the mix for my taste, but they were loud enough that we could still enjoy the glorious, maddened robotic singing.
Stanier often had a pained look of concentration on his face, but it was the good kind of pain that comes from being the most important cog in a conveyor belt of music — repetitious complex beats kept his concentration piqued and his teeth gritted. Every member was sweating, concentrating, moving, playing, swaying, jerking — each one a very human part of the machine that is Battles.
The set started with “Race: Out,” with a loud, deep, tangable noise intro that absolutely had me salivating with curiosity before the band cycled through a lot of the material from Mirrored. Each song engulfed us in its aura as we watched, dumbfounded that this stuff could actually be played so well live.
Well, “live” — there is quite a lot of sampling from laptops and various knobs, dials, and gizmos, but essentially, it’s much more live than most laptop artists. Occasionally, prerecorded samples are played, but that’s done while something else is played with one hand.
An image burned in my memory is of both guitarists, Ian Williams and Dave Konopka, playing their instruments with one hand while playing keyboard with the other, then stretching a third hand (or was it a leg?) to turn some dial or press some big red shiny button.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been blown away by a band, since I’ve left a show feeling pummeled, confused, basted, and giddy all at the same time. Pay any price for the chance to see this band play live; pay all that you have and get ready to have your synapses overloaded.
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May 9th, 2009Uncategorized
Nine Inch Nails are giving away another free download. This time its the Lights In The Sky tour sampler featuring a track from each of the bands supporting NIN on their North American jaunt this summer Deerhunter, Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Crystal Castles and A Place To Bury Strangers.Having done a Radiohead earlier this year with albums Ghosts I-IV and, more recently, offered fans another 10 track free download called The Slip, it would appear that this has become the standard distribution model for Trent Reznor and co.You can get your DRM-free copy of Lights In The Sky (including cover art and digital extras) by signing up here.
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May 8th, 2009Uncategorized
Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready has revealed that the band would like to collaborate with Jack White.
Speaking to reporters about Pearl Jams forthcoming appearance at the Bonnaroo Festival, which will also feature Whites side-project The Raconteurs, McCready said he would love to have the guitarist join the band onstage.
I just, I think he's just a phenomenal guitar player and I'd love to see him play up close, McCready said.
I've seen The White Stripes in Europe, but it was kind of far away."But I'd love to have him up there and jam because he's got a killer voice and he's a great lead player too. So that would be exciting to me."
Other acts scheduled to appear at the festival which runs from June 12th-15th in Tennessee include Kanye West and Death Cab For Cutie.Metallica are also on the bill for the festival. -
May 7th, 2009Uncategorized
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May 6th, 2009Uncategorized
The return of original producer Steve Osborne and a guest appearance by a Rolling Stone highlight Starsailor's upcoming fourth album.Tentatively titled "All the Plans," the album features Stones guitarist Ron Wood on the track "All The Plans We Made," Starsailor frontman James Walsh tells Billboard.com. "We kept asking him if he'd be up for playing some guitar on the record, and at the time he was busy promoting the film ('Shine a Light')," Walsh says. "So there were a couple of months there where he just wasn't available to do it.
"Then I got a call about half past six one evening from his son Jesse saying, 'My dad really wants to do this now. Can you be at the studio (at) nine o'clock?' So from having sort of given up the ghost it all came together out of the blue. It was amazing; he stood there playing the guitar, saying the song reminded him of 'Maggie May' -- quite high praise, indeed."
Walsh describes the rest of "All the Plans" as "back to our roots in a lot of ways," and a "reaction" to the "darker and heavier" tone of 2005's "On the Outside." "On this album, there's a lot more light to it, and we've reverted back to the more acoustic guitar- and piano-driven sound on a lot of the tracks," Walsh says. "It's hard to encapsulate it in one word or phrase, though."
Starsailor recorded the album in four studios around England, and other song titles include "Stars and Stripes," "Tell Me It's Not Over," and "Boy in Waiting." When it comes out remains a mystery, however; Walsh says the album has been finished since May and the band is waiting for EMI to decide on a release date."It's definitely frustrating when you've got a finished record you want to get out and promote," Walsh acknowledges, "But we're keeping ourselves as busy as we can." That includes opening for the Police on its U.K. dates this month as well as performances at the Isle of Wight Festival and Hard Rock Calling in Britain and the Cactus Festival in Belgium. -
May 5th, 2009Uncategorized
Muse have begun to make their fifth album.The boys are currently working on a follow-up to 2006's Black Holes & Revelations.Frontman Matt Bellamy told NME: "We've just started writing songs for the new album, whatever it's going to be, you know? It's going great, we just started."Having reassembled after a hefty tour, the trio are just getting into the swing of things.Matt added: "It's really about getting back together and getting the ball rolling again and seeing whether it'll roll." -
May 4th, 2009Uncategorized
Weezer - those riff-loving, hook-hurling, inner-geek-embracing wags - has become the most reliable band in rock. Sixteen years in, the group continues to churn out crunchy anthems for misfits, nerds, and anyone with a soft spot for quirky, heavy power-pop. The songs are consistently vibrant, catchy, and well-built. Occasional stabs at earnestness notwithstanding, Weezer's lyrics probe frontman Rivers Cuomo's cosmic outsiderness in smart, sarcastic stanzas that come off like self-deprecating goofs but always leave you wondering: Is he laughing at us? Is he sadder than he seems? The chorus is righteous, so why should we even care?Not much has changed on the group's sixth album, a self-titled collection dubbed the Red Album. (Weezer's previous two self-titled projects were anointed the Blue Album and the Green Album.) In fact, one wishes that less had changed upon arriving at the disc's back end, which features token contributions from guitarist Brian Bell, bassist Scott Shriner, and drummer Patrick Wilson that sound like they were mistakenly grafted onto a Weezer album from some other, more forgettable, alt-rock band.Cuomo, newly mustachioed, has started playing around a bit with song structure, pushing beyond rock's usual verse-chorus-bridge pattern and into headier, linear territory. "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)" is a sprawling folk-metal chorale that squashes wildly assorted references (Shakespeare, sex, and stardom) into epic musical settings (elegant harmonies, suite-like movements) and winds up sounding simply, fabulously faux.
But that seems to be what Cuomo is going for. The Red Album is filled with the sunny musings and petulant posturing of a boy, or a slacker, not a 37-year-old, Harvard-educated, multiple-platinum rocker, husband, and father. "Who needs stupid books," he sneers in the gleeful pop-rocker "Troublemaker." "Everybody get dangerous," he counsels over stiff, filthy licks in the song of the same name. "Daddy says I've got to pay some bills/ So I can learn to be responsible," he moans in "Dreamin'," a blissed-out paean to escapism.
Forget those middle-age lotharios in skin-tight leather and feathered hair; Cuomo is rock's Peter Pan, and there's enough stunted growth on the Red Album to fill a case study. A famously reluctant pop star, Cuomo is dreaming the same dreams even after they've come true. "Pork and Beans" is vintage stuff: wall of guitars, heap of hooks, tongue planted firmly in cheek. "Timbaland knows the way to reach the top of the chart/ Maybe if I work with him I can perfect the art," he cracks, going on to claim "Imma do the things that I want to do/ I ain't got a thing to prove to you."Of course, all Cuomo has ever tried to do is perfect the art. To crow about his maverick attitude in a song that was so clearly built for maximum appeal is just so . . . Weezer. -
May 3rd, 2009Uncategorized
Dame Shirley Bassey has been discharged from the French hospital where she was recovering from an emergency operation on her stomach, her spokesman said yesterday.The singer, 71, was taken to hospital with abdominal pains in the middle of the night last week after calling out her doctor in Monaco, where she lives.But her spokesman Paul Carey said: "She is out of hospital today and back at home, resting up and on the road to a full recovery".The star, who wowed audiences at last year's Glastonbury festival in diamante-encrusted wellington boots, has enjoyed chart success since the late 1950s.
She sang the Bond theme tunes for Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker.
The Welsh-born singer now begins rehearsals for her performance at next month's Nelson Mandela 90th birthday concert in Hyde Park.The Big Spender and No Regrets star attracted a new generation of fans with History Repeating in 1997, a collaboration with the Propellerheads.The singer was made a dame in 1999. -
May 2nd, 2009Uncategorized
"Back from the dead!" crows Pimp C in the opening moments of the sixth studio album by these Texas crack–rap pioneers. It's an eerie moment — Pimp C was found dead in an L.A. hotel in December 2007 — but thankfully, Pimp's surviving partner, Bun B, doesn't wallow in the macabre. Instead, we get UGK basics: songs about drugs, sex and flossing, flavored with thudding, no–nonsense beats. Cuts like the sulfurous "Da Game Been Good to Me" remind us what rap lost with Pimp C's...
