Archive for the ‘Hot Music’ Category

Although we can’t necessarily say Rihanna is back, since she didn't go anywhere — she is making a comeback of sorts.

The self-proclaimed "good girl gone bad" is back to her dance roots on her new single, “Only Girl (In the World),” which she debuted Tuesday on Ryan Seacrest's morning radio show.

After taking a more macabre approach to her fourth disc, “Rated R,” she's gone in a decidedly more “sassy, fun, flirty [and] energetic” direction on her fifth disc, “Loud.”

“Get loud, everybody. Get crazy. Get excited. 'Cause I'm pumped. I'm just gonna be me,” she told fansite RihannaDaily.com during a live chat.

“I’m done recording the whole album … I made sure not to let you down with my music! You guys are always defending me, so now you've got some great songs to justify it. I didn't want to go backward and remake [2007's] ‘Good Girl Gone Bad.’ I wanted the next step in the evolution of Rihanna, and it's perfect for us.”

The single was produced by Stargate, the same Grammy-winning producing team responsible for some of her biggest hits, including “Rude Boy,” “Unfaithful,” “Hate That I Love You” and the dance anthem “Please Don't Stop the Music.”

With its club ready bassline and Euro-pop influences, not to mention one heck of an epic chorus, the track is a surefire hit. “Want you to make me feel, like I'm the only girl in the world,” she sings. “Like I’m the only one that you'll ever love, like I'm the only one who knows your heart.”

“Loud” is slated to hit stores in November. Take a listen to the track here and tell us what you think below.

– Gerrick D. Kennedy
twitter.com/GerrickKennedy

Photo: Rihanna performs at Staples Center on July 21 during her Last Girl on Earth tour. Credit: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

Pop & Hiss

Incoming search terms:

• chorus twitter
• rihanna only girl

When I visited Vancouver, Canada, in early June to talk to Sarah McLachlan about her new album and the Lilith Tour, I found the singer-songwriter hard at work to keep her mood positive. Already forced to respond to rumors of serious problems with the female-oriented traveling festival she'd helped found and was now reviving, McLachlan was warm and feisty, but also a bit on edge.

The mood changed when she entered a rehearsal studio to lead her outstanding band through some numbers from that fine, fresh release, "Laws of Illusion." Leading the way from behind her keyboard, McLachlan was authoritative, fully engaged, and obviously happy.

Now that McLachlan has survived the difficult summer of Lilith's downfall — cancellations and poor sales turned it into a sad emblem of the conventional music industry's continuing decline — it seems that she's getting back to her sweet spot. McLachlan has announced a fall tour focusing on the South and Midwest, regions affected by the Lilith cancellations. If these shows go well, it's possible that McLachlan will announce more, perhaps on the West Coast.

"Sarah and Friends" seems structured to give McLachlan — and her fans — what the controversy over Lilith's underperformance may have taken away. Each show will feature the star sitting in with her as-yet unannounced openers, and later taking questions from the audience during an expanded headlining set. It's all about community, the quality McLachlan has said is her prime motivator when playing live.

"Whether it's 10 people or 20,000 people, there's nothing else like it," she told me about performing live. "That's when I feel most grounded in my purpose. This is why I'm here." She added that she loves to learn about a particular song's meaning to a fan, something the interactive portion of her new tour can highlight.

"It’s kind of amazing validation," she said. "I don’t feel weird about it at all…. When somebody, a stranger, comes up to me and says, '"Angel," that song, my brother died, and that song helped me' — it’s a huge compliment."

Beyond such satisfying moments with her fans, McLachlan's new tour gives her a chance to highlight that band, which includes, among others,  Luke Doucet on guitar, Butterfly Boucher on bass and Melissa McClelland on backing vocals and guitar. She talked about them with relish during our interview.

Right now in rehearsals I’m facing everybody, because we’re working on stuff, and I like to see what everybody’s doing," she said in June. "I look up there at Melissa and Butter and I think, man, that’s a hot back line!"

McLachlan had grown accustomed to playing solo while touring only intermittently during the first years of her two daughters' lives, but she's an excellent bandleader and likes to let her more raucous side show, sometimes, when playing live.

"As a person, I’m pretty full on," she said. "I like Metallica! I listen to a lot of ambient music too, but there’s a place for [hard rock]. I have a lot of aggression in me. And there’s nothing like snapping on an electric guitar and just grinding into it. It’s such a sexual female and such an aggressive powerful feeling too. Piano is female, guitar is male, and I’ve got a lot of male in me. I love to embrace it."

There's no word yet on whether McLachlan will be jamming on some thrash metal during these fall dates. But they do allow for her to refocus on what really matters to any musician: the music, and the fans whom she's served over the past decade plus.

When we spoke, McLachlan credited her manager (and Lilith's co-founder) Terry McBride with teaching her the power of the road. "He said, 'You play live, that’s your strength,'" she said. "You get fans every time you go back to a city, you get twice as many people coming. Because you sing, and you sing to them, and there’s this thing that happens when you do. So you gotta focus on that. You gotta work your butt off and stay out there."

It seems that no matter what industry trend analysts and naysayers might think, McLachlan is finding herself again by taking that time-honored advice.

– Ann Powers

Photo: Sarah McLachlan in rehearsal in Vancouver in June 2010. Credit: Jeff Vinnick / For The Times.

Pop & Hiss

Incoming search terms:

• sarah mclachlan

The history of music, it seems, is replete with rocky transitions.

Jac Holzman, who founded Elektra Records 60 years ago and is now back in the swing of things as senior advisor to Warner Music Group's Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman on the company's digital strategy, has seen quite a few.

For Holzman, one of the most memorable occured in 1965 and involved Bob Dylan. The place was the Newport Folk Festival, and Dylan was headlining the event. Described by Time magazine as one of the top 10 music festival moments, the broad details are well-known.

A young, 24-year-old Dylan, who had become an icon of folk music, was booed off the stage after playing three songs on an electric guitar. A number of friends and colleagues tried to persuade Dylan to finish his set, including Johnny Cash, Holzman said. When he came back on stage, an ill-humored Dylan sang "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." It would be 37 years before Dylan returned to the festival.

Holzman was at the concert, and he snapped a black-and-white photo of Dylan. To Holzman, who described the event as he remembered it in the video above, the moment was significant not just because it was shot through with emotion. It represented what can happen when artists evolve, leaving behind a wake of disgruntled fans, in order to grow in a new direction.

Holzman talked about the need for traditional music companies to do the same in an interview for today's Times.

– Alex Pham

Video: Alex Pham / Los Angeles Times

Pop & Hiss

Incoming search terms:

• bob dylan

In the strange ecosystem of Animal Collective, Panda Bear is the difficult one. That’s saying something for a guy in a band with barely a phonetically discernible lyric in its long catalog of tongue-wagging acid jams. But while co-frontman Avey Tare supplies a lot of the melodic heft that kicked the band onto the Billboard charts last year with “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” Panda Bear (Noah Lennox to the government) brings the tangles of synthetic samples, errant noise blasts and the woozy harmonies that make the band’s albums immersive worlds all their own.

His solo breakthrough “Person Pitch,” a cracked take on Beach Boys bliss run through a beatmaker’s hall of mirrors, was Pitchfork’s favorite album of 2008, and expectations are simmering for its followup due later this year. The minimalist drum patter of the first single “Tomboy” gave a hint at its direction, but we talked to Lennox from his home in Lisbon, Portugal, (where he relocated after stints in Baltimore and New York) to hear more about his unusual knack for making drippy psychedelia sound like pop hits in anticipation of his headlining set at the FYF Fest this weekend.

How has living in Lisbon affected what you’re interested in pertaining to your solo career, considering you’re pretty isolated from your band?

It’s definitely forced me to be more responsible, as far as being organized and answering e-mail and things. But it hasn’t really changed how I approach it creatively, even in the band one of us always comes in with a pretty finished foundation and then we work on it from there. I’m a big believer in that your environment affects the music you make, so I’m sure things like walking the streets here affect it, but it’s hard to put my finger on it.

So many people have found a kind of childlike wonder and sense of exploration and repetition in your music. How has raising two actual young children informed that sensibility?

The kids have definitely changed me, not taste-wise necessarily, but I feel a lot more responsibility to do my best with music and cover all my bases.

In the sense they made you more open to commercial success, knowing that a family depends financially on your music?

Not that exactly. I always start by doing exactly what I want to be doing in a kind of creative vacuum, but having a family has really moved me to make that music be as successful as possible. It’s a tough balance to maximize your potential, but to do that you’ve got to tour all the time and I don’t want to leave my family in the dust.

The new Panda Bear songs seem really rooted in drones and kind of wringing a song out of one or two big, good ideas. What’s interesting about that writing dynamic for you now?

The two I’ve released have definitely been in that zone — using small, basic loops — and I’ve always been into that stuff. But the rest of the record is going to focus on vocal melody. I’m always trying to make myself uncomfortable and change equipment to change how I write, and I’ve been ramming samplers for the last six years. So for this album I took a keyboard and cut the electronics out, so it’s just a box with sounds and drum patterns that I run a guitar through. It’s definitely my most complex setup; it took me months to get it up and running. It really downplays the melodic and harmonic aspects of a guitar, so I use it to try and strike a balance with the songwriting.

Some of those elements in the new songs seem pretty abrasive, which is interesting because Animal Collective went in the exact opposite direction on “Merriweather.” Was that a conscious decision from you to move your solo work in a harsher direction?

It’s funny, I still think of these as pop songs. The production choices are very un-pop. But even in the lyrics, it’s about joining these two opposing things, and I tried to do that in the writing.

Animal Collective has a really distinctive approach to vocals. What do these new songs do to broaden and explore what your solo voice is capable of?

I’ve been listening to a lot of crooners like Sinatra and Scott Walker. There’s such a power there, and I’ve never really been into literary concerns as a lyricist so I wanted to focus on that forceful presence. It’s kind of a defense mechanism, to keep the songs mysterious and confusing, but then to have this authority on top of it. Dave [Portner] from the band described these songs as very authoritarian, and I liked that a lot. 

It seems there’s a much wider audience for drone and ambient and other ‘difficult’ music in recent years. Where do you think that interest came from, and what are people getting from it today?

It’s been a slow movement over the last few years. The internet’s really leveled the playing field; younger people are getting exposed to a lot more music whereas before distribution was really streamlined and this stuff was harder to search out.

When playing as Panda Bear you’re really alone onstage. What’s rewarding and difficult about that as opposed to a full band?

These songs are really personal, and I’m just uncomfortable leading a band. I’ve been thinking about this a lot; I know it’s not the most interesting thing to watch a guy behind a keyboard stand. But I can’t imagine taking these songs into a practice space and being like “OK, guys, that was a good take.” In Animal Collective, those guys and I have known each other so long that we have a complete understanding of when to press and pull back, so it’s a pretty comfortable setting.

The last Animal Collective record made you guys ‘stars’ in a way that seemed really unlikely for some pretty difficult music. Did that process change what you thought the band was capable of?

Our ambitions for that band keep getting blown away from what we expected for it; everything seems to keep moving to a new level with each record. But we’ve never done anything other than write music we’re excited about. So we have no idea what to expect and can’t really think about that.

-August Brown   

Photo credit: Maureen Gubia

Pop & Hiss

Incoming search terms:

• panda bear
• fyf review
• maureen gubia

The annual FYF Fest, now in its seventh year, experienced serious growing pains Saturday at the Los Angeles State Historic Park downtown, even if the music onstage offered gratifying highs. The daylong concert featured 35 buzzing bands, a combination of rising, boundary-pushing underground acts and seasoned rock stalwarts, and drew an enthusiastic crowd estimated to be 20,000.

But just as last year, those arriving early to catch the first roster of bands were left stranded in interminable lines. Although the musicians onstage played to eager enthusiasts, the behind-the-scenes organization was visibly lacking throughout the day and night, as evidenced by overflowing trashcans, lack of water dispensaries and endless queues.

Festival-goers are nothing if not a dedicated bunch, though, and despite the many problems, the patient and the persistent experienced a hefty offering of musical joy. Here are highlights and lowlights:

Best costumes: The Dead Man's Bones children's choir was called Warm Glass of Milk, and it arrived decked in period costumes. The kids, ranging in age from preschoolers to teenagers, came portraying (among others) Charlie Chaplin, Audrey Hepburn, Janis Joplin and Ludwig van Beethoven, stood behind Bones' founders Ryan Gosling (yes, the actor) and Zach Shields and belted out a wonderful array of couplets, the best of which was "I raise my flag up into your heart / You let the winds come tear it apart."

Best singalong: It's hard to imagine that one year ago Local Natives were hustling the Eastside residency circuit. Because if the crowd's instant, rapturous reaction to the boozy piano intro to "Airplanes" was any indication, they were born to play to fields of thousands. It takes a special skill to make a line like "Every question, you took the time to sit and look it up in the encyclopedia" into a lighters-up moment, but the Natives' crystalline harmonies could make a cookbook feel anthemic.

Most inescapable fashion trend: The floral women's jumper, seemingly filched en masse from the closet of "Blossom," our early '90s sartorial saint. The hills of the L.A. State Historical Park were alive in rayon-floral jumpers and linen lady onesies. So the question is: Will the '90s revival last till next year or are we already nostalgic for 2000 and its velour track suits?

Best seamless incorporation of a train: Washed Out's set was too quiet, unfortunate considering the gorgeously subtle textures of Ernest Greene's bedroom chillwave. But every time the Gold Line train whizzed by the stage, quiet yet forceful, it so beautifully matched Greene's smoothed-out pastel pop that we wished for a sudden rush hour to occur at 8 p.m. on a holiday weekend.

Best evidence that rock 'n' roll is no longer dangerous: In addition to more mustaches spotted on Saturday, there were marked differences between Saturday's rock-oriented FYF and last month's electronic dance festival Hard, both of which were at the same location. For one, there were no police helicopters buzzing overhead keeping an eye on the "ravers" like at Hard. Nor were there the dozens of uniformed officers and squad cars guarding the periphery of the park. Rather, a lone cruiser sat parked at an intersection on North Spring. The scariest place at the fest was in the mosh pit for 7 Seconds, but the slam dancers managed to police themselves just fine, thank you very much.

Best dance set of the night: The sprawling crew that goes by the moniker !!! originally formed in Sacramento and have become reliable shepherds of the beat, never straying from their North Star of propulsive, thinking-man's funk. It's always a good sign when the viewers closest to the stage aren't the only ones dancing. All over the park, bubbles of dance erupted, pushing sweaty strangers closer together, everyone on a fearless mission to get down.

Most perplexing start: For the first portion of Panda Bear's set, Noah Lennox, as he's known to the DMV, seemed determined to scare off anyone seeking the saltwater lull of his breakthrough solo work, "Person Pitch," or the obsessive jams of Animal Collective. He opened with synth monoliths, almost violent in their inescapable tension, which were eventually spliced with disembodied rips from "Merriweather Post Pavilion." A little later, Panda Bear weakened a beautifully slumberous loop with mismatched vocals and guitar. It seemed like every time a lovely moment would take flight, Lennox would attack it with his version of musical DDT.

Best argument for organizational skills: Dear promoter Sean Carlson: We love you, and the Los Angeles music scene is all the better for your ambitiousness and boundless enthusiasm. But it's time to stage an intervention: The last two years of FYF have been some of the most frustrating concert experiences in recent memory. Want a bottle of water? Wait in line for 45 minutes. Have to use the facilities? That'll be an hour. Want something as wantonly luxurious as a cold beer? Soviet bread lines moved quicker. A great lineup means nothing if you spend half your time beneath punishing, shadeless sun unable to meet any basic human needs. Next year, double your capacity for every amenity or the "Y" in FYF may come to mean "You" instead of "Yeah" — and you can fill in the rest of the acronym.

Most unceremonious close: At other festivals and at their own concerts, the Rapture has been known to kill the crowd with a cowbell-laden dance-punk frenzy. Not so for its closing set at FYF. Perhaps Luke Jenner and company were directed to keep it chill for the finish lest all those American Apparel employees on their night off burst into rioting, but the last three or four songs were the equivalent of sticking a knife in a fat tire.

– August Brown, Margaret Wappler and Randall Roberts

Photos: Best Coast performs on the Oak Stage (top); Local Natives plays to the crowd (second); fans rock out (third); and Ted Leo performs in the hills of the L.A. State Historical Park with 35 other acts at the FYF Fest. Credit: Katie Falkenberg / For The Times.

Pop & Hiss

Incoming search terms:

• FYF Fan Fest Panda bear pictures
• fyf fest twitter