Word: albums
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...Emergency & I,” the fourth album by Washington, D.C., quartet the Dismemberment Plan, is my favorite high school record. I don’t think it’s really a problem that I had not heard it until the end of my sophomore year of college. Not everyone agrees with me.My girlfriend grew up in Bethesda, Md. The D-Plan’s lead singer once called her parents to persuade them to let her attend a concert they were playing in a bad part of town. When I told her I was going to write about...
This week, LCD Soundsystem re-releases last year’s iTunes exclusive “45:33” as an album. The song, which was commissioned by Nike, takes its name from its duration (well, it actually runs 45 minutes and 58 seconds, but who’s counting?); frontman-mastermind James Murphy claimed that its purpose was to “reward and push at good intervals of a run.” But Murphy’s purported athletic intent turned out to be a lie: He later stated that he never intended the music...
...Even if she did, it’s likely she lost it after the first chorus of her mind-numbing drivel. The antidote: the recently-released video “Teddy Picker” by British indie rockers the Arctic Monkeys. In this video, from their second album “Favourite Worst Nightmare,” the band expresses their utter disdain for the contemporary music video. The Monkeys break with slick mainstream productions and display a cavalier attitude. This pimples-and-all approach shows the boys in their street clothes, with bad haircuts and acne in full view...
...also marked an important way station in Gabriel's career, combining activism with intricate, African-inflected rhythms. That soulful style, similar to Paul Simon's recent Graceland excursions but rather more sober, found its fleetest expression in last year's smash album So and Top Five single Sledgehammer, a smoking slice of revisionist 1960s rhythm and blues that turned male sexual braggadocio into high comedy. The album and the single just earned Gabriel four Grammy nominations (awards to be announced Feb. 24), and the singer says that he is "pleased." Then, using a characteristic combination of deflective wit and earnestness...
...complexities of his songs wove eerie aural patterns through which lyrics chased each other like phantoms from a surrealist serial. The music was simultaneously challenging and forbidding, and Gabriel was typed unfairly as an elitist working in a populist form. Biko began breaking this image down, and the So album has put it to rest forever. The process has received no little help from the raucous Sledgehammer video, which shows Gabriel in novel, self-mocking form, acting like a live-action cartoon surrounded by some nicely berserk animation. "I was lying under glass with a steel pole supporting my head...