April Fool's Day is garbage for news-writers

Yesterday was April Fool's Day, and let me tell, if no picnic if you write news about something as based on hearsay and industry rumour as music is.

Last Thursday, March 25, Toronto hardcore experimentalists Fucked Up wrote a stirring essay about the relationship between SXSW and bands, and how the music industry is spending more on product placement than on artists themselves. The whole essay is here on the band's "Looking for Gold" blog, and it's definitely worth a read.

In it, the band trashed their SXSW showcase sponsor Thriller Energy Drinks, calling their product "vile" and finishing by stating, “we can say with force that Thriller Energy Drinks is a bullshit company and we won't be working with them ever again.”

So yesterday, when the band announced they were being sued by the Drink company, it seemed to make sense. Hell, even the Village Voice was corroborating, and their label, Matador, posted the fucking legal document, or so it seemed.

Then, after getting both NME and Exclaim! to report it and best of all, Muchmusic to put it on television, the band posted this, the important part of which you can read below:

"Hey, so the whole lawsuit thing was real. I mean fake. It was fake. No one is suing us. It was a really elaborate April Fool's joke we thought up like maybe 48 hours ago. Thanks to Bob Shedd for helping us find a place to host the website, and Aaron Campbell for doing all the programming. Thanks to the Village Voice for being cool and basically becoming out blog-bff over the last few days. Special thanks to Much Music for putting us on TV to talk about it and all the blogs and news websites (you know who you are) who fell for it. Also thanks to the almost 400 people who signed up to the facebook group to support us and the people that wrote complaints to Thriller."

Then the band claims that the whole thing, including the initial SXSW post, was just marketing for their own flavours of Thriller energy drinks, which they obviously made up in the first place. Fucker! Look at all their stupid products here, which, if people had bothered to shop, would have exposed the prank.

Then, after writing up this prank news, I also wasted half an hour writing that at an Aberdeen, Washington garage sale, demo tapes were found of Kurt Cobain performing when he was just 9 years old. I realized the news was fake and stopped writing when I got to the part about the 9 year old penning a song with the title "Nixon Must Die (Or Resign)."

So, good job to all you amusing bastards out there who grabbed people's attention and got them worked up about stuff that never happened. There's a pretty solid list of them here.

Talib Kweli and Hi-Tek finally make Revolutions Per Second

Talib Kweli's second-most highly anticipated reunion (c'mon Black Star!) has been a long-time coming, but after more than a year of hints, leaks, and suggestions, it appears as though Reflection Eternal is back, and they've brought a brand new full-length LP with them.

The album is titled Revolutions Per Second, and is due May 18 from Kweli's own Blacksmith label and Warner music. Though "Just Begun" - which features the fantastic underground MC/beat-maker Jay Electronica, Mos Def and J. Cole - has already been leaked, it appears that the first single is "Strangers (Paranoid)" with UGK member Bun B. The album's tracklist is below and the video for "Strangers" is above.

Revolutions Per Second:
1. “RPM's”
2. “Back Again” (f. Res)
3. “City Playgrounds”
4. “Strangers (Paranoid)” (f. Bun B)
5. “In This World”
6. “Got Work (Fame)”
7. “Midnight Hour” (f. Estelle)
8. “In the Red”
9. “Liftin’ Off”
10. “Black Gold Intro (The Black Gold Countdown)”
11. “Ballad of the Black Gold”
12. “Just Begun” (f. Jay Electronica, J. Cole and Mos Def)
13. “Long Hot Summer”
14. “Get Loose” (f. Chester French)
15. “So Good”
16. “Ends” (f. Bilal)
17. “Outro”

Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part Two (Return Of The Ankh)... 59/100

Am I the only person on Earth who doesn't like Erykah Badu? It often feels like I am, which is hard for me to understand - she's easily one of the most overrated neo-soul singers around. Her voice lacks the soul of Sharon Jones, the character of Macy Gray and the power of Alicia Keys, but more importantly, she's never come close to matching the hype surrounding her talent and eccentricity. There's nothing particularly interesting or challenging about her music, which often hovers around a slow-to-mid tempo that quickly gets dull, especially if you're trying to plow through an entire album.

And yet, I want to believe, so here I am listening to New Amerykah Part Two (Return Of The Ankh), trying to glean some enjoyment from Badu's latest creation.

But those who, like me, hoped the music might match the wild beauty and colourful intrigue of her album cover will be sorely disappointed: Return of the Ankh is yet another sprawling yawner. It's not nearly terrible, but it never verges on exciting, either. Badu is most exciting when she's spontaneous, which rarely happens here, and at her worst when she drags a single idea through mud for more than five minutes. "Love" and "Fall In Love (Your Funeral)" are both exasperatingly long and yield little reward after a six-minute slog.

Elsewhere, the album feels equally long-winded, even when the songs are short. “You Loving Me (Session)” feels half-baked and frivolous, while “Agitation” starts promisingly and quickly loses its momentum.

It wouldn't be so bad if the rest of the album was twisting and turning, but between its length, its middling tempo and its monotony, New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh) is a long, hard road.

Back to the drawing board, Erykah.

The Morning After: Spoon Live in Toronto, March 29, 2010

Sometimes shows you decide to attend last minute turn out to be among the best. Such was the case when last minute, a friend and I grabbed tickets off of Craigslist and headed to (ugh) the Sound Academy. We missed opener Strange Boys (meh) and supporters Deerhunter (dang!), but arrived ten minutes ahead of the mighty Spoon, who may have played the greatest Spoon setlist of all time.

Anyone familiar with Spoon knows that there isn't a dud song in their catalog, but boy, did Britt Daniel and co. ever play to their strengths. The band pulled heavily from Gimme Fiction and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, playing more songs from each of those albums than from their latest LP, Transference.

Included in the set were my personal favourites "Stay Don't Go," "Rhythm and Soul," "Monsieur Valentine," and "Don't Make Me A Target," and "The Ghost of You Lingers," complete with an epic, crashing-drum finale. Hell, they even played "Everything Hits At Once," a rare but excellent number from their underrated 2001 LP Girls Can Tell.

At the top of the screen, I've embedded a video of the stellar "Black Like Me" from the show. The sound isn't all there, but you can still feel the excitement exuding from the band, not to mention the crowd. And, in case you never got around to hearing Girls Can Tell, you can listen to "Everything Hits At Once" just below. Note the way the drums roll so easily into the groove.



What a stunner:

Nobody Gets Me But You
The Way We Get By
Got Nuffin
The Beast and Dragon, Adored
Me and the Bean
The Ghost of You Lingers
Stay Don't Go
Rhythm & Soul
Everything Hits At Once
Trouble Comes Running
Written In Reverse
I Could See the Dude
Don't Make Me A Target
They Never Got You
I Summon You
Who Makes Your Money
Don't You Evah
Small Stakes
My Mathematical Mind

Encore:
Black Like Me
Is Love Forever?
You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb
The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine
The Underdog

Introducing: Fang Island

So, there's this tracking/analytics website called Next Big Sound, and they offer a service for bands where they track every time a band is mentioned/linked to/shared/etc on the web and translate it into statistics so that the band can analyze where their internet presence is working and where it isn't.

Prefix reported earlier this week on the bands that experienced the biggest boom in popularity following this year's SXSW Festival, and the results are pretty interesting. Epic sad-sacks Antlers picked up a bunch of fans, which is nice, since their 2009 album Hospice went criminally unappreciated despite heaps of critical acclaim. Wu-Tang Clan member GZA also picked up a wad of fans, which is kind of weird, but so did a pretty great band called Phantogram, whose myspace is here, in case you'd care to take a listen.

Experiencing the biggest post-SXSW buzz, however, was a band by the name of Fang Island. The band's myspace claims they sound like "everyone high-fiving everyone," and I gotta say, it's pretty on the money. On their debut, self-titled album, the band stomps around energetically for half an hour, usually with the aid of sky-reaching group vocals and jerky, uptempo rhythms. Fang Island is fuzzed out, but they aren't hiding behind their production value - I think the sound quality here is really all the band could afford at the time. Some of the album comes across as just a little novel, but by and large, the band's energy and interlocking guitars are enough to entertain.

Fang Island are worth keeping an eye on, but they're nothing spectacular as of yet. Kudos to the hype machine this time around for showing a little restraint - I'm digging the band, but too much Fang Island would be overwhelming.

...Oh, you'd like to hear a song, would you? I'll do you one better: