ALBUM REVIEW

Twelve years ago, Blur frontman Damon Albarn and Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett formed Gorillaz — a ”virtual band” whose animated avatars and woozy beats pastiche seemed custom-fit for a dawning era of smartphones, iPods, and other Jetson-y gizmos. ”I’m useless, but not for long/The future is comin’ on,” Albarn drawled on their first single, the dubby alt-chart hit ”Clint Eastwood.”

He was right: Gorillaz’ self-titled debut sold 
almost 2 million copies in the U.S. and made them stars, albeit in physical absentia (even in live performances, they are hidden behind 
 giant cartoon projections). A half decade after their last release, 2005’s multiplatinum sophomore outing Demon Days, the band has returned, once again gilding their four-character core with a delightfully random roster of guest stars: Snoop Dogg, legendary soul smoothie Bobby Womack, Lou Reed, and the Clash’s Mick Jones among them.

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Spoon are a quartet from Austin with roots in what now seems like a distant golden era: the early-Nineties zenith of alternative rock. In 1993, the year singer-guitarist-songwriter Britt Daniel and drummer Jim Eno founded the group, Nirvana were still a working band, Beck was hot with “Loser” and Smashing Pumpkins were in the Top 10 with Siamese Dream. Daniel, Eno, keyboard player Eric Harvey and bassist Rob Pope are now in a mainstream of their own. Their records don’t go platinum or anywhere near Top 40 radio, but albums such as 2002’s Kill the Moonlight and 2005’s Gimme Fiction are routinely plundered for film scores and TV shows. With that exposure, hardy touring and the loyalty of indie-rock fans, Spoon are big enough to be in the Top 10 themselves — 2007’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga debuted there — and headline rooms as big as New York’s Radio City Music Hall.

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In 1994, Jared Leto gave us a TV hunk for the ages: the mute and brooding Jordan Catalano, from My So-Called Life. Unfortunately, Catalano wouldn’t waste an “uhh…whatever” on the hammy, bombastic third disc from Leto’s band, Thirty Seconds to Mars (with Leto’s brother, Shannon, on drums). The signposts here are Pink Floyd, INXS and Nickelback. Leto bellows things like “Where is your God?” over and over as industrial atmospherics and choirs of fans (invited to studio “summits” by the band) hammer home a theme of fortitude in the face of societal trauma (or something). We can all feel as one in coming together to ignore his message of hope.

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Let’s just get this out of the way, shall we? About 99 per cent of pop is drudging twuntery assembled by blank-eyed robots who are unjustly rewarded with mountains of cash, while all my favourite bands languish and die in places like Tacoma, Washington. As someone who believes hardcore punk to be mankind’s highest artform, Lady GaGa is the antithesis of my fucking soul: she eats diamonds marinated in the tears of seraphim, I eat week-old misery on toast. I’d despise her… but she is that remaining one per cent.

It’s because she’s baffling.  ‘The Fame Monster’, being eight new tunes welded to last year’s ‘The Fame’ (where most pop muppets would tack on a tossed-off remix or two, La Gaga delves into her paranoid soul and constructs a thematic collection around new demons that have invaded her life – monsters representing her fear of, among others, sex, death, loneliness and alcohol) is as pristine as you’d expect, but has a sub-zero core of isolation and fear. In the same way as Radiohead battle computers and learn new instruments to hew their sculptures while Fuck Buttons and HEALTH discover new sonic languages, she uses pop, its producers and masks and all its artifice, as her tool of self-expression.

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To read the complete review visit NME

Hot-shot resumes aside, the three heavy hitters in Them Crooked Vultures have a taste for the strange. Guitarist Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) indulges his weirder impulses in his long-running “Desert Sessions” ensembles. Drummer Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana) instigated the excellent heavy-metal detour Probot. And bassist John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) has collaborated with genuine subversives from Diamanda Galas to the Butthole Surfers. Together in Them Crooked Vultures, the three settle not for bland détente but for something a bit more out there.

The arrangements are laced with twists in tempo and mood. Nasty riffs and sticky melodies are everywhere, buttered over by the androgynous harmonies that have made Homme a hard-rock anti-hero, but verse-chorus arrangements hold little interest. Instead, there are fascinating digressions, packed with surprises.

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To read the complete review visit CHICAGO TRIBUNE

To see footage from the Boston show visit us at YOUTUBE

“I wish I could go back in time,” Wayne Coyne yelps on the Flaming Lips’ 12th record. In a sense, he has: These psych-rock mystics haven’t sounded so off-the-wall since they were Oklahoma acidheads in the Eighties. Most of Embryonic sounds like laid-back echoes of Miles Davis’ early-1970s skronk jazz, with distorted funk grooves undercutting pillowy vibraphones and zonked electronics. Despite tons of studio chaff (five songs are fragments named after zodiac signs), a theme emerges, something about keying into the cosmos by relinquishing control. Hippie hokum? Maybe. But the Lips have always been able to subvert pie-eyed whimsy with a sense of homespun beauty, and there’s plenty of that here too.

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To read the complete review visit ROLLING STONE