This isn’t a 'double album that should’ve been one disc' situation; even the excess has its place. You grow to appreciate the sonic continuity, the restraint that magnifies the subtleties, ... the way you gladly spend an hour and a half listening in as her broken heart grows three sizes anyway. | | | | | Miranda Lambert in Wellington, Ohio, 2009. (Rona Proudfoot/Flickr) | | | | | | “This isn’t a 'double album that should’ve been one disc' situation; even the excess has its place. You grow to appreciate the sonic continuity, the restraint that magnifies the subtleties, ... the way you gladly spend an hour and a half listening in as her broken heart grows three sizes anyway.”
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| | rantnrave:// Releasing a double album in 2016 is wonderfully counterintuitive. It presumes that people are still buying albums, which they increasingly are not. And in the age of short attention spans and streaming-on-demand singles, it presumes artists can still make the statement they want to make, when they want to make it. And it presume that fans will come to them on the artists' terms. Today brings two major doubles. MIRANDA LAMBERT's post-marriage concept album "THE WEIGHT OF THESE WINGS" "seems like both a protest against business as usual and a power play," KELEFA SANNEH writes in the NEW YORKER. He also says the sprawling and emotionally hefty 24-track album, which may or may not be a breakup album (she says no; Sanneh notes that pretty much all country records are), is one of 2016's best. Double albums of new material are especially rare in country, but even among classic rockers, releasing one today is a grand statement. METALLICA's "HARD WIRED ... TO SELF-DESTRUCT" is "no ballads, simply 77 minutes' worth of outsized, whiplash-inducing headbangers," in ROLLING STONE's words. Those headbangers would have fit on a single CD, and there are plenty of recent pop, R&B and rock albums of similar length. But there's some old-school ambition in pressing it onto two CDs. "I just think it's a good record to hear spread out," LARS ULRICH told Rolling Stone in a perfect rock and roll quote that, the more I think about it, I'm not sure anyone under 30 would even know what he's talking about. But I appreciate his desire to fly that flag... Based on the two episodes I've seen, PBS' eight-night history-of-recording doc, "SOUNDBREAKING," has some amazing footage (JOHNNY CASH recording on RICK RUBIN's sofa, yes, thank you) and cool stories, but its bias is very old-school rock, which is to say you'll be hearing a lot more from TOM PETTY and JIMMY IOVINE than, say, DR. DRE. The themes of the final four episodes, airing tonight through Monday, offer the possibility of a shift in perspective, so here's hoping... More miniature and more promising is "DRAWN & RECORDED," a new series of shorts about lesser-known moments in music history from animator DREW CHRISTIE, T-BONE BURNETT and friends-of-REDEF VAN TOFFLER and BILL FLANAGAN. Ten episodes are available on SPOTIFY; Burnett says he wants to make "hundreds of them"... It's FRIDAY and that means new music from LAMBERT and METALLICA as well as D∆WN, BRUNO MARS, DNCE, KEVIN ABSTRACT, PC MUSIC, JUSTICE, ELLA MAI , TITLE TRACKS, E-40, THEE OH SEES, ROBERT EARL KEEN, ESP OHIO, PINK MARTINI and sundry others... RIP MENTOR WILLIAMS. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| In 1994, British rock writer Clinton Heylin published "Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry," an entertaining history of the illicit form. | | |
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| The mega-hit is facing another “Blurred Lines”-style challenge over its authorship--one that could potentially stifle the very creativity copyright law is supposed to protect. | | |
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| With a new double album, the country star stands at the center of her own story. Insistently personal and empathetic, it's her most cohesive release yet. | | |
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| It’s called interpolation -- when you sing a riff from someone else’s song over your own -- and it’s the sound of pop in 2016. But is it laziness or a clever response to the global playlist? | | |
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| On the Wednesday evening after the election, the streets of downtown L.A. shook with anger. Thousands of young protesters took to the Historic Core to show their opposition to a Donald Trump presidency. | | |
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| How might the Trump Administration affect the music business? Stronger intellectual property rights seem a strong possibility -- and ironically many of the artists who loudly protested against him will get big tax cuts. | | |
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| After 27 years of censorship, the 70s guitar great has released the album he was forbidden from making. | | |
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| In its grandest project yet, the concert series Wordless Music will screen Terrence Malick’s film with live accompaniment at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. | | |
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| Smashing a guitar is not a revolutionary act. Smashing the male body, though, can be. | | |
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| Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain wrote a book that changed Marc's life. On the 20-year anniversary of 'Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk,' Legs and Gillian tell Marc why they wrote it in the first place and why it still resonates two decades later. Also, Marc's neighborhood buddy Andre Royo stops by to talk about his new independent film Hunter Gatherer. | | |
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| The creator-star of the transfixing FX hit "Atlanta" (and new Lando Calrissian) has rebooted his rapper persona Childish Gambino as a retro funk prophet. | | |
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| The former Danity Kane singer’s triumphant quest for solo stardom has taken in everything from Greek mythology to feminist reworkings of classic pop. | | |
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| "Heptapod B" from the 'Arrival' score This episode is part of a series I'm doing over the next few months, highlighting film music that I think could and should be considered for an Oscar. These awards episodes are presented in partnership with New York Magazine's site Vulture. | | |
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| "The Bends"-era tune that will hopefully one day appear on a studio album. | | |
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| The artists behind songs in this season's movies -- also including Tori Amos, John Legend and Pharrell Williams -- join THR's first-ever Songwriter Roundtable discussion to reveal the feeling of "blacking out" (in a good way), the freedom of not wearing makeup and their concerns for a post-election America. | | |
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| While many are following the purported troubles of a local rap scene, a family copes with the loss of a son. | | |
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| "It’s like the whole world is going German, and that’s a big problem for me"... | | |
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| Almost 50 years after she recorded them, are we any closer to becoming comfortable with Yoko Ono’s music as a culture? | | |
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| As PC music continues worming its way into public consciousness, take a look at why everyone from hipsters to health goths are in for it. | | |
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| The gamut of possible dismissive, condescending or vitriolic reactions to things online is described by the word “edgy”. They who attempt to be “edgy” are looking for shock factor; their goal is to dismiss things loved by as many people as possible, as loudly as possible, to garner the all-important “emotional rise” that makes up so much of the Internet. | | |
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| | from "The Weight of These Wings," out today on Vanner Records |
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| © Copyright 2016, The REDEF Group |
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