Changethethought

I just have to write about the Melbourne, Australia-based band Cut Copy’s new album, In Ghost Colours. I bought it this week and I just can’t stop listening to it. I think I have listened to it about 20 times already and I just can’t get enough of it. It seems to take everything I loved about 80’s new wave and combine it with everything I love about indy rock. It makes me tap my feet and want to get up and dance. It wasn’t until I did a little homework that I also found that this band has a design twist.

Cut Copy began in 2001 as a project of front man Dan Whitford. In 2003 he joined forces with Tim Hoey (guitar/bass/backing vocals/sampler) and Mitchell Scott (drums). In 2005 they began touring internationally, opening for bands like Franz Ferdinand, Junior Senior, Bloc Party and Mylo. Last year they toured Australia opening for Daft Punk on the Neverland tour. Apparently the Sydney leg of the tour hosted an audience of 50,000 strong. Cut copy is signed to Modular Recordings who has also signed Wolfmother and the New Young Pony Club.

If you are not a fan of the 80’s, you probably won’t like this album. If you like to get up and dance, have fun and don’t mind listening to something poppy and optimistic, then this album is a winner. I absolutely love it and as I said, I just cannot get enough of it. It’s the best album I have purchased in a long time and my favorite so far this year.

You can listen to more tracks from the album at Cut Copy’s MySpace page and buy gear from their online store. You can also keep track of the band via their blog.

So after all of that, you are still asking, ‘Where is the design twist?’ Well Cut Copy frontman Dan Whitford is also a graphic designer. You can read more about the design endeavours of Dan Whitford on his page at Modular here. He founded a creative studio called Altar in Australia while working on his music. You can see Altar’s work at their website.

Talk about serious talent, Cut Copy has it in spades. Good music and design. I’m sold.

written by Christopher | tags: Altar, Cut Copy, Dan Whitford, In Ghost Colours, Melbourne, Music

A fellow Denverite, Anthony Cozzi who has worked under the name Snowblinded for some time now has started a record company called Plastic Sound Supply. They have just released their first CD entitled, ‘The Reprogramming Project‘. The clincher is that they released a video for the 8th track on the album (Scaffolding – Rebuild (Cacheflowe Remix) and the video has apparently been the most popular video this week at XLR8R. That is a pretty exciting accolade for a first video and Anthony is really excited.

You can view the video above. Congratulations Anthony.

written by Christopher | tags: Anthony Cozzi, Music, Snowblinded, The Reprogramming Project, XLR8R

The new Portishead album entitled, ‘Third’ drops April 29th. You can view the video from the latest release off the album entitled, ‘Machine Gun.”

I am a long time fan and I have no doubt there will be something worth listening to on the new album. It’s been 10 years since their last album. They will also be playing a series of live shows in the UK, throughout Europe and the U.S. to promote it’s release.

The album is being released on Island Records. It weighs in at 11 tracks and 49 minutes and 13 seconds. Portishead was one of the most influential British bands of the 90’s. Their album ‘Dummy’ released in 1994 and 1997’s self-titled album defined a new music genre dubbed ‘Trip-hop’. Other than a charity event in 2005 and a secret show mid-2007 there has been little seen of the band. They are coming out of hiding in a big way now, as you can see by the show dates below:

March Tour Dates
26 – Porto, Portugal (Coliseum)
27 – Lisbon, Portugal (Coliseum)
30 – Milan, Italy (Alcatraz)
31 – Florence, Italy (Sashall)

April Tour Dates
2 – Munich, Germany (Tonhalle)
3 – Berlin, Germany (Columbiahalle)
4 – Copenhagen, Denmark (KB Halle)
6 – Cologne, Germany (Palladium)
7 – Amsterdam, The Netherlands (HMH)
9 – Manchester, England (Apollo)
10 – London, England (Hammersmith Apollo)
11 – Edinburgh, Scotland (Corn Exchange)
13 – Wolverhampton, England (Civic)
17 – Brixton, England (Brixton Academy)
26 – Indio, California (Coachella Festival)

May Tour Dates
5 – Paris, France (Zenith)
29-31 – Barcelona, Spain (Primavera Sound Festival)

The band will be webcasting a performance of eight tracks from the new album on their website tomorrow. Current TV has scheduled to air the performance eleven hours after the debut on Portishead’s website. You will be able to view it there until after the official U.S. release on April 29th. It’s an interesting idea and presents good fodder for the already circulating argument as to whether the band is still relevant after a decade long hiatus.

written by Christopher | tags: Machine Gun Video, Music, Portishead, Third

Michel Gondry teamed up with his brother, yes he has a brother who is a video editor, to shoot a video for the French electronica band Lacquer. They mounted a camera on the backseat of a convertible to capture a cross country trip from the coast of Los Angeles to the streets of New York. Shot on 16mm film, they captured one frame every second during daylight and then one frame every 10 seconds at night. The video lasts 4 minutes and entails the entire trip over the course of seven days and nights. The song is also very good.

You could file this under the ‘why hasn’t anyone done this yet’ category. When you first see it this is the first thought that enters the mind and that is exactly why Gondry is a genius because he did do it.

written by Christopher | tags: Lacquer Music Video, Michel Gondry, Music, Olivier Gondry

Uber popular Music review portal and all around command center, Pitchfork Media has released a beta version of their online music network Pitchfork TV. There is already some great content on display including the fantastic new video Graveyard Girl video for the new album release from M83.

written by Christopher | tags: M83, Music, Pitchfork Media, Pitchfork TV

The new Bjork video that one of our other Editors, Celeste wrote about earlier last week premiered today. The video was directed by the maddeningly creative minds at Encyclopedia Pictura. It really is an amazing video but then again so is pretty much every single video that has ever been produced for Bjork. She is a crazy little woman and that is why I love her so much.

You can now view the video in higher resolution via Motionographer here. There is also a nice ‘making of’ video available here at YouTube.

written by Christopher | tags: Bjork, Encyclopedia Pictura, Motion Graphics, Music, Wanderlust Video

The Canadian Indie Rock/Folk Collective The Acorn released their new album Glory Hope Mountain in early March. “Flood Pt. 1″ is the first video release promoting the album and it is worth noting as a fine piece of art as well. The video was directed by Christopher Mills. Apparently Mills hasn’t really been on the music video scene for a few years now since his earlier work with a few of my favorite bands like Broken Social Scene and Interpol. The video is very unusual and puts in the work to help deliver on the narrative of the strangely driving if not somewhat tribal song. Production-wise it appears to be mostly 3d but the weaving in of analog accents like sketches and fine art give it a more visceral and dreamlike quality. It is definitely one of the most interesting and original videos I have seen so far this year.

written by Christopher | tags: Canada, Flood Part 1, Indie Rock, Music, Music Videos, The Acorn

A new Gnarls Barkley video for the single “Run”, one of my personal favorites off of their new album The Odd Couple has been out on the airwaves for a few weeks now. One of our readers was nice enough to alert my attention to the fact that there is also a video out for the song. The video was directed by HAPPYduo Richard Farmer and Guy Shelmerdine. The video is a bit of an homage to American Bandstand and includes B boys and girls getting freaky. It starts with Justin Timberlake who also makes a few vocal contributions to the album as well.
The video has also been labeled as potentially seizure-inducing. This clip came straight from the Gnarls Barkley website: “Contrary to rumor, MTV and VH1 censors did not reject the video because of liability issues related to strobe effects and seizures. ‘Initially, there were fears the video was going to fail the Harding Test,’ says a spokesperson for the band. ‘But, for the moment, indications lead us to believe the video passed.”Well, I personally guarantee that the video is better than that seizure-inducing Olympics video. So judge for yourself at your own risk.

written by Christopher | tags: Gnarls Barkley, Happy, Music, The Odd Couple

I purchased the new Gnarls Barkley album this week the second it was available. I was a big hip-hop (back then we called it rap) fan when I was in highschool. I have to admit, I think the genre has slipped a lot since then. Back then, it was the new ‘anti’. It was more rock than rock and roll. If you were a rebel, you listened to rap as much as you listened to grunge. When I was younger they didn’t rap about Cadillac Escalades and stock portfolios. They rapped about selling drugs, getting beat down by the cops and living on the street. Ironically, it was from this very same lifetime that Gnarls vocalist Cee-lo (Thomas Callaway) first emerged. Cee-lo first entered the music scene as part of the Atlanta hip-hop group Goodie Mob which had a large hand in the Dirty South Movement of the 1990s. He left the group after their third album to embark on his solo career in 1999. After releasing 2 of his own albums he eventually parlayed his individual success into what is now Gnarls Barkley. Combining his unique style with multi-instrumentalist and producer Danger Mouse (Brian Burton) from New York, who was straight off a successful stint for his work on Gorillaz‘ Grammy winning album Demon Days that was preceded by his Grey Album, which blended samples from Jay-Z‘s The Black Album and the Beatles‘ White Album. No one wants to call an album a ‘sure-thing’ in the music industry anymore but the combination of the two enormous talents was as close as you could get. Downtown Records knew they had a hit on their hands when Danger Mouse presented them with the song Crazy. After sealing the deal with two Grammy awards in 2007 for Best Urban/Alternative Performance (“Crazy”) and Best Alternative Music Album (St. Elsewhere), the rest you could say is history.

So you ask, what is the new album like? Well, in my humble opinion, it is every bit as good if not much better than the first. It is known throughout the music industry that there are few things more difficult than releasing a sophomore album that can live up to the success of a great first album. On Gnarls new album, the Odd Couple, it feels like they have found their sound and also become totally confident with their style. The mixing on the album is some of Danger Mouse’s finest work so far. Cee-lo’s vocals harken back to the glory days of Motown, with a touch of roaring 20’s vaudevillian panache. I cannot stop listening to track 4, ‘Run (I’m a Natural Disaster)’. Don’t get me wrong though, great songs abound on this album and you can easily sit down and listen from start to finish with zero disappointment in between.

I felt on their last album that since the project was a bit of an experiment, some of the songs were over reaching and hit or miss. The Odd Couple is no experiment, it is an exercise in confident bravado. As an old friend of mine used to say, usually right before we were almost arrested, “It’s all good”. That exactly what the new Gnarls Barkley album is. With cover art commissioned by Big Active and completed with loving artistic care by rising-star designer Siggi Eggertson, it may even be an album that inspires you to refrain from downloading and actually make a much needed pilgrimage to the record store.

No one paid me to say this, download or not, go buy it now and be happy. It will make you so.

written by Christopher | tags: Gnarls Barkley, hip hop, Music, The Odd Couple

Hard Format makes the point that everyone seems to be claiming we may be reaching the end of physical media created for music. Apparently the founders of the site, Justin and Colin, beg to differ. So, in a mutual love of all things music packaging related, the established Hard Format to serve as an archive of their personal favorites. Don’t expect a top 40 best album covers of all time but do expect to see something you have never seen before but probably can’t take your eyes off of. Case-in-point, I purchased the new Radiohead album as a download from Radiohead’s website, I had no idea such a beautiful album was created for it. You can end up spending a lot of time at Hard Format so if you have a little to spare for inspiration, you will definitely find it there.

written by Christopher | tags: Graphic Design, Hard Format, Music

Quite frankly, I am a little embarrassed that I missed Spam Studio. Somehow they flew under my radar, even though I have seen their absolutely brilliant video for the Naive New Beaters. Take the time to watch the entire video on their website because it is worth every second.

written by Christopher | tags: Graphic Design, Music, Naive New Beaters, Spam Studio

Wow. I mean wow. I really mean wow. Just wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. There are not many things in life that have sincerely moved me to tears, but I am not ashamed to say, in absolute seriousness, that watching Paul Potts sing for the first time had this very effect.

I grew up singing and even performed in an opera when I was 12 years old. I sang the lead in an opera called Amahl and the Night Visitors. It was one of the most demanding things I have ever done artistically, and I have always regretted not pursuing acting and singing further. So, to see someone who had been lingering in the desperate shadows of life like Paul Potts, step onto the stage of the British equivalent of American Idol, a show called ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, and do what he did really pulled my heart strings. It is one of those rare moments in life when you feel like you really got to see something beautiful happen. The only word that comes close to describing his performance is transcendent. The guy is the real deal, and he is just amazing. Since his audition, he went on to win the show and has gone on to become an overnight sensation that is sweeping across the world. You can find numerous examples of his enormous talent on YouTube.

He really is an example of how, if you have a dream and believe in yourself, you can do what your heart desires and go all the way. It is nice to see a genuine star shine in what sometimes seems to be such a weary world. Thank you to him for having the courage to step forward and share his gift with the rest of us. I wish him all the success the world has to offer.

written by Christopher | tags: Britain's Got Talent, Music, Paul Potts

If you don’t own Hello Avalanche by The Octopus Project, go out and buy it right now. It’s just a damn fine album. Their last album was fantastic as well but they have really cooked up something special on Hello Avalanche. There are no vocals on the album save for the very last song which is a bit of a departure for them but the depth of experimentation and the harmonies created by both synthetic and real instruments is just deliciously melodic. It’s an album that is great to work to but equally great to throw on in the background of a party. It just makes you feel good.

written by Christopher | tags: Music