Brokeback: Brokeback and the Black Rock (Thrill Jockey, 1/22/13)
The new album from Western-psych-rock group Brokeback featured “more than a little reverb, a sense of wide-open space, and a strong kinship with Americana,” and we here at ALARM thought it was pretty good. Now the band has premiered a video for “The Wire, the Rag, and the Payoff,” which we premiered last month.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Push the Sky Away (Bad Seed Ltd., 2/19/13)
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds has a history of teaming with excellent film directors for its music videos. Following the Gaspar Noé-directed “We No Who U R” comes “Jubilee Street,” which features the return of Cave collaborators John Hillcoat and Ray Winstone.
Depeche Mode: Delta Machine (Columbia, 3/26/13)
With Depeche Mode’s new album dropping at the end of next month, the band has offered a look and listen at Delta Machine with the video for “Heaven.” A disturbing montage of Silent Hill-style imagery remixed by way of Dalí, Goya, and Bosch plays as Dave Gahan sadly croons. Check it out below, as well as a video of the band working in the studio.
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Dinosaur Jr.: I Bet On Sky (Jagjaguwar, 9/18/12)
“Watch the Corners”
Dinosaur Jr.: “Watch the Corners”
When punk hit in the 1970s, it was popular to call the prog rockers and stadium-filling FM-radio vets “dinosaurs” for their size and presumed extinction. That only made it more fun for J. Mascis and his pals to dub their thunderously loud Amherst, Massachusetts, trio Dinosaur in the mid-’80s (it added the Jr. on its second album) to confuse things a bit more.
The band dealt in volume and aggression learned in hardcore act Deep Wound, but guitarist Mascis’s laconic and numb musings and bassist Lou Barlow’s emotional wail were another planet removed from typical punk spit and anger, and Mascis’s graceful, dense guitar solos showed more than a passing knowledge of classic-rock chops. The band has always been a unique balance of aggression and cuddle — snot and bedroom blues — and few of today’s indie rockers ever think to combine both.
Based out of Wexford, Ireland, the hyper-melodic and spasmodic sounds of Adebisi Shank immediately caught our ears when Sargent House reissued its sophomore album in 2011. (Interview here, MP3 premiere here, and year-end list here.)
Now, in advance of an album hopefully later this year, the trio has unveiled an in-studio video of a new track tentatively dubbed “Thunder” (real title TBD). Do yourself a solid and pick up Second Album after watching.
This content appears in ALARM #40. Subscribe here to get your copy!
Born in Moscow, NYC-based painter and illustrator Dimitri Drjuchin creates bright, mystical eye candy that reads like a riddle. You may recognize his surrealist work from gig posters for comics Marc Maron, Jim Gaffigan, Eugene Mirman, and Hannibal Buress — or, more recently, you might have spotted his mind-bending cover for Fear Fun, the debut album from Father John Misty.