L&Q Weekly
Jessica Winter's own 'Wannabe', NiN announce the driest festival of all time, buy all of Steve Albini's stuff, the great cherry shortage caused by Usher
Supported by 4AD
Song of the Week
A couple of weeks ago Jessica Winter announced that her debut album is FINALLY finished, and that it will be called My First Album (out 11 July). This week she released a third (and so far best) single from it, called ‘Wannabe’. It’s got a different tempo to the other ‘Wannabe’, although at this stage in Winter’s pop-loving career a lot of the fun comes from not knowing exactly how she’ll next approach the genre she loves so much. Her grunge-pop ‘Wannabe’ has been inspired by doom scrolling rather than female friendship and zigazig ah.
Interview
caroline: the outer reaches of what a band can do as a performing group
The first thing you notice about caroline is that they don’t look like a band. Actually, they don’t look like anything much: amid the lunchtime hub-bub of the hilltop cafe where we’ve arranged to meet, with South London’s late-millennial alt-creatives congregating for coffee and pizza on a sunny Thursday, the four members of the post-rock folk octet who have joined me blend in entirely. Clearly, there is no caroline uniform. There is no caroline strut. No one nudges their friend and points furtively towards our table in the corner. “I think that’s a band over there,” whispers nobody… Continue reading
Essays & Opinion
Why don't indie labels quit Spotify?
The story of Spotify – soundtracked by ‘The Imperial March’, with $0.003 of every stream shared between John Williams and his publishers – received 30 new chapters it didn’t want this year in the form of Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. It’s a grisly read as Pelly investigates the platform’s practices, burrowing deep beneath what we already know (that they don’t pay artists properly) into how its algorithms and their own cynically commissioned music, bought on the cheap and prioritised in your next aggressively peddled Supermarket Wave playlist, are reshaping our listening habits and encouraging artists to produce their own music that’s equally as vapid in order to compete. “Our only competition is silence,” Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek once said. It doesn’t matter what you’re listening to as long as you’re listening, although Spotify would much rather it be a playlist so bland you forgot it was on, made of musak they paid a flat fee for, rather than Adele or Taylor Swift or anyone else. Better still, make it a podcast, the company’s other great pivot: shows not produced by Spotify receive no income from the platform whatsoever, and instead compete with one another in the external scrum of audio advertising and coveted show-host read-ins… Continue reading
Online Retail
One year after the unexpected death of Steve Albini, the estate of the legendary alt. rock musician and producer has launched a site called Steve Albini’s Closet, which will be selling his music collection throughout the rest of the year. Items won’t just include rare records but also recording equipment, strange books, vintage t-shirts, CDs, cassettes, singles, zines, art, and “mysterious bargains”. It turns out he was quite the collector, as every Friday from now until the end of the year another 100-200 items will be added to the site, Ebay, and/or Discogs.
Festivals
If you don’t like having fun at music festivals and will be in the Los Angeles area on 8 November, you’re in luck, because Nine Inch Nails (or, let’s face it, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) have announced a new festival called Future Ruins, made up entirely of film score composers and their work. Naturally, they’ve manage to book the biggest names in the game for their inaugural “first-of-its-kind” event, from Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow to Danny Elfman, John Carpenter, Stranger Things composers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, and Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh. Questlove will perform Curtis Mayfield’s film work, but either side of that it’s going to be very film scorey. For a whole day. Where the crowd will come alive for Hildur Guðnadóttir’s work on episode 2 of Chernobyl, perhaps even standing up for a brief moment.
Album News
Albums for your diary announced this week
The New Eves – The New Eve Is Rising (1 Aug, Transgressive): If the Velvet Underground had been from Brighton and were into folklore rituals they would have sounded like this raw 4-piece do on ‘River Runs Red’ and the rest of their excellent debut album.
Kate NV – Room for the Moon Live (13 RVNG Intl.): Recorded during a performance of Kate NV’s 2020 second album, Room for the Moon Live is more than a dry run through of a beautifully playful alt. pop album, as a band of 8 take it to new, joyous places.
Jamie Lidell – Places of Unknowing (summer, TODO): You can’t really put ‘summer’ in your diary, but more people than you think have been excited about Jamie Lidell’s first album in 9 years being previewed this week with new track ‘The Center’ – a new piano-led direction.
Rumour of the Week
Usher has a problem
“But cherries are the sexiest of all the fruits!” Usher was heard screaming through his dressing room wall this week, shortly after being told that he’d already fed all of the cherries in the local area to attractive female fans. Somehow still aged only 46, R&B’s most sensual feeder has made putting cherries in the mouths of others an integral part of his live performances over the last year or two, with “yum time” now equating for up to 65% of the show’s length. But with the testicle-shaped fruit now out of season, and Usher’s world tour continuing to ravage the globe of its supplies, the singer is having to accept that back up fruits might need to be implemented at other shows. By all accounts, he’s said to not be happy about the compromise, however much his production team have put forward the case for grapes, peaches and “sexy little plums”, which Usher said sound ruder than they are. Sources say that in Sydney next week Usher is expected to road-test orange segments, which will increase the show’s runtime by a further 3 hours.