Guns N' Roses to finally release new album? & other: June 2008

Tuesday 24 June 2008

Bonus material on US release of new Charlatans LP

The Charlatans have announced the US release of their brand new LP �??You Cross My Path�?? will feature a bonus disc of material.

Released for free earlier this year, the album was downloaded over 90,000, and now a June 10 release date has been set for the US through Cooking Vinyl Records.

Recorded in the UK, Ireland and Tim Burgess�??s adopted-hometown Los Angeles, the special double disc edition includes bonus live tracks and videos and is preceded by lead single �??Oh! Vanity�??

The track listing is:

Disc 1:
�??Oh! Vanity�??
�??Bad Days�??
�??Mis-takes�??
�??The Misbegotten�??
�??A Day For Letting Go�??
�??You Cross My Path�??
�??The Missing Beats�??
�??My Name Is Despair�??
�??BIRD�??
�??This Is The End�??

Disc 2:
�??A Margin Of Sanity�??
�??Acid In The Tea�??
�??You Cross My Path�?? (live)
�??Bad Days�?? (live)
�??Mis-Takes�?? (live)
�??Oh! Vanity�?? (live)
�??This Is The End�?? (live)
�??You Cross My Path�?? (video)
�??Oh! Vanity�?? (video)

--By our New York staff.
Find out more about NME.

May 13, 2008 at Carling Academy, Bristol -
May 15, 2008 at Forum, London -
May 16, 2008 at Guildhall, Southampton -
More The Charlatans tickets

Sunday 22 June 2008

Poison Idea

Artist: Poison Idea

   Genre(s):
Other
   Rock
   Hardcore

Discography:

We Must Burn

Year: 1995
Tracks: 11

Ian Mackaye

Year: 1995
Tracks: 6

Blank Blackout Vacant

Year: 1992
Tracks: 13

Best Of Poison Idea

Year:
Tracks: 38

Nihilistic Portland, OR, hardcore outfit Poison Idea was formed in 1980 by frontman Jerry A., guitar player Tom Roberts, bassist Chris Tense, and drummer Dean Johnson. The chemical group debuted triplet years later with the EP Beak Your King, cramming 13 songs into a 16-minute clip framing; the Record Collectors Are Pretentious Assholes EP followed in 1985, fine-tuning the band's blistery sound and fatalistic worldview. Thanks to their notoriously insatiable dieting of drugs, intoxicant, and junk food, the members of Poison Idea all ballooned past tense the 300-pound st. Mark by the time of the 1986 uncut Kings of Punk, with Roberts -- wHO now tipped the scales at an impressive 450 pounds -- rechristening himself Pig Champion in laurels of the occasion. Tense and Johnson were then discharged from the card, although the former returned in time for 1987's War All the Time, recorded with second guitar player Eric "Vegetable" Olsen and drummer Steve "Thee Slayer Hippy" Hanford; Tense was and so replaced by bassist Mondo for 1988's Filthkick EP. Both the Darby Crash Rides Again and Ian MacKaye EPs followed a year by and by, some other flow of roster garboil which made way for the addition of guitarist Kid Cocksman (presently replaced by Aldine Striknine) and bassist Myrtle Tickner. Poison Idea returned in 1990 with Palpate the Darkness, with a series of live releases (the Official Bootleg EP, the Live in Vienna EP, and the Dutch Courage LP) preceding 1992's Blank Blackout. A collaboration with Jeff Dahl appeared a year by and by, concurrent with the covers record album Pyjama Party; still, in the wake up of Pig Champion's subsequent departure Poison Idea disbanded, cathartic their June 6, 1993, farewell gig at Portland's La Luna as Pig's Last Stand.

Downloading case in the High Court

Saturday 21 June 2008

Alaska

Artist: Alaska

   Genre(s):
Drum & Bass
   Rock

Discography:

Born Again

Year: 2006
Tracks: 2

Arctic Foundations

Year: 2006
Tracks: 8

The Pack

Year: 1985
Tracks: 13

Thursday 19 June 2008

Thergothon

Artist: Thergothon

   Genre(s):
Metal

Discography:

Fhtagn-Nagh Yog-Sothoth

Year: 2005
Tracks: 4

Stream From The Heavens

Year: 1994
Tracks: 6

Fhtagn-Nag Yog-Sothoth

Year: 1991
Tracks: 4

Nature One 2005

Britney Spears saved from court charges

Washington (ANI): Troubled singer Britney Spears would not be facing charges over a photographer's claim that she drove over his foot in November while attempting to flee the paparazzi. The Los Angeles District Attorney refused to pursue the case after reviewing footage of the crowd at the scene, shot by one of the paparazzi on hand, reports E! Online. According to the District Attorney's report, "only way the victim's foot could have been where the video indicates it to be was by the victim placing it in that location. There was a lot of noise and confusion as the photographers were jockeying for position." The district attorney agreed that there was no evidence to

Stars Of The Lid and A. Wiltzie

Artist: Stars Of The Lid and A. Wiltzie

   Genre(s):
Ambient

Discography:

Xtra Stuff

Year: 2003
Tracks: 1

Remioromen

Artist: Remioromen

   Genre(s):
Other

Discography:

HORIZON

Year: 2006
Tracks: 12

Konayuki

Year: 2005
Tracks: 3

Ether

Year: 2005
Tracks: 12

Is ‘The Happening’ So Bad It Defeats Math?

Courtesy of Metacritic.com
The negative buzz on The Happening is deafening — from Razzie predictions to poster defacement to its own director lowering your expectations, everyone seems to agree that M. Night Shyamalan's movie isn't all that good.

But could the movie be so bad it actually defeats the laws of numerics? It seems so, as its current Metascore is 46 — this despite Metacritic cataloging only four reviews thus far, each scoring exactly 50.

Could it be that the movie's badness is somehow dragging its Metascore down even as the seemingly inarguable rules of medians and means attempt to keep it at 50? Could it be God's hand coming down from above, tugging at Night's Metascore as punishment for making Him sit through The Lady in the Water? Or could (spoiler ahead) the villain be…

Photo: iStockphoto

TREES?!?!?!?

The Happening [Metacritic]

Earlier: Early Review of M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Happening’ Suggests Scariest Film Villain of All Time

Caroline Sullivan meets Portishead in Paris

For a band that not so long ago had been left for dead, Portishead are enjoying a triumphant 2008. Third, their first studio album for 11 years, went straight to No 2 in the British charts a month ago, buoyed by almost unanimously ecstatic reviews. Their brief world tour has been equally well received. Other once-popular bands have reappeared after less time to find that the world no longer gives a tinker's cuss about them - just ask Elastica or the Stereo MCs - so you might think that all this warm attention would gladden the heart of producer/multi-instrumentalist Geoff Barrow. But you would be wrong.

"Everything's a nice surprise, but it doesn't fill us with joy," he says, his face crinkling into a pained expression. "My wife Emma called up and said, 'Have you got the midweeks [chart positions] in?' And I said, 'Well no, not really. We're not that bothered.' And she's like, 'Well why? Don't be silly. It's brilliant. Fucking cheer up a bit.'" His wonky, self-mocking grin suggests that was not the first time he had heard those words.

Sitting outside Paris's Zenith concert hall in the waning sunshine of a glorious spring evening, the 36-year-old Barrow is an amiable curmudgeon, quick to rail colourfully against what he hates about the modern world (almost everything, it seems), but equally quick to laugh at himself. Never mind what anyone thinks of Third, he says: all that matters is that he, guitarist Adrian Utley and vocalist Beth Gibbons have actually finished the bloody thing.

Once labelled trip-hop, alongside fellow west country innovators Massive Attack and Tricky, Portishead now have more in common with Radiohead: the fretful, left-leaning politics (Barrow deems David Cameron "a weasely fucking knobpuppet"); the old-fashioned principles (they have never licensed a song to an advert); the dogged determination to overhaul their sound, and the potent combination of bold, strange music with raw emotion. Third could be this year's Kid A: an art-house statement, full of wrong-footing structures, sonic ambushes and gnomic anguish, that somehow finds its way into a lot of record collections.

Success creates its own logic. Because Portishead's 1994 debut Dummy became an era-defining, Mercury-winning phenomenon and birthed a slew of pallid imitations, it was tarred as a "coffee-table" album - an easy-listening lifestyle accessory. But it was nothing of the sort: rather a brooding, unprecedented confluence of hip-hop's hiss and crackle, the eerie ambience of old movie soundtracks and the seductive heartache of torch songs. In recent years, Kanye West and Gnarls Barkley have both cited it as a key influence and strands of its DNA are detectable in Amy Winehouse's Back to Black (even though Barrow later accused producer Mark Ronson of making "shit funky supermarket muzak").

Barrow, a 22-year-old hip-hop fanatic at the time of Dummy's release, reacted badly to what he perceived as the wrong kind of acclaim. His discomfort intensified when TV programmes adopted the songs as easy signifiers of upmarket emotional turmoil, most famously on BBC2's This Life (whose music adviser was one Ricky Gervais), in which uptight lawyer Milly seemed incapable of running a bath without popping Dummy in the stereo.

"You're writing music because you're really concerned about certain things and then it gets put on to entertain twats at trendy fondue dinner parties," protests Barrow, still aggrieved. There is something bracing about his militant distaste for mainstream culture. "People would ask me to DJ at some trendy bar and you'd think, 'These people are fucking horrible'. Big sunglasses. I'd think, 'Fucking hell, have I spent my life working in music just to be a performing monkey for these cunts?'"

Did he ever watch This Life? "I thought they were the most odious cunts," he spits. "The thing is, our music was being associated with the bullshit conditioning of television, and it's not about that. It's the polar opposite. It's like everyone wants to use Glory Box in sex scenes. Can you not fucking hear what she's singing? But my bank manager's eternally grateful, so what can I say? I can slag it off and still buy a new bouncy castle for my little girl out of fondue money."

In 1997, Portishead released their bleaker, more abrasive eponymous second album. Their wilderness years began at the tail end of a demoralising 1998 world tour. "There were relationship break-ups, excesses of alcohol - not really drugs but a bit," explains Barrow, whose first marriage was disintegrating. "You're on this conveyor belt. Eventually, you just want to smash things up because you feel like it's a totally unreal world. So you start fucking your body and brain up and then it all becomes miserable. It's not that the band fell apart, but we did as a people."

By tour's end, Barrow felt incapable of making any more music. His beloved hip-hop had become safe and conservative, and he could find nothing to take its place. He moved to Australia and for the next three years didn't write a single note; in fact, he barely even listened to music. "I thought that every idea that I had about music was fairly boring. I had no direction to go in - no real spark."

Eventually Utley - who had been working with Gibbons and former Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb on their beautiful, folk-influenced 2002 album Out of Season - flew out to begin songwriting but the sessions stalled. Only when Barrow co-founded his own proudly uncommercial label, Invada, did his enthusiasm return. He and Utley found themselves drawn to more leftfield outfits, from 1960s electronic mavericks Silver Apples to drone-metal band Sunn O))), both of whom played the Nightmare Before Christmas festival that Portishead curated last December.

Usually, when musicians talk about the nuts and bolts of recording, it is an interviewer's cue to change the subject, but Third's brilliance is so obviously the product of agonisingly slow and careful work that you can't help wanting to know more about the trio's vexed creative chemistry. It seems to involve a phenomenal amount of debate.

"There's not a single area that we don't discuss hugely," says Utley, a genial, delicately spoken 51-year-old. "Nothing is light. There's nothing throwaway. From these hours, days, years of discussion, you're building your life together. It's like a marriage, isn't it? It's compromise and respect for each other and a deep knowledge of someone else's brain."

In between discussions, they would begin tracks, get stuck and shelve them, sometimes for years. Barrow estimates that three years elapsed between writing the bassline for the song Threads and deciding what chords to put on it. He insists it is not a question of perfectionism but of locating that elusive, magic spark that makes a song worth unveiling to the world. "I think as you get older, when things go wrong it hurts so much, and we question our ability to write any decent music so much, that it's very easy just to put down your tools and say, 'I'm not doing it today'. We could drift for months and months and months. At times it was definitely fucking tense."

"There were some dark moments," agrees Utley. "Geoff and I would tell stories to each other to avoid the reality of making music, like you did at school to distract your teacher so you didn't have to do biology."

To an outsider, I must say, it doesn't sound like fun. "It's all-encompassing," says Utley. "It's sleepless nights, middle-of-the-night panic. Or elation - very rarely elation. At the end of the album there was no, 'Fucking hell, we've done it'. It was more like [he sighs], 'Well, that's all right then. See you tomorrow.'"

They did not end up wanting to kill each other. In fact, they claim, their friendship ripened over the three years of recording. "There's definitely ongoing issues within Portishead that we can make into jokes now," says Barrow. "There's stuff you can say that you were never able to say before."

When the trio first met in Bristol in 1991, they had almost nothing in common and seemed more like an

ad hoc alliance than a long-term concern. Barrow, who worked as a tea boy during the recording of Massive Attack's legendary Blue Lines, was an awkward teenager preoccupied by Public Enemy and nuclear war. Gibbons, whom he met at a local government small-business initiative, was seven years older, a veteran of unsuccessful pub bands. Utley, already in his mid-30s, was a seasoned session guitarist fresh from working with Jeff Beck. "We were different, but musically we had a real spark together," says Utley.

Like the Queen, the 43-year-old Gibbons does not do interviews, although she occasionally broke her silence, circa Dummy. In an interview with Hot Press in 1995, she came across as funny and down-to-earth, talking about her isolated rural upbringing and spending her 20s in Bath "living the life of a hippy-chick up from the sticks". Asked why she usually shunned interviews, she said: "I hope no one thought I was trying to be dark and mysterious, because that's bollocks."

I ask Utley and Barrow to pick a few words to describe her. "Intense," says Utley. "Honest. Fragile. Strong. Believable. Talented. There's many things. She's a many-faceted, brilliant person." Barrow takes much longer to chew it over. "She's painfully honest at times," he finally says. "She sits outside of modern human conditioning. Every way we're supposed to be, she's slightly at odds with."

It's tempting to assume that Barrow brings the beats, Utley the textures and Gibbons the angst, but their partnership is far more symbiotic than that. "We were coming up with music and [Beth would] go, 'That's fucking normal,'" laughs Barrow. "And we're going, 'No it's not! It's fucked!' But that's why I like working with her, because she's not some straight-down-the-line singer. She'll be like, 'No, I want it to be fucking properly out-there'." Equally, Gibbons's lyrics reflect her bandmates' feelings. "It's mainly about the inability of humans to communicate," says Barrow. "This is our way to communicate our worry to people."

Barrow, who cites the gut-twisting 80s nuclear war drama Threads as a formative influence, refers to his younger self as Apocalyptic Geoff. He used to be convinced the world would end in 1998, a prediction he later modified to 2008. "I don't mind being wrong," he says cheerfully. He says he regularly checks the World Health Organisation website for news of potential epidemics, but his mind is no longer haunted by thoughts of imminent annihilation - a benefit of parenthood. "Now I'm just anxious that my little one doesn't fall off the swings and smash her head."

A couple of hours later, Portishead play a spine-tingling show, in which the new material sounds like not so much a departure from the old as a continuation by other means. The last song, fittingly, is called We Carry On. "Merci," says Gibbons. "Au revoir. Enchanté." Afterwards, they attend a backstage party thrown by their French record label. One of Barrow's friends from Bristol DJs in a booth beneath a neon sign reading Bar Artistes, which some wag has amended to Piss Artistes.

Every time I see Gibbons, she is talking and laughing. At one point, I spot her on a raised walkway outside her dressing room, a beer in her hand, dancing to Nirvana's Come As You Are. Barrow is distinctly less adept at le schmooze. Looking askance at waiters bearing trays of canapes, he deems the show "a bit rock'n'roll" and says he has had enough of playing live; it's starting to remind him of 1998. "You look at these faces in front of you and think, 'Isn't it supposed to be wonderful at this point? But it's not at all,'" he says with an almost apologetic grimace. "It's quite horrible."

Portishead have no more shows in the diary, having opted out of the lucrative summer festival circuit, presumably at Barrow's behest. Over by the bar, Utley says that he wishes they could play a few more shows. "We're going down well, so I'm a bit reluctant to let that go because our studio life is so difficult at times."

Nobody in Portishead wants a repeat of Third's torturous gestation, but nobody can say for sure how long the next album will take. "We're all thinking day to day," says Utley, sipping his beer. "It's like an Alcoholics Anonymous situation: this is a good day and maybe tomorrow will be a good day."

And so - slowly, painfully, rewardingly - Portishead carry on.

· Third by Portishead is out now on Island. The single, The Rip, is out on June 21

See Also