Their fans can start jumping for joy ’cause their idols are back with new single WHO’S THAT, a synth-glowing woolgathering evoking dreamy images. No sign
yet of a new LP, but I’m sure that won’t take long.
JOHN LENNON released his 2nd solo LP IMAGINE
on 9 September 1971, today 55 years ago.
It was co-recorded by Lennon, Yoko Ono and Phil Spector.
It topped both the UK and US charts.
The LP’s lyrics reflect peace, love, politics, Lennon’s experience with primal scream therapy and, following a period of high personal tensions, an attack on his former writing partner Paul McCartney in “How Do You Sleep?”.
Lennon: “I used my resentment against Paul to create a song not a terrible vicious
horrible vendetta. I used my resentment and withdrawing from Paul and The Beatles,
and the relationship with Paul, to write ‘How Do You Sleep?’. I don’t really go ’round with
those thoughts in my head all the time.”
MOJO magazine said in retrospect: “The album contains both the best and the worst of Lennon – the idealist and the ranter, the righteous and the vindictive anger – and as such remains more patchy than its iconic status might allow.”
Kentucky alt rockers CAGE THE ELEPHANT celebrate their 20th anniversary
as a band this year. They will party in 2027 around the UK and Europe. The
tour is dubbed ‘Dying In Reverse Tour’ (a hint to a new album title?)
Their latest album, their 6th, Neon Pill, came out in 2024, and
last July they released a single titled Beaches In Tennessee.
“I was really affected by Jeff Buckley when I heard him peform. I was at one of his last concerts in Australia. It was just absolutely staggering. He just touched every emotion in you. He was really superb and in a total class of his own.”
It’s been 19 years since Australian rockers Jet‘s album Shine On
renowned American music website PITCHFORK gave an artist’s
album a 0/10 score.
Now 36-year-old Californian rapper TYGA (backronym
for Thank You God Always) gets the same ice-cold shower.
The 2 main motives for the devastating verdict are: A1 technology was
used to make the record, and the music is badly copied/pasted from
the 80s.
To get in the mood and before you read large pieces from
that review, listen, for starters, to the full-length’s single
below.
Here we go.
“Tyga is not the biggest rapper in the world. But earlier this year, he revealed himself to
be a man with a dream not dissimilar to Lil Wayne’s: to completely reinvent himself and his music. The vision was to create an entirely new character separate from Tyga, the rapper known primarily for the party songs he recorded in the early 2010s while serving Young
Money’s fourth banana, and a world for that character to embody for a whole-ass album cycle…
… Initially, Tyga implied this album was 100% human-made. “Even down to the mixing,
we used a lot of the old hardware,” he told People, citing the very specific examples of “delays, harmonizers. Everything that we used was stuff that they used in the ’80s.”
But then a week later, when asked by VIBE if he used AI on the record, he pulled an about-face and said, “For sure.” He defended himself by claiming that the public’s negative attitude toward AI tools is similar to how people felt about early Auto-Tune use, that “there’s nothing wrong with using technology as a tool,” and besides, even if he got some musical elements from the record from AI, that “the writing, all the vocals are all me.” For good measure, he added in, “Why are people overexplaining how they make shit good?”…
… , $TARFACE is smug and complacent, an amalgam of ’80s synth-pop and disco slapped together by someone who’s seemingly never cared to listen to one synth-pop or disco record in his life. Given the amount of actual effort or even labor put into $TARFACE—which is to say, about zero—the margins on this thing must be amazing.
Stream it out of morbid curiosity if you must, but know that even a single listen runs the risk of making it profitable and therefore encouraging the music industry to commit such atrocities again.”
TUTV: I can’t shake off the idea that this is a very lazy, very stinking/suspicious, and very over the top review. I agree, if AI technology is used, it’s cheatingly stupid. But we don’t know for a fact how far the AI treatment goes: the whole record, or only the backing tracks, some or all of the musical parts and instruments.” To be honest, I have no idea aurally if/when AI is applied or not. I don’t know how you can detect that.
Then the butchering of the music in itself “$TARFACE is smug and complacent, an amalgam
of ’80s synth-pop and disco slapped together by someone who’s seemingly never cared to listen to one synth-pop or disco record in his life” is a sort of gratuitous and unfair opinion.
Decades-old music/genres recycling/reimagining these days is a daily, normal thing (for ages, actually). It happens with rock, punk, techno, metal, EBM, R& B, all the time. Are all those records shit? Nope.
Also, when Pitchfork writes that the album is “slapped together by someone who’s seemingly never cared to listen to one synth-pop or disco record in his life”, how can the creator of it copy that type of music? C’mon.
I can’t get it out of my head that this journalist/writer didn’t like what he heard – and
that’s totally okay; everybody, of course, is entitled to his own taste/impressiin/opinon – but that something triggered him to go to extremes in his reflections, knowing that he would get a lot of attention (ours too) all over the internet (which happened) with his
‘0/10’ score. Did this guy use aggressive-oriented AI for his review? LOL.
To my ears, $TARFACE is a record stuffed with catchy synth dance-pop tunes, but a bit
too much of the same. I give it a 6/10. So, Tyga and this producer have no clue how to use AI properly; otherwise, it would have been a 10/10 masterpiece opus. Right?
Australian pop star KYLIE MINOGUE (58 now) released her global (No. 1 in 40 countries)
blockbuster CAN’T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD today, 25 years ago, on 8 September 2001.
The song was written by a British duo, songwriter/producer Cathy Davis and Rob Davis, who was the guitarist of renowned glam rockers Mud (1966-1980).
So far, the dance-pop classic has gathered more than 1,011 billion streams on Spotify.
Zantingh (voice/songwriter): “Some of the people with whom I shared the earliest version of ‘time loop at hot slit’ take the stage to sing it themselves. Our local scene has been singing this song with us for two years!!
It’s very exciting to finally share it with the world, but no matter where it ends up, it will always belong to the femmes, queers, and weirdos in the Vancouver underground community”.
TUTV: OMG! Buckle up, people. These mental, out-of-their-minds Canadian screamo
punks take no prisoners. They have all engines at full tilt from the first boiling sec.
Shedevil Zantingh has 4 lungs and uses them to go ballistic without a pause. Her clamourous hardcore capacity pierce your eardrums. Fun, right? You bloody betcha.
Let’s get pissed.
British bigshots KASABIAN, fronted by bt their singer-songwriter Serge Pizzorno, one of the best bands of the past 25 years on record and on stage, in my book, have their new album ACT III, their 8th one.
TUTV: Mixed reviews for ACT III, from delighted ones to rejecting ones.
Since frontman Tom Meighan was fired in 2020, the band (read: Pizzorno) slid slowly
into a more synth-abundant, dance-pop-oriented direction with the 2 two LPs. Okay,
no problem, but the execution gets less challenging after hitting the UK’s Album Charts
with all their previous longplayers. Pizzorno plays it (too) save here.
ACT III sounds as if he put all of his ideas in the record’s big dancefloor banger Hippie Shaker and then ripped off that song to write many of the other tracks, but all of them inferior to that centrepiece. Too inferior for Pizzorno‘s diverse, masterly songwriting
skills.
The tunes miss the body, driving twists and turns, the anthemic electronics/rock
mix and Meighan‘s straightforward, trickless and in-your-face vocality.
Mind you, this album is not a full stinker, but I miss
their full-hearted, afire and multipotent explosiveness.
