On Half-Told Stories,half of the tracks are designed to rock out and freak out while trying
to pogo your way around the dancefloor in your head. More and more, the long-serving duo’s mix of trippy electronics and bouncy rock undercurrents comes with pumped-up, pounding decibels, like you can experience, among other stompers, to the full extent on the 3 dumbfounding singles (hear below)
Then again, half the record contains laid-back breathers, letting poetic storyteller Moffatlook out the window and reflect on all things weird whirling in his mind, with his trademark wit and dark humour.
Put everything – low and slow, fast and fervent – together and you know for a certified
fact that the Scots delivered another buzzworthy showpiece for end-of-the-year lists.
Band: GILLA BAND Who: Raw Irish post-punk
chainsaws.
Album:PUGNELLO.
It’ll show up on Sept 25th.
Order info here.
Press info: “Gilla Band never know where they’re going next. For over ten years now,
the Dublin quartet have been redefining what you could loosely call “rock music” in the 21st century, influencing a wide swath of similarly forward-thinking guitar acts along the way.
In the 4 years since previous album Most Normal, each member embarked on other
artistic endeavors. All their extracurricular activity existed in parallel with the exploratory route towards Pugnello, but also informed the band as they reconvened to crystallize the album’s vision.”
Check the 3 razorblade-cutting previews we got so far.
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?
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.
In 2014, to mark 20 years since the release of their 3rd LP, the masterwork named The Holy Bible, the band embarked on a sold-out tour performing the album in full.
‘The Holy Bible Live’ captures the record performed at London’s Roundhouse
during that tour. It will be available in Deluxe, 2LP Blue Marble, CD & Blu-Ray,
and Digital formats.
In 2012, the band abruptly finished their journey following
the untimely death of co-vocalist and bassist Adam MCA Yauch
due to cancer.
At 60, former BB MIKE D is back. He returned early this year with his first solo music.
After a couple of singles and some gigs here and there, he launched his solo debut LP, named THANK YOU a week ago.
A bouncy collection of kicky hip-hop tunes without hot Beastie Boys‘ party
anthems but still inviting your body to hop around like a kangaroo.
Album artwork
Mike D: “It’s been so much fun making this music with people I love and I have grown to
really appreciate in our collaboration. And I just hope it’s fun for others and not overly serious, because let’s be real, I’m releasing this music into a very strange and dark and power-fixated world that really devalues art and feelings and compassion and empathy and equality.”
“We so much loved all three of us being in a band with each other for Beastie Boys. When Yauch died, it was an extremely sad time for me so making music was just not on the table. Then being a dad was something I put myself into and eventually I worked on the ‘Beastie Boys Book’ with Adam (‘Ad-Rock’ Horovitz] and that really helped both of us as we were really able to shine a light on our past together.”
THANK YOU
.
Live, he’s backed by his band 5D, featuring 2 sons.
New dates for US/UK and Europe are below.
Press info: “Interpol’s first album in four years finds the band turning inward while continuing to move forward. Across the record, reflection, distortion and perception become a lens through which familiar shapes are refracted into something slightly
alien, as if seen through a different kind of light.”
Paul Banks told NME: “The drive of the record is a spirit of striving for elation,
enlightenment and clarity. I was born uncertain, that’s what keeps me intact”.
Album artwork
Mojo Magazine writes: “The results display more radio-friendly polish, while the grooves
are enhanced with percussive syncopation, and strings and woodwind are employed for
added sonic swirl.”
TUTV: Finally, after all these years, Interpol made an album that’s up there with their
first 2 outstanding ones, Turn Up The Bright Lights (2002) and Antics (2004).
This Mirror Weighs a Ton is, as the cliché goes, a return to form, stupendous form that is. The record excels because of its strong, utmost, dark romantic songs. Sterling songwriting, not one dull moment.
It feels like Paul Banks was wandering through his beloved New York City for many nights, absorbing its grandeur and also its shadowy mystique, and translating his observations and thoughts into commanding tunes, vocally, lyrically, and sonically.
The tracks’ pace shifts frequently with slow-progressing reveries (title track / Ever The Actor / Enemy / Sudden), amplified mid-tempo jams (Wounded Soldier / Darling Thoughts / Wake-up) and a couple of straight-up rockers (See Out Loud / Wings Of Fire).
Full aural ravishment for 53 minutes. A striking comeback achievement.
The recordings were canned at their 2025 concert at the historic building.
Half of the 13 songs are from their 2nd LP Show Your Bones from 2006.
Massive hits Maps (2003) and Zero are included too.
A physical album, out October 23 via Secretly Canadian, will include today’s
13-track live album as well as a handful of bonus recordings from U.S. shows,
which will come to streaming the same day.
The album’s sound quality is TOP! Stream it below.
They also have a 22-minute concert film streaming now via the The Criterion Channel.
It was recorded at Los Angeles’ Orpheum Theatre and will screen in a handful of theaters around the world this month.
Some (actually many) words from the band on the live album.
Band: WEEZER Who: The veteran nerd
rockers from Los Angeles.
Album: WEEZER
Their 4th self-titled one decorated with symbols,
think Led Zeppelin‘s 4th longplayer. The record
is already dubbed The Gold Album.
Rolling Stone: “Weezer’s Gold is, in fact, Weezer gold.”
Pitchfork says: “Spurred on by producer Kenneth Blume, Weezer get
back in a room together to write rock songs that wallow, reminisce, and,
very occasionally, wow.”
TUTV: Mixed critical verdicts. Weezer is one of these bands that goes back to
their (very) old recipe, to their fan-pleasing formula, over and over again, but
forget regularly, to write enough top-tier tunes to fill a full record. As usual,
the singles are catchy and fun, but the rest is mediocre for a band of their
calibre. No, I’m not impressed.
