I've been babbling on about The Pierces and their gothic carnival pop-rock since September last year. In the intervening six months, they've been off on tour with Lissie, made it onto Radio 2's A-List and finally got round to completing their new album, You & I.
The latest single from that record is called Glorious. Perfectly suited for the hazy nights of late spring, it's a dreamy, close harmony lament with soaring strings and a twingy twangy guitar riff. Critics will undoubtedly draw comparisons with The Bangles and The Go-Gos, which is (a) a lazy assumption about all-girl bands, and (b) entirely accurate.
The video correctly focuses on how sisters Catherine and Allison Pierce are, in common parlance, "total babes".
I was lucky enough to interview The Pierces last month in the plush Penthouse suite they call home while they're in London. It's for a feature that'll be published on the BBC website towards the end of May, when their album comes out in the UK. I thought you might like a sneak peek (sneak listen?). So here's six minutes of it.
Poor old Lykke Li isn't having a great time of it.
Last week, she cancelled concerts and radio appearances after throwing her back out. A posting on her official blog yesterday revealed she'd had some sort of raspberry-related panic attack in the Glasgow branch of Marks and Spencer (which begs the question: why don't gorgeous Scandinavian alt-pop stars shop in my local branch of M&S? I'd be perfectly happy to help out when they spill their raspberries.)
Perhaps the strain of touring the country and repeatedly singing about the bleak dissolution of her last relationship is starting to take a mental toll on Lykke Li? It's a theory backed up by the, frankly upsetting, video for her new single Sadness Is A Blessing, in which she has some sort of "episode" in a posh restaurant.
The singer introduced the video on her website with a short poem.
Father,
I know I Broke
Your heart, it was never
My intention, all I
Ever wanted was to
Dance...
In happier news, Lykke was off her sick bed on Tuesday night to record a few tracks for Jools Holland. They'll be shown on BBC Two tomorrow night - and this lithsome version of Get Some went out on Tuesday's live show.
Fight For Your Right: Revisited is a cameo-filled, knockabout farce courtesy of The Beastie Boys. The concept, such as it is, is that the 1986-era Beastie Boys (Volkswagen pendants, snarling lips, inflatable phalluses) tangle with future versions of themselves (socially conscious Tibetan freedom fighters who occasionally remember to make awesome rap records).
It's been called a short film. It's been called a megavideo. I reckon it's a brilliant pilot for a sitcom. Suggested titles for this Beastie Boys comedy include:
Hello, Nasty!!!
Third Ad Rock From The Sun.
Ill & Grace.
Fight For Your Right To Partridge Family.
Actually, this idea's rubbish. Let's move on.
Fight For Your Right: Revisited premiered last night in Greenwich, New York. It was posted online shortly afterwards... And here it is.
Did you spot all the cameos? The cast-list includes... Will Ferrell, Seth Rogen, Elijah Wood, Jack Black, Danny McBride, John C. Reilly, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Rainn Wilson, Rashida Jones, Orlando Bloom, Jason Schwartzman, Steve Buscemi, Chloe Sevigny, Kirsten Dunst, Maya Rudolph, Laura Dern, Amy Poehler, Shannyn Sossamon, Alicia Silverstone, David Cross. And The list goes on.
You can also check out a full stream of the Beastie Boys' new album Hot Sauce Committee Pt 2 on the end of this link.
Holy Ghost! are the less demanding, less pretentious LCD Soundsystem. That means crisp, strutting disco funk with proper melodies in the bits where James Murphy would have recorded another shouty megaphone rant about his mid-life crisis.
Their latest single, Wait & See, is probably their weakest so far. But, given that previous releases include the almighty Static On The Wire and Do It Again, that's not a major criticism.
The video is properly brilliant, though: Nick Millhiser and Alex Frankel (for they are the spectral duo in question) are replaced by their dads. Misters Millhiser and Frankel Snr are shown recording the song, signing autographs and rifling through creates of vinyl. They look like they're having a blast.
[Insert your own "fathers, sons and Holy Ghost!" pun here]
Holy Ghost! also have an album. It is excellent. Particularly in the sun, with a charred burger in one hand and a sparkly gingermint cocktail in the other (remind me to give you a recipe for that one day - it's amazing). The album is imaginatively called Holy Ghost! and you can purchase it on Amazon.
Hello, pop reader. Today I am going to introduce you to some of the most thrilling sentences in the modern musical vernacular. They are taken from the "making of" documentary for MNDR's new video, Cut Me Out.
Hold on to your chairs, here we go:
"This project came about organically."
"What Ivan did was to take this commercially available product and augment it for us to create a tool to capture Amanda's performance"
"The basic story is of an individual who has layers of things put on them."
I'm going to stop there, in case the explicit nature of those quotes induces some sort of erotic episode in your trouserlegs. But for the full, uncensored effect, you should watch the full, four-and-a-half-minute rockumentary. You won't be disappointed (you will).
As it happens, MNDR is / are excellent. She is / they are Amanda Warner and / or Peter Wade, and they / she / it basically represent a New York Art School riposte to La Roux. IE They are very good indeed.
MNDR first came to our attention with a guest spot on Mark Ronson's Bang Bang Bang last year, which was swiftly followed up by the free MP3, I Go Away, a cyber-ballad with unexpected emotional heft.
Cut Me Out, on the other hand, is a very insistent song; the synth-pop equivalent of Sainsbury's self check-out machines. "Please put your items in the bagging area," it chimes passive-aggresively, unaware that you're drunk and you've just dropped all your coins over the floor and your mum's calling your mobile and an elderly woman who's come out to buy 2 litres of Vimto in her dressing gown is tutting at you under her breath. Stop it! You're giving me a panic attack.
As regular readers might know, I grew up in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. It was an era when Christianity was a fact of life and Religious Education was a compulsory subject at GCSE. Although I'm not a regular church-goer now, I remain fond of those Bible teachings that haven't been distorted into a demented manifesto for small-minded intolerance.
At it's best, religion taught me to look at the world with a sense of awe and gratitude and compassion. That is perfectly alright by me.
I could never get to grips with the music, though. Hymns were tolerable - the bad ones have been filtered out over hundreds of years, after all. It was all that drippy "Jesus is a sunbeam" bollocks that made me want to impale myself on a candelabra like a macabre Marilyn Manson wannabe.
So, just in time for Easter, here are five songs with a religious theme that are 100% not rubbish. I bet they wouldn't play any of them in St Paul's Cathedral, mind.
Because you can't get Prince's back catalogue on YouTube. if you could, this video would either be The Cross (from Sign O'The Times) or Eye Know (from Lovesexy). They're both amazing.
In which Bono plays the character of Judas, betraying Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Alternatively, it's about fighting with your wife at a party thrown by The Great Gastby. From the brief "good period" in U2's career.
I particularly like the lyrics of this one. Nerina has doubts about God's existence, but has a few ideas of what her "ideal" creator would be like. In honesty, most church-goers are exactly like this, and I prefer them to the staunch, immovable fundamentalists. To quote Kevin Smith's film, Dogma: "Having belief is a bad thing. It's better to have ideas... You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier."
