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Tuesday, Dec 5 2017, 6AM
Reznor sings here, "and you could have it all, my empire of dirt," a forewarning of the whole junkie lifestyle he got involved in following the release of The Downward Spiral.
"Interestingly enough, when I wrote the song I had no idea what was in store for me," he told Uncut magazine April 2005. "I wrote the album about somebody who follows this path who was an extension of me. But it was in my head. I hadn't actually lived it. Then later I lived it. I didn't realize the record was a premonition. I was using the metaphor of drugs at the forefront of what was going on. But I wasn't a junkie. Later I became one, but I didn't know there was an addict in me that just hadn't bloomed out of the dirt yet."
The song was written and recorded at a time when the band was undergoing one of its numerous lineup changes and features only Robert Smith and former drummer Boris Smith. Robert felt that this may have been the creative spark for writing and recording the track: "The whole thing was turned around in like two days... I just the idea and we just recorded like me and him in the studio... very much like I did the Top album, actually, he just sort of jammed the drums and I was just playing along."
"All hail Wolf Alice, four U.K. twentysomethings who have not gotten the memo about rock not mattering anymore." - Rolling Stone, who gave the album 4/5 stars. Find the review here: rol.st
The fourth and final single to be released from her No. 1 album Hounds of Love, "The Big Sky" is about remembering some of the simple pleasures enjoyed as children that most no longer find the time for, such as spending the afternoon looking at the sky, watching the clouds take on shapes.
"“If you feel this world is not heading the right way,” Björk said recently, “you have to be DIY and make a little fortress.” It’s within this matriarchal frame that Björk and her co-producer Alejandro Ghersi (aka Arca) created the challenging album Utopia. It’s a long, skittering discovery of googly-eyed romance, a rebuke of the violence inherited by men, and a generous offering of love song after love song, rendered musically with unerring elegance and passion." - Pitchfork bit.ly
Prince got the idea for this song when he dozed off in backup singer Lisa Coleman's 1964 Mercury Montclair Marauder after an exhausting all-night recording session. One of these: bit.ly
The new album, 'Open Here' is out in February and available for preorder from the band's website including transparent vinyl, CD, casette, signed test pressings, and bundles with tea towels. Not many bands do tea towels...
The Moog synthesizer was integral to Numan's sound. He explained to Rolling Stone how he came across the instrument. "I remember it clearly. I had been sent to a studio by [my label] Beggars to record my first album. It was going to be a punk album and we were going to play the songs live. But as soon as I walked into the control room, there was a mini Moog. I had never seen one before. I just thought it was the coolest looking thing, just fantastic. Quite, quite small.
Apparently, a company was going to come pick it up but the man said I could try it out until they came to collect it but they never turned up! I had this thing for the whole day and it was the most amazing experience. Very luckily, it had been left on that sound which had become famous: a huge big bottom bass roar. It was just huge. I didn't know how to set it up. All I did was press a key and the room shook! And I just thought, "Fuck me! That's the most amazing thing I'd ever heard! The power!' Imagine, if the sound had been something that went ping!, I would've thought, 'This is rubbish' and none of this success would've ever happened to me. So much of this was luck."
Son Lux is releasing their 5th LP 'Brighter Wounds' on February 9th. They'll be at Neumos on March 13th.
Check out the full KEXP review of Reflektor from back in 2013. Includes clips of live performances from the album. blog.kexp.org
The National played live on the Morning Show on November 29th. You can still find it in the archive, about 10am!
The official Innocents tour consisted of only three shows in Los Angeles. Billed as Moby live + special guests, the show was separated in two parts, the first consisting of material from Innocents, while the second was a greatest-hits set. Moby stated that the reason for doing little to no touring was "When I go on tour I sit around a lot (cars, airports, hotels, etc), and when I sit around I can't spend my time making music. And pretty much all I want to do in life is stay home and make music. So, thus: a three-date world tour."
Along with the video for Lord, Young Fathers posted a message: "Young Fathers have finished a new album
We hope you hear it sometime in the near future, for now here is a song, a song called LORD
You can’t dance to it" bit.ly
While this was their first official album, in 2002, TV on the Radio released a collection of their demos called OK Calculator. The band left copies of the disc in various cafes and public places for people to pick up. They also sold copies at their live shows until their CD burner broke.
Destroyer is playing the Wonder Ballroom in Portland on January 10th and the Neptune in Seattle on February 8th
"Mary Jane Dunphe's bracing voice is a thing of local legend in the Olympia, WA music scene." Read Pitchfork's review of "The One To Wait" which they named Best New Track: bit.ly
For some of their 1988 tour dates, The Church were paired with Peter Murphy, of Bauhaus, then pursuing a solo career. Murphy apparently expressed displeasure at being relegated to the status of opening act, but there was nothing he could do about it - The Church climbing the charts, while Murphy would not achieve a similar breakthrough for another two years.
They'll be at the Showbox on February 20th!
Curve's Dean Garcia released an album at SPC ECO in August. You can find it on their Bandcamp page: bit.ly
Medicine performs as itself in The Crow during a club sequence, performing “Time Baby II” from the band’s 1993 EP 5ive. But the original soundtrack features Medicine’s “Time Baby III,” a remixed version of the same gorgeous love song. There’s also the original “Time Baby,” a rough early demo recorded before lead singer Beth Thompson joined the band.
The track is known for what Kevin Shields calls the "glide guitar" technique, which he explained in a 1992 Guitar World interview as "just two amps facing each other, with tremolo. And the tremolo on each amp is set to a different rate. There's a mic between the two amps. I did a couple of overdubs of that, then I reversed it and played it backwards into a sampler. I put them on top of each other so they kind of merged in."
The battle cry of the Great Muppet War of 2017. #SeattleMusicMuppetFIGHT
Yeah there's video of Mudhoney playing on top of the Space Needle: blog.kexp.org
A seminal period for Nirvana was their 1989 tour of Europe with their Sub Pop labelmates TAD. "School" was the first song in their set, and as Sup Pop co-founder Bruce Pavitt recalled, by the end of the tour Kurt Cobain would "look out in the audience and all he could see were the kind of people who used to beat him up at school."
This was telling, and it led to songs like "In Bloom" where Cobain was singing derisively about the very people who were enjoying his songs. It also showed just how exhausted and disenchanted Cobain had become even before they signed with Geffen Records and released Nevermind.
Kyle Craft is playing the Tractor on February 1st and Portland's Doug Fir on the 2nd!
Here is Kate Tempest performing "Perfect Coffee" Live on KEXP back in March: bit.ly
The Muppets perform LCD Soundsystem: “Dance Yrself Clean,” in which Kermit teams up with Animal, Miss Piggy, and Sesame Street favorite Cookie Monster to play the song for a surprised and delighted crowd in the British town of Brighton and “New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down” sung by Kermit. bit.ly
"Burning Down The House" didn't get a great deal of radio play at the time, but has endured as an '80s classic and is often used in movies and TV shows, including Gilmore Girls, 13 Going on 30, Six Feet Under, Revenge of the Nerds and Someone Like You. Talking Heads also performed it in their 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense.
God Colony is now out with a brand new cut of their track “Low” which features West London auteur Jelani Blackman.
The producer duo have been collaborating with various artists such as Kojey Radical, Stash Marina, Flohio and BBYMUTHA. The two producers started out playing in bands in Liverpool where they grew up.
Check out the handwritten "compiling notes" for Psyence Fiction: bit.ly
A large double-bass was used. Bill Wyman plucked the notes while Richards played it with a bow. And what sounds like a flute... Brian Jones playing a recorder.
"Death Song, their fifth full-length, is both unlike anything they’ve done before and also the most purely Black Angels album they have released. It’s as if the Texas psych-garage mainstays have now fully mapped the edges of their sound and that this process has allowed them to return with an extreme vengeance to the dead center of what they are. " Here's Paste magazine's review: bit.ly
For those of you that missed Franz Ferdinand in Seattle they're playing tonight and tomorrow night in Vancouver BC and then on the 7th in Portland. Tonight is sold out but there looks to be tickets for the other two shows.
The "Barbara, Barbara We Face a Shining Future" album title was something that Rick Smith's late father said to his mother said not long before he passed away. Karl Hyde told Billboard magazine: "His father was a great man, very inspiring and as soon Rick said that, before we got halfway through writing this material, it was just instant, 'Yeah, that's the title.'"
When asked about writing this song, Bernard Sumner told Uncut: " It was a time when I set out to write a hit single. I think we got a rather large tax bill, and we sat down with Stephen Hague to write a Top 40 hit."
"I had an idea for the bassline, Gillian (Gilbert, keyboards) had some string ideas, Stephen got some drums down. When we got the track going, I was sent off to the flat we had in London with a bottle of Pernod and told not to show my face again until I'd written the lyrics."
The song was inspired by a conversation singer Joe Strummer was having with his then-girlfriend Gaby Salter on the way home from the studio one night about the Basque separatists who at the time were engaged in a bombing campaign against various holiday resorts on the Costa Del Sol. "There should be a song called 'Spanish Bombs' about it," noted Strummer. So he wrote one.
Need more Fugazi? Check out DJ Michelle's Spotlight on them: blog.kexp.org
Black Flag's album Damaged, released on this date back in 1981! The version you hear of Rise Above on the album was intended for an earlier single release only. During the Damaged sessions, Black Flag recorded a new version of "Rise Above," but the band did not like it, so they decided to stick with the original.
Another album released on this date. Renegades is 17 years old today. The pioneering rap group Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force wrote this song and were the first to record it. They released it as a single in 1983.
Pet Shop Boys' Tennant said in an interview: "We arrived in the studio and Bobby O had programmed Michael Jackson's Billie Jean drum pattern. Chris started to play along and I started playing chords. In terms of the lyrics, the inspiration for West End Girls came from The Message by Grandmaster Flash. I remember once staying at my cousin's house in Nottingham and we were watching some kind of gangster film with James Cagney, and just as I was dropping off to sleep, the lines 'sometimes you're better off dead, there's a gun in your hand and it's pointing to your head' came into my head and I thought 'that's quite good' so I went off to find a pen."
A couple of years ago, we were able to coax the NYC-based artist out of his semi-retirement to play John in the Morning at Night and were also able to premier the video for "You Push, I'll Go" bit.ly
In 2016 The Dandy Warhols joined DJ Troy Nelson in the studio for a live set. See it here: bit.ly
This album showed up at #2 on the KEXP Listener top albums of 2016. Be sure to vote now for 2017's! blog.kexp.org
The Cure formed in the torn-and-frayed London suburb of Crawley, where their sensitive side was not always appreciated. This song didn't go over well with some of the hardened punks that came to their shows, but the band remained unwavering in their approach and made a strong connection with legions of fans.
M83's album Hurry Up, We're Dreaming contains more vocals than any of the band's previous records. Frontman Anthony Gonzalez believes the shift comes from touring with bands like The Killers and Depeche Mode; bands with enigmatic frontmen who aren't afraid to belt out their tunes. Gonzalez describes himself as shy but says he's getting better at being more confident and being a frontman who can get out there and sing.
Parquet Courts will be here in Seattle at The Showbox on Friday, February 16th, 2018.