STATIC and FEEDBACK
Tracing the path of Neil Young’s ‘Helpless’
Cutting through all else, the song is a simple call back to a childhood home, the inevitable stage for all the confusion and turmoil that comes with maturity. It’s simple structure — the song never breaks from that D-A-G path — runs in contrast to the weight of growing up, growing old and moving out.
It’s time to sum up the best music of 2011, and the Black Keys top our list, with El Camino walking away with “album of the year.”
What else did Nick highlight? Check it out now.
Noel Gallagher flies high on his own
Without his brother and bandmates, Noel has full control of an album again, and he makes the most of it with High Flying Birds.
The opening “Brandenburg Gate” starts out interestingly enough, with Reed reciting “I would cut my legs and tits off/When I think of Boris Karloff/In the dark of the moon,” but it’s not long before the weirdness kicks in, Metallica’s full-scale riffing and James Hetfield’s repeated “Small town girl!” punctuating the rest of Reed’s pseudo-ranting.
And it just goes on like this…
Revisiting the mechanical world of walkmans and cassettes
What began as an experiment in the wake of a dead iPod turned into a love rekindled with a gloriously imperfect format and an outdated music player.
Tom Waits is at his morbid, bizarre best on ‘Bad as Me’
Tom Waits is as brilliantly unpredicatble as ever on Bad as Me, a new LP that contains as twisted, funny and blaring a take on losing everything in war as you’ll ever hear.
The Black Keys - “Lonely Boy”
This is the first listen to the first single from the upcoming El Camino, and has just become the best video of the year (decade?).
The Grateful Dead whip up a worthy successor to ‘Europe ‘72’
… So what, then, for the casual fans? Certainly, there are a number of people who enjoy the Dead while owning only a couple of records or a few songs. And there are also a number of people who listen to the band quite a bit, have most of the records and a few live recordings, but would never be able to commit the time, energy and money needed for a 73-disc box set.
For those many folks, the band has assembled a successor to the live album that started all this, Europe ’72, Vol. 2, a two-disc set that serves as a brother to the original album in sound and feel. And like the original, there are plenty of sounds and styles that clash and bond with each other. …
Radio Static, Ep. 19: Screaming Fields of Sonic Love
In which Nick takes about 40 minutes of your time to retrace his love of Sonic Youth through words and music. Fear not — it’s mostly music.
