This Week’s New Music Releases: 31 August 2009

Albums and singles released in the UK today…

Brendan Benson and Noah And The Whale both release new albums today (August 31), while Friendly Fires and Saint Etienne reissue deluxe editions of their previous albums.

In the singles stakes, The Cribs return with ‘Cheat On Me’, Jamie T unleashes his ‘Chaka Demus’ EP and Delphic release ‘This Momentary’. The physical version of Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Holiday’ is also out today.

Singles released today:

Delphic – ‘This Momentary’
Dizzee Rascal - ‘Holiday’
Jamie T - ‘Chaka Demus’ EP
Manchester Orchestra – ‘I’ve Got Friends’
Prodigy - ‘Take Me To The Hospital’
Remi Nicole – ‘Standing Tears Apart’
Sugababes - ‘Get Sexy’
The Cribs - ‘Cheat On Me’

Albums released today:

Brendan Benson – ‘My Old, Familiar Friend’
Friendly Fires - ‘Friendly Fires’ (reissue)
Just Jack - ‘All Night Cinema’
Noah & The Whale - ‘First Days Of Spring’
Saint Etienne - ‘So Tough: Deluxe Edition’
Tommy Sparks - ‘Tommy Sparks’

NME.com Monday, August 31st 2009

Fans around the world have marked what would have been Michael Jackson’s 51st birthday with parties and mass dances.

In Mexico City, organisers said they had broken a record for the most people dancing to Thriller at the same time, reporting that 12,937 people turned up.

In New York, film director Spike Lee staged what he described as a “joyous, festive and celebratory” event.

Other gatherings remembered Jackson in cities including London, Paris, Moscow, Delhi, Barcelona and Bucharest.

An all-day street party near Jackson’s childhood home in Gary, Indiana, featured local performers and a candlelight vigil.

Up to 10,000 fans braved heavy rain in Brooklyn. Fans also left messages and memorabilia at his Neverland ranch and his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Spike Lee now wants to make his party, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, an annual event.

“I was just like everyone else. I loved his talent,” said Lee, who directed the music video for Jackson’s 1996 hit They Don’t Care About Us.

The festival attracted up to 10,000 people despite heavy rain, with a DJ playing Jackson’s hits.

Edna Robles, from Brooklyn, said: “It could be thundering, I don’t care. I watched him through the years and I think he’s the best. I love him.”

Many fans at the global gatherings dressed in Jackson’s distinctive attire and danced to his hits.

Mickael Ayeri, in Paris, said: “He’s my inspiration for dance and for song. He is the greatest artist, a complete artist. And when I see, when he died, honestly, I lost a part of me.”

In India, some of Bollywood’s biggest stars, including Shahrukh Khan, Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif, released a free musical tribute to Jackson.

Jackson’s family had originally planned to bury the pop star on his birthday. But he will now be laid to rest in a private ceremony on Thursday.

On Friday, a coroner ruled that Jackson’s death was homicide, primarily caused by the powerful anaesthetic propofol.

news.bbc.co.uk Monday, 31st August 2009

Noel Gallagher has said he quit Oasis because of the “verbal and violent intimidation” towards himself and his family.

The guitarist, who announced his departure On Friday 28th August, said the situation had become “intolerable” and forced him to “seek pastures new”.

In a message on his tour blog, Noel also claimed he had received a “lack of support and understanding from my management and band mates”.

He is thought to have taken the decision to leave Oasis after relations with his brother, singer Liam, soured beyond repair.

The pair, who formed Oasis in 1991, are reported to have been involved in an altercation before the Rock en Seine festival in France on Friday 28th August.

The band pulled out of their headline set at the event just before their scheduled slot time.

On his blog, Noel apologised to any fans who felt “let down”, adding: “Apologies are probably not enough, I know, but I’m afraid it’s all I’ve got.”

He also said he was sorry for the band’s cancelled headline set at the V Festival last weekend.

“I was match fit and ready to be brilliant. Alas, other people in the group weren’t up to it,” Noel wrote.

He continued: “In closing I would like to thank all the Oasis fans, all over the world…The last 18 years have been truly, truly amazing (and I hate that word, but today is the one time I’ll deem it appropriate). A dream come true. I take with me glorious memories.”

The guitarist added: “Now, if you’ll excuse me I have a family and a football team to indulge…I’ll see you somewhere down the road. It’s been a fuckin’ pleasure. Thanks very much. Goodbye.”

The Gallagher brothers have endured a fractious relationship since Oasis formed in Manchester 18 years ago.

But, despite their differences, neither Brother has ever formally announced their departure.

Gigwise.com Monday August 31st 2009

Audiotube’s ‘Mystery Snapper‘ competition has been extended… so get uploading your entries. The competition will now draw to a close on Friday September 4th.

All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning the 8Gb Ipod Touch, worth £165, is submit your favourite music-related pics from this summer and the best pic will win the wicked prize.

Whether you’ve battled your way to the front of one of the many gigs and festivals taking place this month, performed a quality set with your band or maybe just had a great music star sighting then we want to know all about it.

Each Audiotube member can upload a maximum of five images each. After this point the Audiotube team will shortlist the best entries and post a voting thread in the forums. Members will then have the chance to vote and decide who will be crowned Audiotube’s first ever ‘Mystery Snapper’.

Click here for more info

Pete Doherty gave a private performance to a fan after he was thrown out of the rocker’s concert.

The unnamed teenager was asked to leave a secret show at London’s Roundhouse venue for being underage but the Babyshambles star stepped in to save the boy’s disappointment and took him and his mother to his dressing room for an impromptu show.

The unnamed fan said: “Pete handed me his notebook and said, ‘Write a setlist.’ He then played five songs for just me and my mum. It lasted an hour. It was amazing.”

“He walked around the room, playing his guitar as if he was playing to a crowd of thousands.”

“Moments like this make you realise how much of a legend he really is.”

This is not the first time Pete has displayed his kindness towards his fans.

Last July, the rocker performed at the wake of a 16-year-old supporter who died of bone cancer.

Pete, 30, had met Daniel Squires backstage at a concert and gave him his telephone number, telling the stricken teen to call him whenever he wanted to.

After learning Daniel had passed away, the former Libertines rocker joined mourners at his funeral in Tyneside, North East England, before giving an impromptu performance with a group of the teen’s friends.

Lynette Gale, manager of the Golden Lion pub where the wake was held, said at the time: “He said he wanted to come up to pay tribute. It was a lovely gesture and made it all special.”

Music-news.com August 30th 2009

Thousands of music fans are heading to the Reading and Leeds Festivals to see The Arctic Monkeys, the Prodigy and Kings Of Leon later.

Radiohead will also perform at both sites of the three-day festival for the first time in 15 years.

Organiser Melvin Benn said: “We’ve got the best bill of the year.”

On Tuesday, he announced that flags have been banned from the twin sites because they block the crowds view of the stage.

“Almost everybody’s arrived, all the sound systems seem to be good and we’ve had incredible weather,” Mr Benn said.

“I’m very pleased with the start we’ve had, and we’re just looking forward to the music kicking off now.”

“I’m feeling positive about the weekend.”

Phoney tickets

Despite his confidence, he did admit there had been “a couple of issues” with fake tickets, but insisted the situation had improved from last year.

The event promoters, Festival Republic, said a number of tickets had been issued by unofficial websites.

A spokeswoman said anyone holding a phoney ticket will not be allowed into the festival.

In Reading, 83,500 fans are expected to descend upon the banks of the River Thames, while 70,000 will be at Leeds’ Bramham Park.

Highlights from both festivals will be shown on BBC Three and broadcast on BBC Radio 1 across the weekend.

BBC News August 28th 2009

Kentucky-born and Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Dawn Landes has announced she will be releasing her third album, Sweet Heart Rodeo, on Monday 7th September. The album will be preceded by the release of a digital download single, Romeo (released Monday 31st August), which berates a certain someone who once ruined one of Landes birthdays by standing her up, and borrows a hook from Tennessee Ernie Ford’s fifties nugget of resignation ‘16 Tons’.

Landes first came to the UK’s attention with the release of her acclaimed second album (and her UK debut), Fireproof (2008).  Q declared it to be “Understated and beautiful”, whilst The Guardian called it “vivid girl-next-door indie pop in the spirit of Frente and Cat Powers.”  Uncut said: “Landes propels the whole project skywards with a voice that encapsulates the best qualities of Laura Veirs and Cat Powers.  It’s pretty much essential stuff.”

Sweet Heart Rodeo looks set to garner even more critical acclaim. The title was inspired by Landes’ great-grandmother’s beau, who ran away to join the rodeo during the Great Depression.  A rodeo theme runs throughout the record as she compares the ups and downs of romance to the rigours of bull riding. “Each song is like its own bull,” the twenty-eight-year-old deadpans.  “Each ride its own love-story … you know, trying to hang on to a wild thing isn’t always graceful.”

Recorded in Landes own studio (Saltlands in Brooklyn) with regular collaborator, drummer and all-rounder Ray Rizzo, guitarist Josh Kaufman and bassist Annie Nero, the album kicks off with ‘Young Girl’, which ponders gender stereotyping - competitive boys, jealous girls - over a reductive and distorted keyboard riff. The haunting ‘Money In The Bank’ marries down-home hippie wisdom (‘the night before you die, what are you gonna buy?’) to a glorious chorus bolstered by a wistful French horn.

Landes  even drums on an unlikely cover of Margo Guryan’s already unlikely ‘Love’, a 1968 collision of cool jazz and nascent psychedelia. Rizzo’s idiosyncratic harmonica style (“kinda cloudy- the opposite of ethereal”) boosts the quirky ‘Wandering Eye’, a rare song that combines sex and travel without causing offence, while ‘Little Miss Holiday’ imagines a conversation between Jodie Foster and the teenage hooker that inspired her character in Scorsese’s unhinged ‘Taxi Driver’. It’s tender rather than bleak.

‘Brighton’ is a tribute to a magical day in that great Southern (English) town, yet it could hardly sound more American, Appalachian even. “I hope I captured it in the song,” she says. Her Brighton though is more romantic than the resort us Britons know, already a fond memory. By the album’s conclusion, the wobbly wedding march of ‘All Dressed In White’, you’ll probably be thinking of giving love a try.  Even if it does hurt when you fall off.

Available on CD and as a digital download, the full tracklisting as follows :

1.    Young Girl                           7.     Wandering Eye
2.    Romeo                               8.     Little Miss Holiday
3.    Money In The Bank              9.     Dance Area
4.    Love                                  10.    Brighton
5.    Sweetheart Of The Rodeo     11.    All Dressed In White
6.    Clown

www.cookingvinyl.com
www.dawnlandes.com
www.myspace.com/dawnlandes

Audiotube Newsdesk August 28th 2009

Snow Patrol announce a very special UK tour to take place in November 2009. ‘Snow Patrol Reworked’ is a live celebration featuring highlights from the bands 15 year career to date, specially reworked and reinvented.

Snow Patrol are a truly global multi platinum, multi-million selling success story and the Reworked tour offers a chance to look back to the early days of their career as well as giving fans the opportunity to hear their work interpreted in a brand new way - at each show Snow Patrol will be joined by other musicians and surprise guests tba.

The tour will also encompass songs by The Reindeer Section. A collective that featured members of Belle and Sebastian, Idlewild and Teenage Fanclub among many others.

Each ticket to the Reworked tour comes with a free download of the incredible ‘Lightning Strike’, the epic trilogy that closed the bands critically acclaimed last album ‘A Hundred Million Suns’.

Dates are:

18th November Brighton Centre
20th November Bristol Colston Hall
21st November Newscastle City Hall
23rd/24th November London Royal Albert Hall
27TH November Manchester Palace Theatre
30TH November Glasgow Clyde Auditorium

Tickets on sale now! For tickets call: 0871 2200 260

www.snowpatrol.com

Music-news.com August 28th 2009

Monday 28th September sees the release of Great Lakes, the new album from McIntosh Ross, aka Lorraine McIntosh and Ricky Ross of the multi-selling Scottish group Deacon Blue.

After more than two decades in and out of Deacon Blue, the pair decided they wanted to make an album - together. Not an album as part of Deacon Blue. Not a Ricky Ross album with Lorraine popping up on backing vocals but an album which the two of them could call, justly and equally, their own.

The rules of engagement were kept to a minimum. They would both write and both sing. The songs would be beautiful, meaningful and simple – no unnecessary chords or complicated changes. And the couple would go somewhere other than Scotland to record them. “We knew what we’d get if we did it here in Glasgow,” Ricky says. “We thought if we go somewhere else and get different people to work with we’ll come up with something that will surprise us.  We wanted to record music together that was completely fresh.”

‘Somewhere else’ turned out to be the Red Star Studio in Silver Lake, Los Angeles and the ‘different people’ were a group of players steeped in the finest traditions of Americana music. Mark Howard was hired to produce. He has worked in the studio with Bob Dylan and Tom Waits and produced Lucinda Williams’s Top 20 album, World Without Tears.

With Howard’s help Ricky and Lorraine hand-picked a band that included drummer Steven Nistor (Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse), bass player Daryl Johnson (Emmylou Harris, the Neville Brothers) and the great Doug Pettibone (Lucinda Williams’s guitarist) on pedal steel and banjo. Completing the line-up was guitarist and backing vocalist David Scott (of The Pearl Fishers), an old friend of Ricky’s and Lorraine’s from Glasgow, who produced Ricky’s last solo album, Pale Rider.

The result is The Great Lakes by McIntosh Ross, an album of supreme melodic grace and spiritual purity which combines echoes of the duo’s Celtic homeland with the alternative country twang of the American south – a seamless blend of Caledonia and California, if you will. “I don’t think we consciously thought of Scotland or America,” Ricky says. “It was more to do with the kind of songs we wanted to sing. These became more folky as the writing went on, while the more mainstream pop songs got disregarded. The main thing was that if it didn’t seem like a genuinely significant song to both of us then it didn’t get on the record.”

Available on CD and as a digital download, the full tracklisting is as follows :

1.    The Great Lakes                   8.    Your Straight Man
2.    Winter Is Coming                 9.    Mount Juliet
3.    Bluebell Wood                     10.    Silver And Gold
4.    All My Trust I Place in You     11.    Oh The Dark
5.    Gloria                                 12.    This World Is Not My Home
6.    A Passing Place                   13.    Jesus Nailed My Sins Upon The Tree
7.    Walls

With Deacon Blue currently on an indefinite hiatus, bar the occasional get-together for special gigs such as this year’s Liverpool Summer Pops festival, Ricky has branched out as a songwriter, and written songs both for and with a variety of artists including James Blunt, Ronan Keating, Will Young, Nanci Griffith, EG White and Jamie Cullum among many others. Lorraine, meanwhile has launched a parallel career as an actress, appearing as a regular character in the Scottish soap River City, the current BBC drama series Hope Springs, and in several feature films.  The irony is that singing is now more central to her life than ever before. “I sing all the time,” she says. “I sing more than Ricky. He couldn’t survive if he could never write another song, but I simply couldn’t live without the singing.”

www.cookingvinyl.com
www.mcintoshross.com
www.myspace.com/mcintoshross

Audiotube Newsdesk August 28th 2009

Madonna has said she was “compelled” to comment on the discrimination of Romany Gypsies while on stage in Romania, despite being booed by fans.

The 51-year-old was jeered by the audience in Bucharest after saying the discrimination “made me feel very sad”.

Publicist Liz Rosenberg said Madonna made the comments after being made aware of the prejudice towards Romany people in eastern Europe.

The star uses a group of Roma musicians on her Sticky and Sweet tour.

Madonna paused during her two-hour show to say: “It has been brought to my attention, that there is a lot of discrimination against Romanies and Gypsies in general in Eastern Europe - it made me feel very sad.”

“We don’t believe in discrimination, we believe in freedom and equal rights for everyone.”

Jeers and cheers

The star then received more boos when she mentioned prejudice against homosexuals and others.

Rosenberg said Madonna had told her there were cheers as well as jeers from the 60,000-strong crowd.

“Madonna has been touring with a phenomenal troupe of Roma musicians who made her aware of the discrimination toward them in several countries so she felt compelled to make a brief statement,” she added.

Concert goer Ionut Dinu, 23, said: “I jeered her because it seemed false what she was telling us. What business does she have telling us these things?”

Romania has the largest number of Roma in eastern Europe.

Nearly half of Europe’s estimated 12 million Roma claimed to have suffered an act of discrimination over the past 12 months, according to a recent report by the EU Fundamental Rights Agency.

The agency says Roma face “overt discrimination” in housing, health care and education.

BBC News August 28th 2009