animal collective "water curses" ep leaks

It's set to be released in the US on May 6th, but here it is and it's really good and weird the way you like your Animal Collective.

mp3's after the jump.

"Water Curses"
"Street Flash"
"Cobwebs"
"Seal Eyeing"

What do you think?
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kanye's blog is to be described as:

KanYe's blog is always a good place to find old school hip hop music videos, photos from European fashion shows, and press releases for expensive toys targeted at the world's bored billionaires. This seems odd, however, when you realize that the people who read the blog are KanYe's fans, very few of whom, presumably, are European fashion moguls or billionaires. As a matter of fact, many of the blog's commenters are just hoping to catch the Louis Vuitton Don's eye and have their careers as aspiring rappers/artists/writers/etc. jump started. The class divide between the blog's readers and its content, coupled with the readers' drive to impress KanYe through their tiny posts which he almost surely won't read, consistently begets a butt-ton of unintentional humor.

There is one commenter in particular, 'tuesdainoelle,' who comments on seemingly every post KanYe makes and is seldom not among the first 5-10 to do so. In my opinion, no KanYe blog entry is complete until she weighs in on it, so I've copied her comments from the last bunch of posts below for your reading enjoyment. The first line is the post's title; underneath it is which number commenter she was (1st = first person to comment on the post after it was put up).


AWESOME!
(5th)

tuesdainoelle | March 13, 2008 The Phantom Coupe is to be described as: Classy, intelligent, and elegant interior and exterior. Very nice :) Although, I must say that the Cars: Concept and Regular cars featured on MY blog are soooo much SWEETER and much more awesome....*wink*


Carnegie Mellon University - Sneakerology 101 Class
(3rd)

tuesdainoelle | March 13, 2008 Pensylvania's Carnegie Mellon University introducing a class basically if I'm saying this right...on how to make...sneakers? Different and silly intelligent. The name of the class: Sneakerology 101 lol. There's only one quote for these students:
"No dream is too high for those with their eyes in the sky."- Buzz Aldrin


Freeze Frame Performance Art in Grand Central Station, NYC
(3rd)

tuesdainoelle | March 13, 2008 In my favorite quote: "Creativity is pure Orginality" the WHOLE performance was brillance...I love how they all just frooze in positions unimaginalbe...and for 5 minutes WOW! Great post :)


Freedom Ship
(3rd)

tuesdainoelle | March 13, 2008 The Freedon Ship has interesting and amazing character to it. Very advanced and creatively designed. The most "AW" part is: 3,000 commercial units in a similar price range, there will also be 2,400 time-share units, 10,000 hotel units, and a world-class casino. It will be interesting to see how THIS project does, when it arrives :)


Y-3 2008 Spring Footwear Collection
(1st)

tuesdainoelle | March 13, 2008
(Talking in an MJ voice) Those are nice...especially the gold olds, not sure if I can hear the others...how much are they?
These kicks featured from Hypebeast are: classic, different, weird and kind of original. I like the 3rd and 4th photos...they have everyday looks :)


New Vid With The Kid!!!!
(9th)

tuesdainoelle | March 12, 2008 First and foremost I want to say that I love Kid Sisters personality it's: Pure humor, bold (far as not caring what people will say),silly and has a lot of CRAZZE FUN character. Ok and moving along...can someone please say; "5 hour lunch". I was more glad to see the video freezing then NSync singing "Hit me on ma beeper, beeper beeper, the class act dancing on the step stage like we at Auntie BeBe house for a barbacue, those crazy goofy colors flashing, and that hall wall that Kid Sister walled through it looked as though it was an espoide from "LOST". Bottom line: Love Kid Sis; wack video


Now, I know that people like tuesdainoelle are probably perfectly nice and well-meaning and I don't mean to deride their earnest, if somewhat misguided, attempts at ascending to the intellectual level of their idols. I just find her posts enjoyable and I hope you do too.

UPDATE: She hasn't commented on a single post since I made this post. There's no way she saw this, right? Unless she's googling her screen name every day? Right?

UPDATE II: She's back! And good as new: "@Kanye: The ONE and ONLY Freshness! Graduation Experience Pt2 is: 2 Sweet, Mad crazy, OUT of the BOX (far as the song being edited to go along with cartoon, which is OUT COLD) and it was intense. Derrick Lee did a very nice job :) Good post :)"

P.S. (sp?)
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first wave of spring weekend tix sell out

After being available for only about six hours total, tickets for Brown's Spring Weekend music festival sold out today at around noon. Tickets for Saturday's lineup sold out first, with Friday following shortly thereafter. For those who missed out, there will be another thousand or so tickets made available 72 hours before the festival, pending a favorable weather forecast. And, if you can't wait that long, the high demand for tickets will most likely lead to a highly active scalping market on campus and online -- just don't expect to pay $20 for both days. VW's "Oxford Comma" a capella style from Carleton College in Minnesota after the jump.



Maybe look on Craig's List, though most of the people there are buying and not selling. Continue reading...

roots/fall out boy collabo leaked

(tixgirl)

The Roots ft. Patrick Stump - "Birthday Girl"

Rising Down, the new album from the The Roots won't be released until April 29th but three songs from it have already leaked. The first two, "Get Busy" and "75 Bars," were leaked ("prereleased"?) on OkayPlayer.com by the band, along with videos for both songs. Today, a third, much less legit (in more ways than one) leak occurred. "Birthday Girl" features Patrick Stump, the lead singer of Fall Out Boy, on the chorus, and can already be heard all around the internets.

According to the OkayPlayer message boards, the song first hit the net on a fan-made YouTube montage of Mr. Stump. As for the song itself: the chorus by Stump is very creepy, corny, and catchy, and Black Thought's verses are as good as ever. I have a feeling it'll prove to be a poor man's "The Seed 2.0," which enjoyed international hit status following the 2002 release of Phrenology but became annoying to many a Roots fan from its subsequent over-airplay. The difference, though, is Cody Chestnut >> some guy from Fall Out Boy.

UPDATE: OkayPlayer is reporting that The Roots have dropped "Birthday Girl" from the album. Guess we won't have to worry about over-airplay anymore.
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cat power show

hello all! i’m posting for the first time because for a moment everything is working properly on my sick computer. the following is both a show review for cat power at the orpheum on february 7, 2008 and a failed attempt at a first draft of a memoir for my creative nonfiction course (which required intention, opposition, and resolution for the main character as well as unmediated sensory details). oh well.

Last Thursday, after class, I caught the 8:10 Greyhound to Boston to see Cat Power perform at the Orpheum. She’s touring for her newest record, Jukebox, a sort-of follow-up to 2000’s The Covers Record. I guess her backing band, calling themselves the Dirty Delta Blues, is a collective of famous bluegrass musicians that some get excited about, but I don’t recognize any of their names. I don’t know who opened, because we were late, but I suspect it was Appaloosa, a blonde former Berliner credited with “saving [Cat's] life” in Cat’s myspace blog*. Cat’s real name is Chan Marshall, pronounced Sean, phonetically Shawn Marshall; I don’t know what Appaloosa’s real name is, but I think it’s such a beautiful stage name, I almost don’t want to know. Appaloosa’s Easter Demos CD was $9 at the merch booth, so I bought it, and I still love that first song, “The Day (We Fell In Love)” that I was infatuated with over break and made the first track on a killer mix CD for my friend Adrian. It’s like Nico is singing over a multilayered series of pleasant beeps and the electronic blips of keyboards and cheap drum kits.

We arrived late, like I said, for the last half of Cat’s set. Which was fine because most of what we missed was that interminable period of time between the supporting band and the main act, when the most interesting thing to do is note the songs that are chosen to play over the PA. Our seats were underneath the balcony, and since the Orpheum is a restored nineteenth-century theater, peeling gold leaf filigree and angels on the ceiling, hard seats, and shabbily carpeted stairs, the acoustics are pretty terrible, especially underneath the balcony where the sounds all fuzz and melt together.

Even from our seats underneath the balcony, I could see Cat enough to be surprised by how thin her ponytail was, and, more distinctly, the silhouette of a young man in the third or fourth row. He was standing and at least decently muscular, decidedly not indie-skinny, with short, almost-buzzed-looking hair. He looked clean-cut, like the kind of guy who would wear loose fitting khaki painter’s pants. I mean, wear them well. I imagined that his shirt was red, long sleeved but with gray stripes around the collar and where the sleeves would have ended on a regular t-shirt. I imagined he had dirty blonde hair.

Actually, I didn’t notice him until later. We were busy being thrilled to have even gotten there. While trying to navigate the T from South Station to Downtown Crossing, Franny asked me if I was sure that the Orpheum wasn’t located in Foxboro, and I said no, that’s Gillette Stadium, but still it got me nervous. And then some guy with a huge suitcase asked us for directions, and I couldn’t help him because the Boston I know is the product of daytripping at the Museum of Science with my parents and cousins and a summer spent in Cambridge between junior and senior year, and my parents were in love there before I was born, so I have an unbearably romantic affinity for the place. There are few things I love more than imagining my parents young and skinny and in love. We walked past Boston Commons and I remembered a summer afternoon spent in the botanical gardens. I remembered going to see Arcade Fire at the venue in the spring and knew we were almost there. Everything always reminds me of everything else.

I didn’t notice this guy until Cat Power, or actually her keyboardist, asked us all to stand up and dance. Cat Power agreed, she said this was dancing music, and I don’t need to be asked twice to dance. We were sitting between two rows of middle-aged people who looked kind of tired, like they might have first heard Cat Power on their local Clear Channel-owned soft rock station. They didn’t feel like dancing, apparently, because they did some requisite toe-tapping, but then they sat down quickly, like it was a relief to return to their seats. As I watched everyone in the theater sit down in hesitant waves of wanting to please Cat and yet being afraid of looking silly, I noticed him.

He stayed standing the entire time. Past the amount of time it would be appropriate for the drunk guy -- and there is always that drunk guy -- to be standing; he gets tired. Long after his friends had all sat down, he remained. Constant. I liked that about him. When Cat traversed the stage, his head moved to follow her. I imagined what she saw of him: his face, kind of happily dazed, mouth slightly open, because I decided this must be his first time seeing her. I imagined him lying on his bed in his UMass Amherst dorm room, stretched on the bed with his hands folded behind his head, gazing at the ceiling, thinking only of her. His friends come knock on his door, want to invite him to go out with them and meet some girls, but he would rather listen to The Greatest, and when Cat sings forlornly, “Where is my love?” He says to himself, “I’m here. Don’t you know I’m right here?”

It occurred to me that he was in love with her. Devoted, in a very serious way, to someone he has undoubtedly never met. I began to get bored with the concert itself and its poor acoustics, and shifted my focus to him. Sometimes Cat would shimmy in his direction, but there was a part of me that wanted her to stop. Whether she meant to or not, she was teasing him, because he could never have her. She’s a star. And he’s just some guy who’s in love with her. Bummer.

She’s a professional, though, and maybe she deals with this all the time. Maybe some audience member at every one of the shows on her North American tour is this in love with her. Maybe sometimes she wants to go out with them, get to know them better. Have a beer after the show or whatever it is rock stars do. I know she is a recovering alcoholic, so maybe not a beer. She doesn’t seem the like coffee type, either, so maybe she wants to ask him out to tea. I can see her flirting now: wrapping her little hands around a warm ceramic mug, shrugging her shoulders, swishing her thin ponytail. Laughing at his jokes and making self-effacing comments. Wearing an oversized sweater. Maybe this is exactly what she wants, like that Weezer song. Remember “Across the Sea” when Rivers Cuomo croons “I could never touch you, I think it would be wrong” to his half-Japanese penpal? It’s like that. She knows that she can’t have what she thinks she wants because she can’t ever really love him like he already loves her. How does Cat Power meet guys? Can she only date people of similar, indie-rocking fame? Who would that be? I don’t know, Conor Oberst? He’s too young and self-indulgent for her anyway.

Closer to the end of the show, but before the encore, members of the audience ironically held their lighters in the air and waved them for her. Some people held cellphones. Everyone was sheepish, like they were taking part in a joke they knew wasn’t clever or even funny. Some tired little thing.

This guy, though, he wasn’t insincere. I watched him raise his lighter above his head, his long right arm stretched to the angels on the ceiling rather than waving goofily like everybody else. He flicked his lighter once, just once. Arguably the most graceful use of a lighter I have ever seen, none of the frustration of trying to light a cigarette on a windy day, travel mug in your other hand, making it impossible to cup the cheap lighter that won’t stay lit for more than a millisecond. I could see the flame from my seat. It never wavered. For three songs, this guy held his thumb on the nub of a button on the lighter.

And I knew from twelve rows back that nobody will ever love someone like he loves Cat Power.

After the set finished, and the band left stage, we all whooped and hollered and clapped and cheered for them to come back, and that is always the second more boring part of the show after waiting for the main act to begin. Cat came back on last. She sang a couple songs from The Greatest, and they were really, truly beautiful even under the balcony. Finally, it was all over. I was still watching the guy. Cat bowed and waved from all corners of her stage, and I saw him walk to the center and hand her what could have been an unpublished script. A huge stack of 8.5” x 11” plain white sheets of paper bound together with those big black plastic clips. She very graciously took it from him, tucked it under her left arm, and kept smiling at the crowd. Then she left the stage and we gathered our coats and scarves and retraced our steps back to South Station.


*This appears to be lost to the ether. Whatever.
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youtube decides it's time for everyone to listen to sigur rós

"Heima"

Oh snap! In less than an hour YouTube's entire front page will be devoted to Icelandic band Sigur Rós in honor of the release of their new rockumentary "Heima" which will be streaming fa free in its entirety for all 24 hours of March 7th!

There will also be lots of fan-made music videos to watch, all hand-picked by the band. Check out BrooklynVegan for more, and set aside 97 minutes for what I've heard is an amazing film by what I know is an incredible band.

P.S. Fun fact: "Starálfur," the title of one of Sigur Rós's most beloved songs, means "staring elf" in Icelandic. Like, a small supernatural creature from a folk tale looking at something over an extended period of time. Makes the experience of listening to that song a little different, doesn't it?

Update: At 9am EST when I woke up this morning, "Heima" had just over 1000 views since midnight. As of about 3:30pm it has almost 100,000 views.
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brown spring weekend lineup announced

(brownbeatle)
As Pitchfork reported a few weeks ago (thanks to my tip), Brown University's 2008 Spring Weekend music festival lineup is quite impressive. Friday April 11th will feature hip-hop emcee Lupe Fiasco and Columbia '06 afro-poppers Vampire Weekend, followed on Saturday by British/Sri Lankan hottie M.I.A., mash-up dj Girl Talk, and, the black sheep of the otherwise indie-allstar weekend, jam band Umphrey's McGee.

As in past years, the shows will take place on Brown's Main Green with the Meehan Auditorium as the rain site.

Not surprisingly, the Spring Weekend tradition at Brown is a long and storied one. Past performers have included such luminaries as Ray Charles (twice), Bob Dylan (twice), Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Smokey Robinson, Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, U2, REM, Elvis Costello, De La Soul, George Clinton, and, more recently, names like The Fugees, Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo (twice), Wilco (twice), The Roots (twice), The Shins, and The Flaming Lips. See the entire list from 1960-2006 here.


Vampire Weekend - "Campus" Live on WXPN
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we multimedia!

Chances are you found this blog because you're already on the Making Ends Meet tip but if not, we've got news for you: Fran and I are all OVER these internets. We host a radio show on Brown Student Radio called Making Ends Meet (aka Killing & Not Caring, our original name which was too racy for The Man) which airs live from 2:30-4pm on Monday afternoons and archives so you can listen to it at your leisure. There is also a Facebook group for the show on which we post news and stuff every week. Fran has another show called Little Babies which is on at 8pm once a month on Monday nights which is a half-hour interview-based show in the vein of This American Life only better. Won't you listen? Continue reading...