Webcuts Music

All killer, no filler, Joe Pernice and Co. turn up the volume and turn in one of their most enjoyable records to date.

Way back in January this year, Baltimore’s Beach House released one of 2010′s great albums with their third release, Teen Dream. On September 13, the band will release a 6-track iTunes session which includes re-imaginings of 5 previous album tracks and an entirely new, unreleased track. The EP contains new versions of four tracks from Teen Dream, with “Walk in the Park,” “Norway,” “Silver Soul,” and “Real Love” as well as “Gila” from Devotion, their 2008 release, and a new track entitled “White Moon”. Read on to hear the new song.

Sounding like a counter-revolutionary, singer-songwriter Jonneine Zapata’s task at hand is presciently hinted at in the title.

We didn’t review Ted Leo & The Pharmacists recent album The Brutalist Bricks, because frankly, the music speaks for itself. Trying to find 450-odd words to adequately sell Mr. Leo’s blood, sweat, and tears would be doing the man and his music an enormous injustice. You won’t see his music used on commercials, you won’t see him selling his soul on a magazine cover for a few more units sold. A punk rocker with a pure heart, Leo and The Pharmacists have always done it (for better or worse) their way, and you have to respect that… and buy their records. Man’s gotta eat, y’dig (read more about that here — http://www.tedleo.com/2010/07/07/regarding-the-rumors-of-retirement/). “Bottled In Cork”, one of the finer moments on The Brutalist Bricks, shows Leo throwing out enough hooks to make Cheap Trick envious and indulging in a little old fashioned fun, theatre style. I swear if he brought that show to London, I’d go see it.

Named after the town they’re from, Memphis has “some great songs, some brilliant moments”, but not quite all adding up to Magic, Kids.

During their recent visit to Australia for Splendour in the Grass we caught up with LCD Soundsystem’s main man James Murphy who gave us reason to put away the hankies for LCD’s much reported demise – “It’s not necessarily the last record. I would make another record. It’s more the end of this part – three records that go together, an arc. We became a bigger band than I ever expected. Something needs to stop, for me, for us all to be happy.” He also waxes lyrical about making the record in the LA of his imagination, growing up and wanting kids, his Greenburg soundtrack experience and his many and varied future projects.

Releasing their soundtrack to 13 of Andy Warhol’s screen tests was an opportune moment for ex-Galaxie 500/Luna star Dean Wareham to fully express his love for Velvet Underground and the stars of Andy Warhol’s Factory. The screen tests alone, wavering between the visually arresting and the arrestingly mundane, were elevated into a new realm with the musical accompaniment provided by Wareham and partner Britta Phillips. Bringing the 13 Most Beautiful show to London (having frustratingly been given its UK premiere in Dunfermline last year) was a long-anticipated occasion.

Having been blessed with seeing Elliott Smith perform several times over his all-too-short career, Webcuts has nothing but admiration, appreciation, and love for an artist who was one of the greater, if not greatest, songwriters of our generation. Should it be that some of you are unfamiliar with his work, Domino Records in the UK are to release on November 1, An Introduction To… Elliott Smith. A album featuring 14 tracks compiled from all seven of Smith’s albums: Roman Candle, Elliott Smith, Either/Or, XO, Figure 8, From A Basement on the Hill, and New Moon.

A few nights before this Pixies warm up concert for Splendour in the Grass, I had a vivid dream. In it I was the tour manager or press officer for the band and they were being put up in a luxury hotel with a huge swimming pool which they were swanning around in and (in)famously not getting along and refusing to do the show. It ended with me giving them a “look all the great rock’n’roll bands are dysfunctional, but when you’re on stage for that hour and a half you come together, that’s when you work, that’s when you function!” speech. And then I drove them to the Zoo in a black hummer.

“Give me a minute and I’ll blow your minds“. The crowd laughs, so does the man who just uttered those words. The mood, somewhat quiet, respectful, shiftless, is lightened, and Mark Kozelek begins another master-class in tinkling the nylon strings of his Spanish guitar like Liberace would the piano. “I’m old” he breaks the silence again, “I’m fat, I need water, I need lyrics to my songs”. From my pew to the right side of the stage I have to squint to see if it’s not Neil Young sitting there complaining about his arthritis. To Kozelek’s credit, he’s still as ageless as ever, and that gut you were grabbing at? I’m pretty sure you’ve been carrying that for a while now.