yes it does involve shaking your ass

Twenty years ago, Superchunk helped pave the indie scene by releasing their only hit: Slack Motherfucker. It was about working for a, er, slack motherfucker, and a high-energy, fast-paced anthem for losers everywhere. After that they vanished from the spotlight, but were far from over. They released eight albums before they taking a semi-hiatus in 2001, only to sporadically release rarity compilations and do live shows.

They recently released Majesty Shredding, their first full album in nine years, but that's a different story. I want to talk about their 2001 masterpiece Here's to Shutting Up. It's a perfect mix of "fuck yeah" fast-paced jams and chill songs. It sort of has an emo vibe, and the third track Phone Sex takes a brilliant venture into country. As you get into the second half the songs get calmer and feel sort of lonely, which makes it a perfect album for rainy days; if you don't feel like talking to anyone, this is a great album to put on. I suggest you listen to it much more that that though.

A track-by-track analysis of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Kanye West is somewhat of a tortured soul. We all live in his world, but he has trouble running it. He's a genius idiot. With all of the controversy surrounding him, he releases a self-analytical album that invites you to the depth of his soul. I invite you to a track-by-track analysis of his magnum-opus.

Dark Fantasy: Kanye's dark fantasy includes waking up in Sleepy Hollow, Nicki Minaj, and a backing chorus of chipmunks. Glorious.

Gorgeous - He's still mad at South Park, how-I WILL NEVER EVER EVER EVER LET YOU LIVE THIS DOOOWN DOOOWN DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWN.

POWER - Ah, the King Crimson sample. In this song, Kanye says "So what if I'm egotistical? I am a fucking God. [Note: from now on, Kanye will be referred to as God, and God will be referred to as Matt]" YA NIGGAS GOT TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD.

All Of the Lights (Interlude) - Thunder before the storm? Bracing.

All Of the Lights - Oh my god those horns. Shit just took surreal to a new level. So, God slaps his girl because "MJ GONE, OUR NIGGA DEAD." C-c-c-custody battle! He's a good guy, he just made a mistake. His baby aint going to no ghetto university.

Monster - Possible response to all of the hate God gets (surprise, surprise.) Media turns me into a muthafuckin' monster? Well guess what, I AM a muthafuckin' monster. Fellatio metaphors using a pharaoh and sarcophagus. Oh shit, who dese vampires suckin' my blood?

So Appalled - LIFE CAN BE SOMETIMES REDIKULUS. God claims he would be on Matt's playlist, and continues to pat himself on the back. God's high as united, 30,000 feet and you're not invited. I guess it means "If you want to make me into an asshole, fine. I am so above you anyways."

Devil in a New Dress - God falls in love and will do anything to make dis honey happy.

Runaway - Easily the greatest song on he album. God finally grows frustrated with the image us mere mortals cast upon him and runs away from it all. Also has a 35-minute music-video counterpart.

Hell of a Life - The chorus goes to the tune of 21st Century Schizoid Man. Pussy and religion is all God needs, and he'll live one hell of a liiiiife. After he marries a porn star, of course.

Blame Game - Were the lyrics slightly altered, this could be a very potent track about the death of God's mother. God has no time for reflection though. He has more important things to do like teaching a bitch how to reupholster her pussy. God taught well.

Lost In the World - The one with Bon Iver. Everything's crashing down. Vocals collide. God feels lost in the world, so he builds his own city. Meanwhile...

Who Will Survive in America - History lesson with African bongos that gets progressively faster. Ends appropriately with applause. God knows that he's God, and sanity is restored for now.

livin' like a bug aint easy

Home Movies is awesome. Basically it's a poorly animated cartoon about three grade-schoolers that make really kitschy movies, but much of the script is improv. The result is a bunch of 8-year-olds with awkward adult speech-patterns and some of the funniest shit you've ever seen. The soundtrack itself is really good, mainly because it's a mix of 0ver-the-top glam ballads and instrumentals that are actually pretty sad. I've been searching for this for a while, and my life is complete now that I've found it. I honestly can't recommend this any harder.
GET IT

season one, episode one
septopus
trust yourself

Indie? A GENRE? Controversy!

Once upon a time there was a delightful little genre called "alternative." Bands stripped off the excess noise of 80s metal and turned what was left into, you know, not shit. Leather pants were replaced with faded denim, Gibsons with Fenders¹, glam-locks with five o'clock shadow, etc. etc. When R.E.M's single "The One I Love" made it on the Billboard 100 in 1987, America went fucknuts. By the mid 90s, "alternative" could pretty much describe anything that wasn't rap or metal. In 2010, alternative is the new rock, indie is the new alternative, and rock is the new...hard-rock? You get my point though. Alt. went places, good (Weezer's first two albums, The Bends, Beck) and bad (Weezer's post-Green Album works², Nickelback, Coldplay, etc.)


In the late 80s, a couple of masterminds were creating what would go on to be known as the "indie sound." These rambunctious lil' scamps were known as the Pixies. In 1987, Steve Albini helped produced their 1988 debut Surfer Rosa, the follow up to their 1987 EP Come On Pilgrim. It was fucking awesome. Drums, vocals³, bass, guitar - everything was epic. While their 1989 album Doolittle⁴ usually gets more credit, Surfer Rosa is still a classic and cited by a fuckton of musicians as an inspiration⁵. Oh, and the album cover has titties. Fucking awesome.

(How wonderful. At the time of writing this, MediaFires decides to break down. I'll put the link up ASAP, folks.)

1. This is speculative
2. Okay, the Red Album was pretty fucking good.
3. Have you ever masturbated to Kim Deal's voice? Feels good, man.
4. Listen to this as well
5. Kurt Cobain said that Smells Like Teen Spirit was basically his attempt at a Pixies song. CUZ IT'S NOT A RIP-OFF IF YOU ADMIT IT, AMIRIGHT????//?///?

Are you ready for the album of the year?

It happens only too often that when a band release their debut album whislt covered in gratuitous amounts of hype, that it turns out to be, well, shit. See Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong, Hadouken and Frankmusik for proof. Well Foals were a band who managed to live up to the Hype releasing a debut album that gave us a well needed break from the "landfill indie" that was unrelentlessly rotting away on every advert, radio station and tv program.
The difficult second album was always going to be a tough one for Foals, what with the first being so fantastic and all, but by god have they risen to the challange. Total Life Forever, out in just over two weeks from now is little short of godly. Total life forever is everything antidotes was but more grown up, and this is in no way a bad thing. The songs still bounce along with all the enthusiasm of before only now, with a much richer sounding texture, warm synths aplenty. Opening track Blue Blood seems a little slow and tentative builds up and swells like a beast, and then we hear the bouncing bass and intricate guitar riffery that shaped antidotes. There seems to be a slightly more post-rock feel to the 7 minute Spanish Sahara which is followed by the anthemic and shorter track, This Orient and Miami, the albums strongest track bursts into life with an insanely catchy chorus that is bound to set the festival audiences this summer alight. The album is a delicate mix of songs that are calm and collective and songs that are enough to get you dancing. End track, What remains pounds on, with crashing cymbals and a striding bass that brings a fantastic album to a fantastic end. Foals are moving British "indie" music forward and with an album as perfect as this, the new bands on the scene have a lot to contend with.

9/10, here you go boys and girls.

SWEET'N'SOUR JESUS FUCK

Holy spicy fuck-whistles. This bad-boy leaked a few hours ago, and it's giving me a metaphorical boner. You want to know what it's like? It's like dropping acid in a McDonald's ball pit full of sex. It's really good.

MGMT is, at face value, a radio-friendly single maker. Or should have been a radio-friendly single maker. MGMT never really wanted to get popular, they just happened to release three singles that got a fuckton of airtime. Andrew VanWyngarden stated that Congratulations won't have any "Time to Pretends" or "Electric Feels". This proves to be bittersweet, seeing how Time to Pretend fucking rocked. But the inconsistencies of OS were all too noticeable. The mature songs like Weekend Wars and The Youth were scattered between the big three singles: The aforementioned Electric Feel and Time to Pretend as well as Kids. Congratulations fixes these problems though. You certainly won't find anything that would make it big on the radio. Every track shows the experimental/psychedelic tone MGMT was aiming for. This album feels like you're in one of those spinning rides at Disney World. You're jerked from side to side as each song splits into three, only to be neatly wrapped up by the end.

UPDATE: /mu/ has spoken, they fucking loathe it. 2deep4them

Holy shit

This is more of an announcement than an official post, sorry 'bout that. To compensate, you can click on the cover below to download the Phoenix Wright OST. Trust me, it's faux-16bit gold.

Oh fuck, OH FUCK. I should have known about this earlier, but it somehow slipped between the cracks. Holy Jesus fuck. This is the first Get Up Kids album/EP (not counting live albums) to come out in six years. Besides MGMT's Congratulations is the only 2010 album I'm really anticipating, unless Interpol gets off of their post-punk asses and really releases their new album this year. Granted, Simple Science is only four tracks long and has the lingering possibility of being a total abortion, but it's great to see something new from them, since Guilt Show was a really shit way to fade out. Simple Science comes out on April 17th on colored vinyl (shit yes) and CD.

-Jonathan

White Butterfly Ordinary Thundercloud

Holy shit, what?

This album is awesome. I picked it up from the greatest fucking sharethread ever (mark September 6th on your calender, it's the second-coming of this God).

So, Start A People. It's by Black Moth Super Rainbow. It's trippin' balls. Think of it as a combination of Beck's Hell Yes EP, Bomberman 64, EarthBound, Kid A, and Animal Crossing. It's hard to remember it track by track. The whole album is like one epic, orgasmic song.

GET IT

DON'T BE A KNUCKLE-SANDWICH

I AM AMERICA

Who is Stephen Colbert?

Besides a forgettable avatarfag (I fucking hated that guy), he's the coolest person. Ever.

He's always pissing people off with his biting satire on the TV show The Colbert Report. If you live outside of the U.S. and wonder what he's mocking, just watch this. Well, at least O'Reilly is a good sport about it. I'll give him that.

But this isn't about O'Reilly, this is about THE Colbert. His 2007 book I am America (And So Can You!) is the greatest thing known to man. Here's the .pdf file of the book, but once you finish reading the .pdf, consider getting the audiobook. It's narrated by Colbert himself, and it plays out like a normal episode of the Colbert Report. All of the expected topics are covered: Sex, drugs, homosexuals, religion, etc., etc. I would give you a sample of his best quotes, but fucking BlogSpot (I am never going to call it Blogger) doesn't want me to copy-paste. Swine.

DON'T BE A KNUCKLE-SANDWICH. BUY THIS BOOK.

Yes, I have been abusing the font sizes lately. Fuck you.

I'm using Adam's 320kbps file for this post, olololololol

I can't act smug for liking this album, which really sucks. Normally I'd be like "Oh dear, you haven't listened to Ziggy Stardust yet? That's okay, you're just missing out on one of the biggest musical influences ever. No, don't feel bad."

Alas, the first time I listened to this album was in November or something, so yeah. Kind of missed the bragging-rights deadline (which would have been when I was 12, I'd assume. I mean, who wouldn't like a 12 year-old Bowie fan? No one, that's who.)

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is essentially about an alien rock-star trying to cope with Earth's cuh-razy society. Sound cliched? Good, because Bowie basically set the space-rocker cliche. Fuckwin guitar and Bowie's distinct voice mesh together greatly. As far as my Bowie knowledge goes, Ziggy Stardust is tame compared to his other albums. It sounds like something that would be played on classic-rock stations (I mean this in the kindest way possible), like 101.5 THE POOOOOOOOOOINT! Ahem, sorry. That was my favorite radio-station in Tampa.

So yeah, this is definitely worth checking out, especially if you have absolutely no knowledge on David Bowie.

Best Tracks: Ziggy Stardust, Starman, Soul Love, Five Years

BWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM

The Angelic Process - Weighing Souls With Sand
Download

After I recently fell in love with 'entry-level' drone bands Sunn O))) and Earth (BWOOM SOUNDS LIKE MY FRIDGE INORITE) I decided to move onto less 'bwoom' styled drone and I got recommended this, it's amazing shoegaze influenced drone and alot different to what I expected.

Even if you're not into drone (probably 2deep4u) I really recommend this, because you'll see it more as a shoegaze record with drone influences and the vocals are insanely good, and I mean REALLY good. The Angelic Process likes to make everything come in at once and it just sounds amazing.

p.s. if any drone fans are reading this and thinking 'WTF is this guy on about?' then I apologise, I'm new to the genre :3c