Archive for February, 2012
Watch Yuksek’s Video for "Off the Wall"
Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:10:45
Go here to watch Yuksek‘s “Off the Wall” video.
Electro-pop composer Yuksek (AKA Pierre-Alexander Busson) has invaded the US, bringing a flurry of swooping, dance-pop anthem and a brand new record, Living on the Edge of Time, released Feb. 14 on Ultra Records.
YUKSEK – Off the wall (clip officiel) by umusic
Did you like the vid?
—Amy Sciarretto
02.28.12
Tags: Yuksek
Converse Rubber Tracks Features Workout in "Oh Hello" and "Track of the Week"
Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:15:46
Converse Rubber Tracks has premiered two new installments of the short-film series “Oh Hello” and “Track of the Week” featuring Converse Rubber Tracks recording artists Workout.
In the latest “Oh Hello,” Workout, who hail from Brooklyn, New York, walk viewers through the creation of both the universe and how they came to be a band, as well as talk about their No. 1 fans: their moms.
Watch Workout get creative in the studio to determine which way to take the sound of their single “Bon Voyage” while recording at Converse Rubber Tracks in this week’s “Track of the Week.” “Oh Hello” is here.
“Track of the Week” is here.
Also check out Converse Rubber Tracks studio engineer Jason Finkel works his mixing magic in this edition of “Geek Out.” Watch as he blends the perfect mix of guitars, drums and bass. With a little bit of know how you can turn that garageband demo into a polished mix too. You can “Geek Out” here.
Do you wanna Workout?
—Amy Sciarretto
02.28.12
Hot Chelle Rae Hosting "Mobile American Idol"-Type Contest
Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:15:47
Hot Chelle Rae are running a contest StarMaker Interactive. Essentially, the “I Like It Like That” hitmakers are hosting a “mobile” American Idol–type contest to find a talented fan who can sing “I like it Like That” as well as they can! Is that possible? Let me see ya try, Hot Chelle fans.
Using the StarMaker mobile app (available for free download through the iTunes App store) contestants are asked to sing and record Hot Chelle Rae’s newest hit “I like It Like That.” Once you publish the recording on the StarMaker network, the public can vote on their favorite submission.
Hot Chelle Rae will listen to the top ten recordings and invite the creator of their favorite rendition to come meet them while the band’s on tour. The contest runs through March 31 and the band will choose the winner on April 7.
Consider this the next generation of American Idol or American Idol 2.0 Anyone can download the app and have their friends, family and even their favorite band listen to their musical creations!
To participate, contestants download the StarMaker app, available through the iTunes App Store, and use its studio-quality voice effects to record themselves singing Hot Chelle Rae’s new hit single “I Like It Like That” for free. StarMaker’s sophisticated proprietary scoring technology provides instant feedback enabling contestants to improve their score each time they sing the song. When participants nail their performance, they can publish it to their StarMaker profile and watch as the StarMaker community listens and votes on their submission. The top ten StarMaker artists will be posted on the leaderboard throughout the contest. After the finalists are announced on April 1, Hot Chelle Rae will listen to the top ten recordings and invite the creator of their favorite rendition to come meet them while they are on tour.
To download the StarMaker app, visit The Apple App Store. For more information about the contest, visit here.
Did you enter?
—Amy Sciarretto
02.28.12
Tags: Hot Chelle Rae
Tennessean Josh Doyle Wins Guitar Center’s First-Ever Singer Songwriter Contest
Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:15:49
Guitar Center’s first ever Singer-Songwriter competition has chosen a winner. Josh Doyle, from Antioch, Tennessee, was handpicked Saturday night by Grammy Award-winning producer John Shanks as the nation’s top undiscovered singer-songwriter.
A total of 10 finalists were chosen from more than 17,000 entries, and in a live competition in Hollywood last Saturday, Feb. 18.
Doyle came out on top. The singer-songwriter takes home a prize package including $10,000 cash, a three-song EP produced by Shanks, new gear from Fender, Taylor, Ernie Ball and Shure and much more.
Check out his winning performance here.
Congrats, Josh Doyle.
Did you like Josh Doyle’s performance?
—Amy Sciarretto
02.28.12
Tags: Josh Doyle
See the Music: Five Finger Death Punch Talks "Remember Everything"
Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:17:17
Five Finger Death Punch Photos
Five Finger Death Punch Videos
Five Finger Death Punch have built a truly timeless tale in “Remember Everything” from their latest album, American Capitalist.
Beginning with haunting and hypnotic clean guitar from Zoltan Bathory and Jason Hook, the song opens up a heartbreaking story of regret, rage, and redemption. Jeremy Spencer bolts down the tune’s backbone with a stadium-size beat, while the riffs rise to the heavens. Vocalist Ivan Moody entrances with the verse before belting out one of the best hooks that he’s committed to tape yet.
“Remember Everything” is on the level of some of Alice in Chains best dark output or a track like Pantera‘s “Hollow”. It’s got the elements of a classic ballad, but there’s a level of intensity that separates it from the pack and ultimately makes it something real and raw. It’s also emblematic of Five Finger Death Punch’s growth and evolution.
There’s a vicious vulnerability to the track that makes it so utterly undeniable.
The same could be said for all of American Capitalist though. It was a landmark for the band last year, and it’s paving the way for an even bigger 2012.
In this exclusive “see the music” video interview by ARTISTdirect.com editor in chief Rick Florino, Zoltan Bathory and Jason Hook open up about “Remember Everything”…
Watch the Five Finger Death Punch “See the Music” on “Remember Everything” Below!
Watch the music video for “Remember Everything” below!
—Rick Florino
02.28.12
Did you dig this “See the Music” interview?
For more with Five Finger Death Punch check out the below!
Spend a day with them here!
See our review of American Capitalist here!
Politics Sung With a Texas Kick
LONDON — In the 15th-floor restaurant of the St. Georges Hotel with a slate-gray view of a cloudy London, the singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith seemed right at home last week, spinning jet lag into enthusiasm four days before beginning a tour in Northern Ireland to promote her 20th album.
Senor McGuire
The singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith, whose roots lie in the blue-sky vastness of West Texas, has toured England, Scotland and Wales every year since 1986.
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At 58, Ms. Griffith is still every bit the perky, high-pitched Texas folk singer of 34 years ago when she first took her music out across the Red River. The rosy and puffy cheeks are a bit more pronounced yet dimmed with age, and a finger disorder has limited her ability to strum her signature guitar as much as she would like, but Ms. Griffith has not lost her devotion to writing and playing music. And she beams as she explains her decision — after three decades of beginning tours in the United States — to start a tour in Ireland and the United Kingdom where she will play 17 dates in March.
“I guess everyone deserves to have one overnight success,” she said between sips of wine just a few hours after landing here. “Just to wake and have it be there. Ireland was that for me.”
Ms. Griffith has long been associated with Ireland — Northern Ireland in particular — due in large part to her songs from the 1980s that addressed the political situation there — “It’s a Hard Life Wherever You Go,” for one — but also the country’s beauty, as in “I Would Bring You Ireland.” She also performed in Northern Ireland at a time when other musicians would not because of the threat of terrorism.
“For many artists there were just too many possibilities for something running amok,” she said.
Her music soon caught on in England, Scotland and Wales, where she has toured every year since 1986. “Scotland got into a push and shove with Ireland over who adopted me as their red-headed stepsister, but now I’m more like their gray-headed stepsister,” she said. “The Welsh claim me because I’m half Welsh and half Scot — but all Texan.”
The imagery of her music may be as much the allure as the politics, whether in her native country or for those outside who are fascinated by it. With roots in the blue-sky vastness of West Texas, Ms. Griffith has always sung candidly about the history of the United States and the simple and often heartbreaking stories that shaped it: Dust Bowl farmers, a Crow Indian boy sweeping up a saloon amid the white men who conquered his people, young lovers dancing in an empty Woolworth store, loneliness — Garbo-style — inside a hotel late at night, life as it fades away on Death Row.
And her concerts have always connected her music to the moment and to the land, wherever she may be. Her album “One Fair Summer Evening,” recorded in an intimate bar in Houston, features stories of playing in Ireland, fully celebrating where she often sold out shows and felt just as at home as in Texas (she owned a home in Dublin for many years). And after being a lifelong Texan, she sold her house in Austin last year and moved to Nashville.
Ms. Griffith has found much of her success as a songwriter, thanks to many artists recording her music, particularly Maura O’Connell, the Irish folk singer who recorded Ms. Griffith’s “Trouble in the Fields,” an anthem to the U.S. farm crisis of the 1980s but embraced by an Ireland that is no stranger to a history of agrarian troubles.
Her new album, “Intersection,” was released in the United Kingdom and Ireland in late January and will be released stateside on April 10 to coincide with a U.S. tour. It’s a continuation of her usual blend of politics, emotion and a dusting of rebellion. “Hell No (I’m Not Alright)” deals with economic doldrums many listeners will relate to right now, no matter their country. “That song belongs to everyone,” she said.
Van Halen at Madison Square Garden
Of the small handful of new songs that Van Halen played at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night, one managed to sum up the spirit of the band’s current reunion tour. It was “The Trouble with Never,” a typically full-throttle contraption: grinding riffs, bashing drums, deviously catchy chorus. And as David Lee Roth spat out the lyrics, it was easy to apply them obliquely to his situation in the band: years of estrangement and acrimony with the brothers Van Halen, followed by a recent strategic détente.
“Every Einstein’s assigned / A Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber,” he sang. Which was meant to be funny, and probably a little pointed. The bigger message of “The Trouble with Never,” telegraphed by its title, took aim at a certain kind of declarative vow — like those made by Eddie Van Halen over the years, when people speculated about Mr. Roth’s return. Maybe that’s reading too much into the song, but at one point, after an especially ferocious guitar solo, there was also a spoken interlude over a slowed-down groove, culminating in the aside “Selective amnesia is only a heartbeat away.”
Van Halen — with Alex Van Halen on drums and Eddie’s son, Wolfgang Van Halen, now filling Michael Anthony’s spot on bass — has been through this sort of thing before. After parting ways with Mr. Roth in 1985, the band installed Sammy Hagar as lead singer and scored four consecutive No. 1 albums, followed by a less charmed affiliation with Gary Cherone. The first reunion tour with Mr. Roth, about five years ago, was a commercial smash, and an effective reminder that the most committed fans still see him as the enduring face of the Van Halen franchise: its Connery, its Shatner.
What’s different this time around is the existence of a new studio release, “A Different Kind of Truth” (Interscope). The album has a respectable spark, and yet the show included only four of its tracks; on one of them, “China Town,”Mr. Roth momentarily forgot the lyrics. The rest of the set list consisted of well-honed nostalgia, without any trace of material from the Hagar era: selective amnesia, as the man said.
From a crowd-satiation standpoint, this was fine. The band’s center has always been Eddie Van Halen, who still deserves his exalted stature among rock guitarists; even his heavier riffs came threaded with filigree, and his solos were bold in their extravagance. The one solo that didn’t come fastened to a song, late in the show, featured not only his signature tapping technique but also a drift of cascading arpeggios, rendered beautifully strange by his finessing of a volume knob. There could have been more of this.
But then the band had a lot of songs to get through, from “Runnin’ With the Devil” to “Ain’t Talkin’ About Love” to signature covers of “You Really Got Me” (The Kinks) and “Oh, Pretty Woman” (Roy Orbison). “Panama” was churning but precise, and “Hot for Teacher,” with its double bass drum cadence like a jackrabbit’s pulse, was urgent and galvanizing. “How ‘bout a little candy from a stranger, hot stuff?” Mr. Roth ad-libbed, adding a weirdly predatory layer to the song.
Since we’re back on the subject of Mr. Roth: at 56, he continues to convey both a busy work ethic and an insistent effortlessness. Looking trim in sequins and shiny fabrics, he covered the breadth of the stage with fluid footwork, though his trademark high kick was scarce. His voice suggested a similar constriction, coming across strongest in his barking, regular-guy mid-range. In a band so heavy on virtuosity, he’s touchingly mortal.
But he’s still selling a fantasy. Halfway through “Jump,” the inevitable finale, some confetti cannons fired at the foot of the stage, and he dashed off, returning with a giant checkered flag. He waved it to and fro, signaling a crossing of the finish line. Who the winner was he didn’t say, but he looked like he’d been waiting for that moment all night.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 29, 2012
An earlier version of this article misstated the first name of Roy Orbison as Ray.
Past Idol Favorites to Perform on Season 11
February 28, 2012 | 11:46 am PT
American Idol has set the bar high in terms of talent. Successful artists come out of this competition every year regardless of whether or not they win the top prize. This season some of your favorite past contestants return to perform their new music as we watch the current hopefuls compete to stand out.
According to The Hollywood Reporter included are Season 8 finalist Adam Lambert who is set to release his second album, Trespassing, this spring, Lauren Alaina the runner-up from Season 10 who released her debut album, Wildflower, this past October and James Durbin, the fourth place finalist from Season 10 who released his first album, Memories of a Beautiful Disaster, back in November. On the March 15th show Chris Daughtry will debut his new single “Outta My Head” from the album Break The Spell!
Who will be a success from Season 11? Watch the boys perform tonight at 8/7c on FOX and cast your vote!
While you wait for the show to air get prepared and watch performances from the Semi-Finalists.
Posted by AI Insider
Chat About the Top 13 Guys
February 28, 2012 | 01:03 pm PT
The time has finally come! The Semi-Finalist guys sing for America’s vote tonight at 8/7c on FOX and the secret saved contestant will be revealed! Is it Johnny Keyser, David Leathers, Jermaine Jones or Richie Law? Tune in to find out and don’t forget to VOTE for your favorites after the broadcast.
Who do you want to advance to the finals? Join the discussion with fellow fans in the comments section below. Login with your Twitter, Facebook, or American Idol accounts and discuss the episode below.
In addition to chatting here, you can also share your comments on Twitter with #Idol and post your comments on Facebook.
The American Idol Insider will be chatting with you from the audience LIVE from Twitter. Ask @IDOL_Insider your American Idol questions!
Check back tomorrow for recaps, videos, and photos.
Get to know the Semi-Finalists with exclusive interviews.
Posted by AI Insider
Idol Nation Forums are Ready!
February 28, 2012 | 03:19 pm PT
The wait is over! The #1 community for American Idol fans is back with new and improved forums. Chat about all things Idol, form fan groups, and join the Play-By-Players as they post live about the show.
Stay tuned as we roll out more community features over the coming days and weeks.
Posted by AI Insider