What are you listening to?

Shod I drive three hours to see Jeff Magnum this weekend?

I wouldn't, but I was only ever a casual Neutral Milk Hotel fan.

My brother-in-law on the other hand saw him recently in Toronto (he's a HUUUUGE fan - In An Aeroplane Over The Sea was his The Queen Is Dead) and he was literally moved to tears by the show. Apparently he's just phenomenal live.

Aw yiss....

One of my friends drove three hours to see him in Cleveland a couple weeks ago and said the same -- great show, totally worth the drive, he'd do it again in a heartbeat.

YESYESYESYEYSYESYES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

From the MBV facebook page (which is "official", whatever that means):

"We are preparing to go live with the new album/website this evening. We will make an announcement as soon as its up."

Apparently it's out, but the site is toast.

I was not expecting them to find yet another way to keep me from listening to their new album.

Sell on iTunes or Amazon, people! Ideally both!

I don't care. I will sit up all night F5ing that shit if I have to.


Not really.

But I will be seriously annoyed if there's some fancy limited edition that I miss out on.

Also: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/make-my-bloody-valentine-website-work-again/YdCY6dSx

For the first time since I was 21, I can say: I JUST BOUGHT THE NEW MY BLOODY VALENTINE ALBUM.

Hooray!

Make sure you don't grab the 320 mp3 download. Apparently there's some sort of transcode disaster that cut everything above 16.4 KHz.

Of course everyone got the 24 bit .wav, right? RIGHT?

They sound OK to me but that might be a thing my aged punk-rock ears can't distinguish. More importantly, IT SOUNDS LIKE MY BLOODY VALENTINE. I swear to God, if churches played MBV during mass I'd still be fucking Catholic.

I'm going to see Muse in Wednesday! Woo!

This MBV is quite a lurching, evil beast. I wasn't real impressed at first, until I got to track 3 and I put on headphones and it's kind of blowing my mind. I'm on spin #2 and getting more excited by the minute.

There's, like, layers man...weird fucked-up overtones. And track 3 is a serious pitch-bent mindfucker.

So far my favorite track on the record. I'm also getting more and more into this record on the second spin thru.

I think the secret weapon here is Colm Ó Cíosóig - he's playing on every track (as opposed to Loveless where sickness kept him from playing on most of it, so they ended up looping his drums and resorting to other trickery). The back half of the record especially where it gets into some more experimental territory, he's just a monster.

Goddamn, My Bloody Valentine. I can barely wrap my brain around this. How is it that we've have twenty-some-odd years of people trying to rip them off, yet there's still nobody like them?

LATER: On my second playthrough. I bet Johnny Marr is punching himself in the face over that phased rhythm track on "New You".

I've got both and think the "320 mp3 is a bad transcode" is something of a hipster urban myth here. The mp3's sound pretty goddamned good, and are certainly more portable than the 1.5gb 24bit .wav files.

The 16khz cut off is pretty much mp3 standard.

I thought as much. I'm not real familiar with 320's mp3's so I gave the benefit of the doubt that maybe they were able to exceed those surly bonds, but what you say makes sense. In any event, played through a $300 ASUS Sound card and Stennheiser headphones, there's a difference between the .wav files and the mp3's, but it isn't a "disaster" by any means. It's about what you'd expect the difference to be between a slightly lossy format and one that's less so. It's not gamebreaking by any means.

I quoted you on my blog today, MK (with attribution!) Hope that's ok! I'm better at asking forgiveness than permission.

I really hope it grows on me. I certainly wasn't expecting another Loveless or anything of that caliber, but a lot the record is leaving me cold. I could see it being a great EP, however.

Totally OK.

I'm bummed to hear that you don't like it, Griot. I'm on listen number three and I think it's phenomenal. It's not another Loveless, but it's informed by Loveless, if you catch me.

Interesting that you bring up the EP idea, because you could pretty easily break it into three EPs. The first three tracks are what you would expect from MBV (notwithstanding that crazy weird "solo" on Only Tomorrow which might be my fave moment on the record), the next 2 show off the quieter version of the band with keyboards taking the place of guitars, and then the last 4 sort of build off from "Soon" and enter some weird hybrid territory where shoegaze had babies with dance and drum 'n' bass. That last song just demolishes me, though, with a flanger running on the drums so it sounds like a fucking jet is taking off.

OK, I'll stop talking about this soon. But fuck me, what a great album.

Listening to this again tonight, and it's making me want to pull out all those other great albums that sound like MBV. Sadly for me, they don't exist. Kevin sucked up all the genius and he won't share.

I couldn't agree with you more. It's a fantastic album that reveals more and more genius with each listen.

I am not giving up on it yet, just not feeling much beyond the final third so far.

I sure hope my coworkers want to listen to it loud all day today. 'Cause, uh, that's pretty much what's going to happen.

New Nick Cave album out on Friday. Also, there's a new single, with a video directed by John Hillcoat ('The Proposition', 'The Road') and starring Ray Winstone.

The new Coheed & Cambria album is out.

My week has been made.

New Dick Diver single from their upcoming second album

https://soundcloud.com/dick-diver-calendar-days/water-damage

Introspective, young, suburban Australia-tinged rock.

Australia-tinged is code for "covered in spiders", right?

HAIM. HAIM. HAIM.





Three jewish sisters front a soft rock band with Fleetwood Mac influences and it is glorious. After this track carefully wormed it's way into my ears I chased up more unreleased fare via youtube and it's all good to great. Album is due later this year and the pre-buzz is currently reported to be right off the charts.

All signs point to an imminent global ears takeover so prepare yours now.

EDIT: Have this one as well:

zomg boris playing here in april

Mangum can keep is shows that move people to tears. I need shows that move me to ROCK.

Hello Kula Shaker, I missed you.

No, it's actually great.

I caught them on the Smile tour, and they were incredible. INCREDIBLE. Actually, that whole show was good - interesting American black-metal band called Nachtmystium opened, and then Torche who were fucking great. But Boris, man. In-fucking-credible. WALLS of Orange stacks, two for each guitarist, and a drumkit with a GONG which the drummer at one point ended up playing with his drum seat as the mallet. They also had Michio Kurihara on second guitar, and man alive can that guy make some fucking noise. They ended with that last, titanic track on Smile (i.e. "untitled") and as long as it was I could have listened to it for another few days.

In terms of sheer volume, the only things I've ever seen that come close were My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr. Greater praise I cannot give.

I cannot get enough of this Tycho album.

I saw them on their last tour and it was amazing. Same lineup you mentioned, gong and all. Possibly the best show I've ever seen, and I got Wata's setlist and she autographed it for me. Not the loudest, as Swans take that title by a large margin.