Posts
All Comments
So, it turns out Yeah Yeah Yeahs wrote Skeletons during a snowstorm. And so they wanted the video to reflect that feeling, they instructed Barney Clay when he turned up to direct. This is what he did:
[via Stereogum]
[Buy It's Blitz]
Stereogum have got the Moss-from-the-IT-Crowd directed new Yeah Yeah Yeahs video. For the watching online.
Streaming over on You Ain't No Picasso: Zero, early indications of the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs stuff.
It's their Christmas gift to you: All I Want For Christmas Is You, streaming from the Yeah Yeah Yeah's MySpace. Santeriffic.
Karen O is indulging in a spot of side-activity, in the form of Native Korean Rock and the Fishnets. It's nothing to do with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs; at the moment, it consists of two live shows in New York on July 21st (= some shaky cameraphone footage on YouTube from July 22nd).
We make this the fourth, or is it fifth, redesign of Conor McNicholas' reign as NME editor - he introduces the new look issue with a letter signed "The Editor", and there are two notable things from the off: the first is that it's even smaller, as the paper continues to shrink like Doctor Who on the wrong end of a laser screwdriver. It can now hide, comfortably, behind Rolling Stone.
The other noteworthy point is that it's not as disastrous as early reports had made it sound - rather than a further evisceration of content, this relaunch is more about rationalising the content. It looks quite bitty, but then the content has been bitty for a while; now, at least, it's organised like a professional buffet instead of a fumbled picnic basket.
It'll be interesting to see what it's like when it doesn't have the T in the Park, Oxegen and Live Earth coverage to give its front half some shape - there's clearly a firming up of the attempt to make photography one of the reasons for people to buy the paper (although a cover splash for "free aerial photo of T in the Park" pushes it a bit - that's a picture on an ordinary page, then, is it?) and the weekend festivals have offered a lot of stuff to fill those slots; quite how successful that'll be during the soggy-arse end of November remains to be seen.
If it's good news for photographers, it's not quite so good news for the writers - the longest article is the Kate Nash piece, there's a half-article on Bonde De Role, but that's as deep as it gets. Karen O is interviewed by readers via NME's MySpace - where you can go to put questions for The Cribs next week. As if apparently aware that sending traffic to a rival publisher's website is probably not the smartest move, you're then instructed to "keep checking NME.com to see if your question has been picked". The O interview is trailed as being "her weirdest ever", but it's not especially weird, the odd question about 'what sort of beard would you have' aside: it's all 'how would you like to die' and 'do you believe in god'? Its as weird as the Sunday Correspondent Questionnaire and nowhere near as left-field as the Smash Hits' regular quizzings.
Conor pledges "more album reviews" in his intro, which is managed by giving fifty words to a dozen records - we can figure out why Stephanie Dosen's album A Lily For The Spectre is worth eight marks, but not only a few handfull of words. The reviews are now shorter than the little puffs they used to give when they had a round-up of the best albums from the previous month.
If they needed more space to allow longer album reviews, they could free up a whole page by dropping the "reader's photos" page as quickly as they introduced it - the old "this is me with the drummer from Cud" bar has now been dropped still further, and we're treated to a full cover of someone who has had Mani write on their shoe, and some bloke in a shop "dressed as a glam rocker" (he isn't.) It's like that pointless "pleased to meet you" column which the Guardian does on Saturdays and nobody reads, only out of focus.
The other big problem with this iteration of the NME is that it doesn't have a clue what it is anymore. There's Kate and Karen, but also New Order and Morrissey bits; there's a full page marking The Verve's reunion, which is written with the apparent assumption that people might have heard of Ashcroft, but know little of him (we should point out that the 'full page' is mainly a photograph). So the new target reader seems to be someone who'd be worried about Mozzer retiring and how faithful the Joy Division movie is, but who doesn't know about the Mad Richard years. Someone who'd buy a magazine because there's The View on the cover, but not minding there's only a brief review about them inside. A person who won't count the advertising pages ratio - about 40%, as it turns out.
The revamp has gone a long way to properly organizing the magazine the NME has become, but the big worry has to be that it now doesn't look like a publication that anyone would have come up with if they'd been starting from scatch.
Thank god for digital downloads and the unbundling of the album, which will make it easy to pick out the decent tracks being produced for the Spiderman III soundtrack (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Flaming Lips) and leave the hackneyed and overblown (The Killers, Jet, Snow Bloody Patrol).
The album in full:
Snow Patrol - 'Signal Fire'
The Killers - 'Move Away'
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - 'Sealings'
Wolfmother - 'Pleased to Meet You'
The Walkmen - 'Red River'
Black Mountain - 'Stay Free'
The Flaming Lips - 'Spiderman vs. Muhammad Ali'
Simon Dawes - 'Scared of Myself'
Chubby Checker - 'The Twist'
Rogue Wave - 'Sight Lines'
Coconut Records - 'Summer Day'
Jet - 'Falling Star'
Sounds Under Radio - 'Portrait of a Summer Thief'
Wasted Youth Orchestra - 'A Letter to St. Jude'
The Oohlas - 'Small Parts'
Chubby Checker's version of The Twist? Heaven help us all.
The ever reliable remember the eighties - although they should consider renaming themselves The 80's - A Warning From History - reports that the latest totally unwanted revival is of Modern "Ay-ay-ay-ay-Moosey" Romance, a band who even at the time not even Look-In could muster much excitement over. More encouragingly, the Most Beautiful Man in the world (or at least Duran Duran, or at least on the days when Nick Rhodes looked like crap) John Taylor is apparently working with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But John, don't save a Yeah for me now...
... I'm sorry, I think Local Radio got into my brain.
Ikara Colt and Yeah Yeah Yeahs - on tour, together:
Mon 24th Feb GLASGOW CMU
Tues 25th Feb SHEFFIELD Leadmill
Wed 26th Feb MANCHESTER MDH
