Lorde's SNL appearance goes without a hitch

There were two excellent performances and one dodgy sketch from Lorde on this weekend's Saturday Night Live. The New Zealander delivered pitch perfect renditions of Green Light and Liability from her forthcoming second album, Melodrama, the latter performed while drowning in a merenguey wedding dress ("I wanted to look like an attic moth, no sparkle, swaddled and floating. something so sad about white," she wrote on Twitter).

Watch below.

how i spent my saturday vibes pic.twitter.com/z2LDydYwnX

— Lorde (@lorde) March 12, 2017

brought all of our things to place on the piano and make it feel like where we sat and wrote the song ❤ pic.twitter.com/ziJ7mMAv5e

— Lorde (@lorde) March 12, 2017

@lorde feat my best candles, lorrie moore's book 'self help', baby's-breath flowers, framed pic of robyn that sits on jack's piano, obama

— Lorde (@lorde) March 12, 2017

chill uneventful saturday evening vibes part II pic.twitter.com/2cg6zX8hQ5

— Lorde (@lorde) March 12, 2017

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Carly Rae Jepsen breaks out the ballad

Carly Rae Jepsen popped up on SNL last night, playing the second single from her upcoming third album. All That, which is its name, starts boldly by stealing the fractured drumbeat from the intro to Prince's The Beautiful Ones.

It never reaches the histrionic heights of that Purple Rain track (and Prince would never countenance a lyric as cheesy as "I'll be your lighthouse when you're lost at sea") but it's such an accurate pastiche of 80s pop ballads you can imagine it playing while Kelly LeBrock gets her perm tangled with Matthew Broderick. In slow motion. On the bonnet of a DeLorean.

Listen to the official audio and watch the (very good) SNL performance below.

Carly Rae Jepsen - All That

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Prince tore up the textbook on SNL

Instead of two four-minute performances, which has been the standard since the 70s, Prince was handed an uninterrupted eight minute slot on this weekend's Saturday Night Live, and he didn't waste a second.

Along with his 3rdEyeGirl band and guest vocalist Liane La Havas, he performed a medley of songs from his recent albums Art Official Age and PlectrumElectrum. And, for someone who's not accustomed to the idea of quality control, he actually did a good job of picking which songs to play - so we got boudoir ballad Clouds, guitar workout PlectrumElectrum, some straight-up rock'n'roll on Marz, and the ethereal set closer Another Love.

OK, it wasn't as hit laden as his pyrotechnic SuperBowl performance in 2007 but, as adverts for new material go, this was up with the best.

A poor-quality video follows, until the lawyers rip it down. US viewers can see the whole thing properly on Rolling Stone.

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Rihanna on Saturday Night Live

Okay, okay, I'm like five days late with this - but in my defence, Rihanna's album is so terrifyingly bad that I'd mentally screened out any references to her for the last fortnight. This sketch, however, is mildly amusing.

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New Power Generator

Prince is back, back, BACK!!!

His new album, 3121, hits the stores on March 21st - with a host of guest stars and a video directed by Salma Hayek.

A single, "Beautiful", is also due out in the next couple of weeks, and it sees his royal badness (as they used to call him) getting all smoochy with a new soul singer called Tamar. Now, Prince is always at his best when he has a decent female foil, but the jury's out on whether Tamar is a muse (Rosie Gaines) or a menace (Cat). You can decide for yourself by watching their performance on last week's Saturday Night Live, below.



Personally, I'm not overly impressed with the new material. The two songs performed here plough a similar stylistic furrow to 2003's "Musicology" album. That record launched the purple perv back into the mainstream, but to many fans it felt like Prince-lite: a diluted and blunted version of his postmodern musical genius. Yes, it was great to him get the recognition he deserves -- but is playing it safe on the follow-up the best way to retain those fans?

Indeed, the highlights of Prince's career have always been the curveballs: ditching the power rock of Purple Rain for whimsical psychedlia on Around The World In A Day; sacking his band, the Revolution, at the height of their popularity in 1986; hiring a 10 piece soul band in the mid-90s while the rest of the world machine-gunned gangsta rap into the charts; having his sole UK number one (The Most Beautful Girl In The World), just as everyone was writing him off as a spent force…

So, let's hope these audience-friendly tracks he performed on SNL are the exception -- a sweet candy to tempt us into his dungeon of rootsy perversion. Because we all know Prince is at his best when he's being a naughty boy.

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The following takes place between the hours of 5pm and 6pm

As the new season of 24 premiered in the USA, review site Chromewaves attempted to blg events 'as they happened'. Unfortunately, they missed the first hour of the show...

Never mind because, for us at least, they managed to sum up all six seasons in one line:

"9:42PM EST / 8:37AM TFT (Twenty Four Time) - 'Do not shoot! Just chase him on foot and yell instructions in a threatening yet informative manner!'"
[Read the entire Chromewaves review (Warning: Spoilers!) ]

If you enjoyed our clip from Saturday Night Live last week, you could do worse than going over to Smithappens, where they've begun to make an archive of the things. Something worse would include shutting Smithappens down for copyright infringement. Or killing your mum.
[Smithappens.com: SNL archive]

No, this man isn't holding up an X-ray of our kidneys after that 'accident' with the ceremonial sword. What he's got hold of is a new musical instrument from Yamaha, called the Tenori-On. Working through some sort of sophistry involving lights and samples, it promises to unleash the inner John Michel Jarre in all of us... Which is a scary thought, when you stop to consider it.
[More on the Tenori-On at Yamaha.com]

Radiohead's demo tapes from the days they were called "On A Friday" have been popping up on the interweb. Fan-site, At Ease provides some very thorough sleeve-notes, and some hints about where to find the demos. But if titles like "The Greatest Shindig In the World" and "Tell me, Bitch" are anything to go by, we'd advise giving the band's early experiments in barn-dance/gangasta-rap fusion a miss.
[Read more on ateaseweb.com]

Disturbing discussions are taking place on Fiona Apple's official messageboard. What is she going to think? (Expect a song / essay about it in 2008)
[Epic Records: Fiona Apple Forum]

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Go out and do something less boring instead

Video on the internet. Watched it a couple of times, not been that impressed. A few words spring to mind: tiny, blocky, stuttering, eyestrain, headache, homicidal rage.

So it was with great scepticism that we looked at Google's new video service. Our pessimism was partly justified - picture quality varies wildly, and the initial selection of clips is hardly groundbreaking. We counted 37 music videos ranging from Beyoncé to, erm, Destiny's Child.

Worse still, the service has already been swamped with geeks. Who wants to see speeches from IT conferences, or videocaptures of people playing computer games?

In the "most popular" charts you'll find countless inane viral videos, like that one with two asian students miming to the Backstreet Boys, or that other one where there's a ghost in a car advertisement. Our mum will love it.

The paid-for downloads aren't much better… Episodes of the Brady Bunch anyone? Anyone?

On the plus-side, however, Google's video player is a decent size - taking up around 3/4 of the screen - and there is almost no loading time. Even better, a lot of the clips can be downloaded for use on your Video iPod or PSP. Very cool.

Another feature we like is the ability to plonk any of the videos directly onto your website. Just to see what happens, we've dragged over a classic Richard Pryor sketch from Saturday Night Live.


Hardly a revolution in online video, then, but a step in the right direction.

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