Marie Osmond’s son kills self in jump from building (Reuters)
Reuters – The teenage son of famed Osmond family singer Marie Osmond committed suicide by jumping from a building in downtown Los Angeles, her representative confirmed on Saturday.
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Marie Osmond’s son dies in Los Angeles (AP)
AP – Marie Osmond’s 18-year-old son Michael Blosil has died, the entertainer said Saturday.
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Lil Wayne set to test how jails handle celebs (AP)
AP – Lil Wayne may be a self-professed gangsta with the gunshot wound to prove it, but he’s made plenty clear how he feels about doing time behind bars.
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Dialogue with Four Tet: The London producer discusses Plastic People club and Burial
Assessing the trajectory of Four Tet’s creative arc is like watching a drunk weave through traffic: dizzying, difficult to follow and ostensibly an accident is bound to occur — except that it never has. Throughout his 15-year career, Kieran Hebden has glided across an array of genres, flashing a sonic schizophrenia and technical virtuosity that’s left label-obsessed music writers bereft of ways to categorize his sound.
Initially, Hebden was branded “post-rock,” forming Fridge with his schoolmates from South London’s Elliott School, a musical hotbed that also birthed Burial, half of Hot Chip, and the Mercury Prize-nominated jazz musician Emma Smith. When his partners went to university, Hebden adopted the Four Tet moniker and began trafficking in free jazz-tinted, hip-hop-grounded sampledelica on 1999’s “Dialogue,” seemingly an abrupt turn to outsiders, but understandable considering he lists the Gravediggaz’s “6 Feet Deep” among his most seminal influences. 2001’s excellent “Pause” found every bleary-eyed hack with a laptop branding him “folktronica,” an albatross he subsequently and artfully eluded with forays into the world of remixing (tweaking everyone from Andrew Bird to MF Doom), improvised jams with legendary drummer Steve Reid, and an increasing dance music bent, incorporating everything from techno, European library music, and dubstep (as evidenced on last year’s “Moth/Wolf Cub” split with Burial).
His new album “There Is Love in You,” released last month, might be his most towering achievement yet, a singular work that both splinters the notion of genre and consolidates the far-flung experimentation that characterized his previous output. Known for esoteric samples spanning stray voices to rubber ducks, Hebden created an instant classic out of everything from an infant’s heartbeat to a child playing a toy piano to a gorgeous constellation of chopped-up vocal samples — all of them sutured to entrancing four on the floor beats. In advance of his show at the Echoplex on Saturday night, Hebden spoke to Pop & Hiss about his aversion to genre boundaries, his love of hip-hop, and the possible closure of his old haunt, London’s Plastic People nightclub.
Train, back on the tracks
The San Francisco rock band Train sits at a peculiar juncture in pop music. Over a decade-plus career as a band, they've penned some of the most recognizable, infinitely replayed tunes on pop and rock radio, “Drops of Jupiter” and “Hey Virginia” primarily among them. Yet its most recent album, “Save Me, San Francisco,” suggests the band has something to prove.
Though the group has long been maligned as producing middlebrow, adult contemporary guitar-pop, “Save Me” is its best attempt yet to put the urgency and vitality of its hometown on an album. The single “Hey, Soul Sister,” currently holding strong at No. 7 in the Billboard Hot 100, unexpectedly lives it up to its title, with an effortless swing and Pat Monahan’s lively yet sweet-hearted vocals. After a three-year hiatus, the band has found a new instrumental swagger as well, digging deeper into rhythm and getting noisy along the edges.
At the Le Montrose hotel in West Hollywood, we recently talked with Monahan and guitarist Jimmy Stafford about the new expectations (and difficult sales climate) for rock bands today and how the Bay Area's wild legacy informs their very precise pop music.
– August Brown
Live review: Dirty Projectors at Disney Hall
Leading his band Dirty Projectors on Saturday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, David Longstreth kept folding his long, gangly frame toward the floor, as though he were trying to avoid being noticed.
The Brooklyn group released one of last year’s most celebrated indie-rock discs, "Bitte Orca," and Longstreth, one presumes, has long since grown used to playing in front of the type of crowd that views a concert as an excellent opportunity to tweet. But the seated Disney audience entertained no such distractions, listening with laser-like focus as Longstreth and his bandmates, along with the New York chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound, performed Dirty Projectors’ 2005 album "The Getty Address."
Halfway through the hour-long piece, the singer-guitarist seemed to seek refuge from the spotlight by pulling a hood over his head.
As uncomfortable as he may be with such concentrated attention, Longstreth writes music that demands it: Described by the composer as an opera that "examines the question of what is wilderness in a world completely circumscribed by highways," "The Getty Address" jams together darting string arrangements, thudding percussive grooves, elaborate vocal harmonies and quasi-Asian guitar riffs; the libretto follows a fictional character named Don Henley (based on the Eagles member) on a complicated journey across the American psycho-ecological landscape.
Last year "Stillness Is the Move," an irresistible avant-funk cut from "Bitte Orca," became something of an indie-scene hit for Dirty Projectors; it even earned a widely circulated cover by Beyoncé's sister, Solange Knowles. But "The Getty Address" offers a bold reminder of Longstreth’s background in (and continuing commitment to) experimental art music in all of its challenging structural complexity.
Neon Indian – “Mind, Drips” (Summer Dregs Remix)
Alan Palomo and the rest of his Neon Indians recently delivered a “Terminally Chill”/”Ephemeral Artery” medley and some less-than-not-geeky dance moves/live guitar licks on Jimmy Fallon. (I’m all for enthusiasm, but while you can take the psych out of the bedroom, you can’t always…) Closing the curtain again, here’s another Psychic Chasms track “Mind, Drips” [...]
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