HOME CONTACT US Get our RSS feed: DISCLAIMER: Music hosted on this site is for preview purposes only. If you like what you hear please buy the artist's work. You can find much of it here: ARCHIVE February 2007 January 2007

Off the Wall After Sunday night’s wrist-slashingly dull Oscar ceremony we’re glad to hear one of film’s most quixotic talents is set to return in 2007. Harmony Korine was the enfant terrible of 90s independent cinema and divisive as his films were (his 1997 directorial debut Gummo was named ‘worst film of the year’ by the New York Times and “the work of a young master” by Werner Herzog) they were always daring, imaginative and hard to shake. Unfortunately, after 1999’s Julien Donkey Boy, Korine started to lose the thread. In fact, he went completely nuts. Spiralling crack addiction may have been responsible for his next project, the frankly insane and unsurprisingly incomplete Fight Harm. The then 25 year old explained his concept to a journalist at the 1999 Venice Film Festival: "I go around provoking passers-by, trying to start a fight while the video camera follows me and films everything. It's very brutal -- I've already broken a collar bone and been arrested. The punches and kicks are all real, it's one of the most disgusting things you'll ever see. I wanted to push humour to extreme limits to demonstrate that there's a tragic component in everything." Filming stopped shortly after, with Korine having to serve a two-and-a-half-month prison sentence following a third arrest. But now, thanks to the help of his pal, professionally spooky David Blaine, he’s fully recuperated and clean. His new film Mister Lonely is due later this year and stars Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, Denis Lavant, Anita Pallenberg, David Blaine, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Werner Herzog (whose performance in Julien Donkey Boy is one of the funniest we’ve seen). Korine describes it thus, and it sounds awesome: "It’s the story of a young American man lost in Paris. He scratches out a living as a Michael Jackson look-alike, dancing on the streets, public parks, tourist spots and trade shows. Different from everyone else, he feels as if he's floating between two worlds. During a car show Michael Jackson meets Marilyn Monroe. Haunted by her angelic beauty he follows her to a commune in the Highlands, joining her husband Charlie Chaplin and her daughter Shirley Temple. A place where everyone is famous and no-one gets old. Here, The Pope, The Queen of England, Madonna, James Dean and other impersonators build a stage in the hope that the world will visit and watch them perform. Nuns fall out of airplanes and children ride pigs. Everything is beautiful. Until the world shifts, and reality intrudes on their utopian dream." Here's a barely related song, Transformer di Roboter's wonderfully odd, Mac startup noise-sampling cover of Michael Jackson's Stranger In Moscow: Transformer di Roboter - Stranger in Moscow [mp3] [buy] More stills, music videos and Korine's brilliant appearances on Letterman... Posted by: Scott 28/02/07 Weekend Links LISTEN Volumes 1 & 2 of Now That's What I Call Shhhh..., an incredible series of dusty fingered mixes from FOPs Charles II and Beatnik. CSS's fantastic covers of L7, Sleater Kinney and J-Lo. Apparently Lovefoxxx is courting Simon from the Klaxons. In true Trent style we've christened them SiFoxxx. We can't wait to see them in HELLO! [source: Gorilla vs Bear] READ The always excellent Tofuhut's latest post is a wonderfully detailed look at Polk Miller and The Old South Quartette. [source: Tofuhut] The Office as written by David Mamet. [source: McSweeney's] WATCH Robyn - Konichiwa Bitches Bonde Do Role - Solta O Frango Neil Young - Old Man (Live at Massey Hall, 1971) Posted by: Scott 24/02/07 Rattle & Roll Here at Pinglewood we’ve never done an honest day’s work in our lives. We have pink little palms, soft as Haribo, and our wet, foppish handshake flops somewhere between the royal wave and I’m a Little Teapot. Shakes, on the other hand, are the kind of pals that grip hard then wiggle your knuckles around just to see you squirm. They come from the Isle of Wight, there are two of them, and they have the same surname. We hope they’re co-joined twins like the Brothers of the Head. Their pumped-up, punk-funk would be even better if one of them was singing out of the other’s neck. But even if they are two separate, non vital organ-sharing beings their new single Disneyland is sure to see them roughing up a few dancefloors. Last year they did a great job of remixing Fa-Fa-Fa by the excellent Datarock, and even managed to make Kasabian sound a little less like the arseholes they so obviously are. No mean feat. Aqua Teen Hunger Force - The Movie Shakes - Disneyland (Vacation) [mp3] Datarock - Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Shakes Remix) [mp3] [buy] Posted by: Scott 23/02/07 Strange Bedfellows (RIP Harold Hunter) As in the seminal buddy cop film 48 Hrs., where grizzled Jack Cates and street-smart Reggie Hammond reluctantly team up to outwit their murderous foes, it seems the new-folk and dubstep scenes have formed an unlikely alliance in order to serve justice on the UK pop charts. Jamie Woon’s soulful take on folk standard Wayfaring Stranger reached new ears thanks to a bleak reworking by the reclusive Burial, and James Yorkston’s new single, the charming Woozy With Cider, comes with a FWD-thinking remix from Kode9. While many dubsteppers are indeed boisterous young roustabouts and new folk singers are almost always cranky and badly dressed, their alliance is not as uncommon as that of their wise-cracking LA counterparts. Jamie Woon - Wayfaring Stranger (Burial Mix) [mp3] [buy] James Yorkston - Woozy With Cider (Kode9 Mix) [mp3] [buy] One thing they share is motive. The fledgling dubstep and new-folk scenes were both born of frustration. Dubstep charted a course away from the tired and cliquey worlds of two-step garage and drum and bass, while the current crop of folk troubadours enjoy nothing more than to cock a snook at the fusty world of traditional folk music. But what really binds them is that, despite their protestations, both scenes are just polished, politer versions of their forebears. It was The World Is Gone released last year by the shadowy Various that first made clear how happily these disparate genres can sit together. While not especially true to either scene, Various had Massive Attack’s magpie eye for pairing sounds and their synthesis has obviously proven popular. However, though we quite like the remixes posted here, we do fear for the future. These acts may nudge their way on to a few coffee tables, but they stand to lose more than just their edge. Soon this combination of pastoral plaintiveness and sleek futurism (it’s earnest and ghetto!) will soundtrack car ads, Hollyoaks and dinner parties across Stoke Newington. Who knows, in 2008 we may even see Gordon Brown shaking his fat pre-election booty to a tastefully morose Findlay Brown Vs Virus Syndicate cover of Things Can Only Get Better. Nobody needs to see that. Various - Hater [mp3] [buy] Videos and more music... Posted by: Scott 21/02/07 Weekend Links New Feist song [source: I Guess I'm Floating] Amazing new music video 1 [source: Stereogum] Amazing new music video 2 [source: Stereogum] Back to the Future Vs Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure [source: Stylus] The lovely Hattie Collins on Robbie [source: Hattie C In The Place To Be] Afro Samurai Bird Flu Posted by: Scott 17/02/07 Derelicts of Dialect The best book ever written about hip-hop is ego trip's Book of Rap Lists. It ignores the academic hand-ringing of most rap tomes and instead revels in the clowning and geekery that is hip-hop’s real bedrock. Now the merry pranksters at ego trip have gone a step further and made the best ever hip-hop TV series: VH1’s ridiculously entertaining The (white) Rapper Show. At its most basic, it’s the Apprentice, but tricked out with rims and smothered in irony. Here the hopefuls live in a rundown Bronx warehouse (the White House), travel around in a prison bus and are constantly, mercilessly mocked. T(w)RS’s Donald Trump is rap legend MC Serch of 3rd Bass fame and he comes prepared with his own neat little catchphrase: STEP OFF! (Incidentally, it seems Serch’s old partner in rhyme, Prime Minister Pete Nice, is now a baseball historian.) The contestants include a militant anti-racist who incoherently rails against white supremacy, a Paul Wall-alike grill-mouthed southern rapper, a Vanilla-Ice worshipping teenage girl and a bolshy New Yorker who sounds like MC Lyte and misguidedly drops the N-bomb ten minutes into the first episode. The show works as a hip-hop history lesson (Prince Paul, Brand Nubian, Kool Keith, Just Blaze, Bushwick Bill and Grandmaster Flash are just a few of the outstanding guests) and tackles head-on the inherent ridiculousness of suburban appropriation of hip-hop culture. It’s hysterically funny, but the show’s real success is that you end up rooting for the aspiring rappers. Take our personal favourite, self-proclaimed King of the Burbs, John Brown. In the first episode his dunderheaded blank stare and idiotic catchphrases (“Hallelujah hollaback!”, “Ghetto revival!”) provoke Persia (the aforementioned MC Lyte biter) into attacking him with a giant dildo. By episode 3 his bone-dry sense of humour and almost autistic single-mindedness, not to mention his surprisingly OK rapping, had us charmed. As Serch says (about four times an episode) THIS IS NOT A GAME PEOPLE! 3rd Bass - Steppin' to the A.M. [mp3] taken from The Cactus Album [buy] 3rd Bass - Ace in the Hole (ft. KMD) [mp3] taken from Derelicts of Dialect [buy] 3rd Bass - The Gas Face (Lyrical Remix) [mp3] taken from The Cactus Revisited Clips galore... Posted by: Scott 16/02/07 The Delighted Earth For a while now we've been planning a mixtape called How To Seduce A French Art School Student When It's 5am And You've Drunk All The Gin. There'll be bands that Stereolab sound like and bands that sound like Stereolab. We'll have some Neu! Serge Gainsbourg, Faust, Sun Ra and Free Design, then some Deerhoof, NERD, Broadcast, Metronomy and Girls Aloud. It will be more pretentious than Kanye's new flat. Slip it on after preciously quoting some Rimbaud at a near-unconscious Parisian and we guarantee results. And by results we mean they'll absent-mindedly fool around with you for a while, then shout at you, then break some of your stuff, then leave. Because that's the only way seduction by splashily avant-garde pop-rock can, and should, end. Au Revoir Simone are not French and they are not art school students. We will almost certainly never get to fool around with them. But at least we can console ourselves with their pretty, poignant and artfully artless Bontempi-pop. We love this gamine Brooklyn trio and not just for their drum machines. They were in London last night but if, like us, you missed them don't fret, they're back on 26/02/07. Here's a song from their new album The Bird of Music and one from last year's Verses of Comfort Assurance and Salvation. Au Revoir Simone - Stars [mp3] taken from The Bird of Music [buy] Au Revoir Simone - Hurricanes [mp3] taken from Verses of Comfort Assurance and Salvation [buy] Video for new single Fallen Snow and the girls on stage with David Lynch... Posted by: Scott 14/02/07 Silver Surfers If, like us, you enjoy nothing more than a good fight between two tinfoil clad moonmen then you’ll love the excellent video for LCD Soundsystem’s fist-pumping new single North American Scum. It’s taken from their unreasonably good new album Sound of Silver, our favourite record of the year thus far. DFA look set for a great year. Sound of Silver should sell by the truckload and they’ve just signed two very promising new bands. Prinzhorn Dance School are boy/girl art rockers in the vein of Pinglepad favourites Victorian English Gentlemans Club, while Booji Boy High is a camp and kooky Hot Chip side-project. Prinzhorn Dance School - You are the Space Invader [mp3] [Buy] Booji Boy High - Doubleshaw [mp3][Buy] Posted: Scott 09/02/07 All Roads Lead to... Music pundits, hipsters and tipsters must be rubbing their greasy paws with glee over the current UK pop charts. Though 2007 is still young enough for us to constantly refer to it as 2006, a number of acts widely touted for success this year are already scoring hits. Mika, Jamie T, Klaxons and The View are all troubling the top ten, causing a smug chorus of “I’ve been into them since their first demos leaked in late 2005” to ring out across the internet. Which brings us to Maps. We’ve been into Maps since their first demos leaked in late 2005. Speak to us about Maps and we are unbearable - all rolling eyes, faux-weariness, and fey, bitchy asides, just like Guy Pearce’s panto Andy Warhol in the hysterically bad Factory Girl. But a quick listen to the glorious (but now oh-so-old) demo for To The Sky should explain why he makes us so insufferable. Maps - To The Sky (demo) [mp3] Maps is a mysterious young man called James who writes and records in his Northamptonshire bedroom. His hazy vocals and sweeping melodies have drawn justified comparison with My Bloody Valentine and Spiritualized. His debut album will be released by Mute in a couple of months and he's just posted another winning song on his MySpace page. Love him, bore your friends about him then write a self-deprecating (but true) blog about what a pompous idiot you are. Video and tour dates... Posted by: Scott 08/02/06, oops, 08/02/07 Hail to the Victors If Prince’s fabulous halftime show at Superbowl XLI teaches us anything it is this simple equation: R&B + marching band = awesome. The little purple pal has joined an elite troupe of R&B artists who in recent years have learned that hiring 50 high school kids dressed in garish uniforms to perform meticulously choreographed drum and brass arrangements of their hits will always be a showstopper. We remember a rambling outro on the Lucy Pearl album in which Raphael Saadiq daydreams about marching band covers of their songs, but it was Gwen Stefani who really got the ball rolling in 2005. She was quickly followed by Kanye West on Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, Outkast, and Kanye again, this time with Jamie Foxx, at last year’s Grammies. But pop stars dressing up as majorettes are just the beginning. The real madness starts when marching bands are allowed to do their own thing. Watch the Penn State Drum Line’s silly, knockabout version of Thriller, witness the Jackson State Marching Band’s hip-hop influenced show (complete with Hustle & Flow references and an amazing break at 2:00), but most of all marvel at the 2006 Pride of Arizona’s mind-blowing Radiohead medley. And it doesn’t end there. Josh Davis (using the name Motorcycle John rather than DJ Shadow) has compiled a couple of excellent marching band funk collections and then there are a slew of contemporary brass bands like the Rebirth Brass Band, the Youngblood Brass Band and Hot 8 who ply their own great tunes alongside some staggeringly good (usually Motown) covers. Lucy Pearl - Marching Band Interlude [mp3] [buy] Hot 8 - Sexual Healing (Marvin Gaye cover) [mp3] [buy] ??? - Chameleon (Herbie Hancock cover) taken from Schoolhouse Funk Vol. 1 [mp3] Posted by: Scott 06/02/07 Dream a Little Dream It could be SAD, it could be the early stages of H5N1 avian bird flu, but insomnia runs rife through the Pinglepad. So thank God for Michel Gondry's Science of Sleep, which arrives in UK cinemas on 14/02/07. Starring two of our favourite actors- Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg- it is a magic-realist romantic fantasy with lots of Clangers-style stop-motion animation and a big, sweet heart. There is much to love about this playful, funny film but for now we’ll concentrate on the music. The film’s dreamy, heavy-lidded soundtrack was composed by Jean-Michel Bernard who also pops up in the film as a piano-playing policeman. Its main theme is a song called If You Rescue Me, a rewrite of Lou Reed’s After Hours adapted by Linda Serbu (a cat-rescuing, aspiring film director and presumably one of Gondry’s pals). It’s performed in the film by Bernal and some of his co-stars. And, of course, they’re dressed as cats. Gael García Bernal and pals – If You Rescue Me (Chason des Chats) [mp3] The Velvet Underground – After Hours [mp3] More... Posted by: Scott 05/02/07 The Gilded Youth “The kids are coming up from behind,” warned James Murphy in 2005 and he was dead right. Nowadays, all the real hipsters are still at school, underage clubs get all the best line-ups and there’s a whole wave of new bands- Cajun Dance Party, Bombay Bicycle Club, Pull In Emergency, Late of the Pier, Poppy and the Jezebels- who cannot even smoke legally let alone drink. While these bands are sometimes let down by their overly derivative sounds another, more interesting, young prospect is frYars. Of course that upper case Y is a little annoying but this seventeen-year-old Londoner’s demos brim with promise. He’s been described as a ‘gloriously lo-fi doom pop balladeer’ and we think this is what you’d get if a teenage Morrissey had signed to DFA. frYars - The Rise of Jack and Chloe (Alternative Mix) [mp3] frYars - Chocolate (Rough Mix) [mp3] Posted by: Scott 04/02/07 There's an Awful Lot of Bands in Brazil Diplo, it seems, knows exactly what he’s doing. Not only did he have sex with MIA, but last year he put together a North American tour for two at the time relatively unknown Brazilian bands: CSS and Bonde de Role. Now it’s a given that CSS will be huge in the UK this year. The 'tired of being sexy' girls (and token bearman) have just added a second London date to their already triumphant February tour while their raucous, drink-spilling eponymous album will be re-released (with full media onslaught) in March. And let us not forget that Kimberly from Girls Aloud named their awesome Lets Make Love & Listen Death From Above her 4th favourite song of 2006. Having just inked a deal with Domino Records, it looks like Bonde de Role is set to be the next shouty, hard-drinking Brazilian party band we take to our hearts. The baile funk rockers will practically be living in the UK for the next month (see them with Junior Boys at Dingwalls on 20/02/07 and the Gossip at the Astoria on the 24/02/07) and their new (but old) single Solta o Frango will be out on 09/04/07. We love their rambunctious ways and you should try and see them if you can. Any band that samples Alice in Chains in one song and Summer Nights from Grease in the next really deserves your respect. Melo do Tabaco.mp3 (YSI) - (the Alice in Chains one) Funk da Esfiha.mp3 (YSI) - (the Summer Nights one) Buy their brilliant new Afrika Bambaataa-celebrating single, Marina Gasolina here. We couldn’t find any (mad) decent Bonde de Role videos so here is CSS’s last clip for Alala: PS- while writing this we discovered the fabulous title of ex-Ipswich Town legend Alan Brazil's autobiography. Respect him. Posted by: Scott 01/02/07