DAILY NEWS PICKS

Dickie Peterson, Bassist and Lead Singer of Foundational Metal Band Blue Cheer, Passes Away at 61 [Brooklyn Vegan]

Stream Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s Bleak Theme From the Film Adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; No Words, Just Grandiose Post-Apocalyptic Meandering [Gorilla vs. Bear]

Sufjan Stevens Is Going Through Serious Soul Searching, Questioning Point of Both The Song and The Album, Seems Loaded With Melancholia (In Other Words, Sufjan Stevens Feeling Exactly Like Sufjan Stevens) [Vish Khanna]

Stream “This Is It,” a Posthumous Michael Jackson Recording Featured in the Upcoming Jackson Documentary This Is It; “This Is It” and This Is It Making Good Case For This Not Really Being It, Unless “It” Is Mediocre Jackson Material [Pitchfork]

Musicians Come Together In London In Debate On Future of the Music Industry – While Everyone Familiar With Daft Punk Know They Have Already Figured It Out: Become Robots [NME]

Stream New Brooklyn Fuck-Core (Yeah, I Just Invented That Genre) Giants Lightning Bolt, “Flooded Chamber” – A Tribal, Ecstatic Blitzkrieg of Sound and Drums, Which I’m Pretty Sure Samples Radiohead’s “Pact Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” at The Beginning; Garden of Earthly Delights Released Tomorrow [Stereogum]

Stream New Fall Out Boy, “Alpha Dog” – Which Is a Hilarious Amalgamation of Overproduced Cock-Pop, and Gang Vocals That Slightly Resemble The Bee Gees; Elsewhere, My Readership Confused As To Why I Post New Fall Out Boy Song [Idolator]

I Like Elvis, But Not Enough To Dig Up His Body or Anything Weird Like That…Hmm…How Can I Show My Love For The King? I Know! I’ll Buy His Hair! (Yes, This is Real) [The Tripwire]

Stream Burial (That UK Dub-Guy Who…You Know, Everyone Loves) and Flying Lotus (That L.A. Glitch-Guy Who…You Know, Everyone Is Sort of Indifferent Towards) Collaboration; As Such, Track Is Sort of Unremarkable [Gorilla vs. Bear]

compiled by Max Sebela

THE NINETIES-IST
One Saturday night about six months ago, I was standing outside Academy Records in Williamsburg. It was one of those rare Saturday nights in New York, one where everyone you know decides to go out of town and, just as you get all set to go party, you find yourself in the middle of the perfect stay-at-home-and-catch-up-on-Grisham night. Not one to sit at home on a Saturday night, I found myself hanging around N. 6th Street, trying vainly to stir up a ruckus.

While smoking a cigarette on the street, I happened to overhear a snippet of conversation that set my teeth on edge. Two girls in their early twenties, obviously from money and most likely on vacation from some exclusive private college, walked past Academy. One girl said to the other, “So…do they still make records? And do people still buy…music?” The surprise and disdain in her voice were such that she might as well have been saying, “Remember when people thought the Earth was flat?”

My heart sank at the tone in her voice, because she’d illuminated the problem without even knowing there was one. The mainstream music industry, comically flawed since its inception, has been a creative wasteland for years. While I would posit that the old model for promoting and distributing mainstream music has been showing stress fractures since the fake “vinyl shortage” of the early 70s – in which albums by fringe bands like the Modern Lovers were shelved, the excuse being there wasn’t enough vinyl to meet production demands – it is my astute opinion that the old standard of modern pop music breathed its death rattle in 2003. Sometime after the White Stripes’ Elephant and before Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief (and, in fairness, the industry’s corpse may have kept flopping until Good News For People Who Love Bad News came out in April ’04) the rock-music-as-big-moneymaker model jumped the shark. The last wave of new, compelling rock music (aka the garage rock movement of ’01 – ’03) had failed to ignite: The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and their ilk had all somehow managed to follow up stunning debuts with tepid sophomore efforts. The lifers – bands with no real hits but respectable catalog sales and devoted followers – began jumping ship from their respective labels (either by necessity or design), many realizing the benefits of working with a small organization, many more marginalized by the continued consolidation of the big label infrastructure.
More on #1: A Prologue

Bob Dylan Picked Up By Police While Wandering Into A Jersey Front Yard, Mistaken For Vagrant; ABC Makes Unreported Conjecture That Dylan May Have Been Looking For The House Where Springsteen Wrote Born To Run [ABC News]

Radiohead Officially Releases “These Are My Twisted Words” As Free, High Quality MP3 Download; But What About WallofIce.Com? (Every Time You Hit That Link, Thom Yorke Cries) [Dead Air Space]

Watch Pulp Fiction Director Quentin Tarantino Talk Inglourious Basterds Soundtrack/Explain How He Picks a Good “Rape Scene” Song [Spin]

Brooklyn’s Dirty Projectors Announce Temecula Sunrise EP With Two Unreleased Songs; Released September 28 [Domino]

Weezer Announces Single “(If You Are Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To;” Premiers August 25 (But If You Look Hard Enough, You May Be Able To Stream It Early) [Stereogum]

San Diego’s Wavves Releases Another Zach Hill Collaboration, “Hula Hoop;” It’s Not As Good As This One, But Hill Looks Like He’s In A Hilarious Amount of Pain When He’s Drumming [Wavves Blog]

Memphis Session Musician Legend Jim Dickinson Passes Away [Pitchfork]

Stream Brooklyn’s Woods/Vivian Girls Side Project The Babies’ First Tracks: “All Things Come to Pass” and “Meet Me in the City” [Myspace]

L.A. Noise Band HEALTH Announces Most Awesome Contest Ever…Seriously, Buy Their Album – You Can Win A Bag of Their Cat’s Hair, Or Conference Prank Call A Prominent Indie Rocker [Prefix]

Stream Epic New Lightning Bolt Song, “Colossus;” Earthly Delights Released October 13 [Pitchfork]

compiled by Max Sebela

HIDDEN GEM
Lightning Bolt
Hypermagic Mountain
2005 | Load

I have been wrong many times in my little life. In Winter 2001, my college girlfriend Rachel pounded on my bedroom door, imploring me to go to Harvey’s with her and check out this band from Rhode Island, called Lightning Bolt. When she said they were a bass-and-drums noise rock duo, I turned up my nose, turned up the Ryan Adams, and told her I wasn’t interested. I may have thought Rachel was going to see drum and bass, which would have sent me into a frenzy of “electronic music isn’t music,” self-righteous rhetoric I subscribed to at the time.

Again, I have been wrong many, many times in my life.

Anyhow, Lightning Bolt. Rachel came home later that night, dripping sweat and hopping up and down about Lightning Bolt. The self-titled LP she’d bought was violently abrasive, and it made my eyes water to be in the room with the volume turned up to eleven. But there was something danceable to it. I could hear a steady one-two beat through the frenzy. I could imagine jumping up and down to that beat, and my eyes watering from the volume, and the screeching fuzz bass sending me running around in all directions. Then I imagined what it would be like to listen to this music in a room full of sweaty, frenzied people. And I really, really wished I had gone to the show.
More on Lightning Bolt | Hypermagic Mountain