Month: June 2021

Fans of the fictional Indiana town of Pawnee and its inhabitants received some unexpected but awesome news last month: Mouse Rat, the fictional Parks And Recreation band led by Chris Pratt’s Andy Dwyer, is releasing an album album, The Awesome Album. The initial announcement was accompanied by the release of “5,000 Candles In The Wind (Bye Bye Li’l Sebastian),” and now Mouse Rat has shared two other favorites: “The Pit” and “Two Birds Holding Hands.”

Mouse Rat manager April Ludgate Dwyer says of the new songs, “Shut up and stop asking me stuff or I’m going to murder you a thousand times.” Pawnee Journal reporter Shauna Newport also noted, “My favorite song on the new album is ‘The Pit’ because it brings back some special memories… of my reporting… at the pit.”

Aside from Mouse Rat, the album also features contributions from other characters from the series, including Duke Silver (the jazz-playing alter-ego of Nick Offerman’s Ron Swanson), Scott Tanner (a Pawnee musician portrayed by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy), and Tanner’s band Land Ho! (which famously reunited at the Pawnee-Eagleton Unity Concert).

Listen to “The Pit” and “Two Birds Holding Hands” above.

The Awesome Album is out 8/27 via Dualtone/Entertainment 720. Pre-order it here.

Ted Cruz is not great at movie references. He completely bungled the meaning of Watchmen while attempting to slam “rabid environmentalists” as the true supervillains. Yet he can’t help himself, even while quoting one of his very favorite movies, The Princess Bride, while engaging in a highly entertaining feud with Cary Elwes, who infamously portrayed Westley. Alas, Ted was crushed when the film’s cast reunited to raise dollars for Democrats, and he was undoubtedly not happy when Elwes declared himself to be a non-fan of Cruz.

“How does it feel to know that not only the entire cast and crew of your favorite movie The Princess Bride, but almost the whole entertainment industry, have nothing but rabid contempt for you?” Elwes previously tweeted at Cruz. “#inconceivable? I think not, you miserable ROUS.” Ouch. Well, given that Ted loves The Princess Bride, it’s no surprise that he also enjoys quoting a similarly-quotable franchise, that of Monty Python. He decided to tweet a GIF from The Holy Grail (the “run away” moment) while criticizing VP Kamala Harris “[o]n the border crisis.”

Yep, Cruz is still attempting to frame what’s happening at the border as as a “Biden crisis,” even though the Associated Press has instructed reporters to not use the word “crisis” to describe the situation. That hasn’t stopped Cruz from literally lurking in the bushes in his attempt at a dramatic video, and he appears to believe that Harris [who was put in charge (by Biden) of “lead[ing] our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle”] should be able to solve the U.S.-Mexico border situation overnight. Regardless of the issue’s complexity, everyone’s pouncing on Cruz over his silly method of quoting movies. And they’re throwing the “run away” thing back in his face, since he definitely ran away from Texas to Cancun during this year’s ice storm.

The comics world and hip-hop have crossed over numerous times in recent years, from Marvel Comics’ classic rap album-inspired cover series to books penned by or featuring rappers like Jean Grae, Rae Sremmurd, and more. This month, DC Comics will deepen the connection with the release of the Dark Nights: Death Metal Soundtrack album, conceived as a companion to the popular comic book crossover storyline “Death Metal.” Today, DC released the latest single by Florida thrash-rap pioneer Denzel Curry.

While the track may feel like a bit of a departure from some of the more traditional releases from Denzel, it’s in keeping with his well-noted appreciation for punk, thrash, and metal. Employing a characteristic low-register guitar riff and headbanging tempo, Denzel smashes metal and rap together for a hardcore experiment in kicking through the lines between genres. “I have this motto that I use in the studio, though, of ‘shoot first, ask questions later,’ so after a few convos we called up my homie Spencer from Trash Talk and made it happen,” he explained in a statement. “Some of you might love it and some might even hate it. For us, it was an experiment.”

Listen to “Bad Luck” above.

Dark Nights: Death Metal Soundtrack is out digitally on 6/18 on Loma Vista Recordings, with physical LPs out 7/16. You can pre-order them here.

In the lead up to Thor: Love and Thunder starting production, Chris Hemsworth showed off his workout routine and made it clear that the “Lebowski Thor” look from Avengers: Endgame is buried in the past. The actor already looked completely ripped for the Marvel film, but apparently, there was still more shredding to do and he kept on bulking up. As filming began, Hemsworth’s body double had to pull him aside and basically warn the actor that he was getting so jacked that his double was having trouble matching his muscles. “He’s the biggest though he’s ever been, so I have to be the biggest I’ve ever been, which is a challenge but I’m up for it,” Bobby Holland Hanton told the New Zealand Herald.

And, now, with Hemsworth’s latest photo commemorating Thor: Love and Thunder wrapping production, Hanton’s claim that the Thor star is the biggest he’s ever been is looking like the gospel truth. Just check out those arms.

Last week, Hemsworth shared a photo of himself taking his son for a walk, and lamenting that the boy wants to grow up to be Superman, and the actor’s arms looked ridiculously ripped. It was probably the most ripped those guns have ever been, and yet somehow, this latest pic is even more jacked. Is this why there’s a chicken shortage? Is Chris Hemsworth eating all the chickens to fuel his super swole arms? That might be something to look into.

(Via Chris Hemsworth on Instagram)

We are still in the early stages of coming out of a deeply strange and tragic period in modern world history. As we look ahead to the rest of 2021, there is hope that some sense of normalcy is about to settle in. In terms of music, new concert tours and festivals are being announced every single day. And that will potentially make the albums we’re listening to feel a little more permanent.

A common complaint you heard during the pandemic is that it made all forms of culture feel a little transitory. Films, TV shows, books, albums — they all seem to arrive one day and be gone the next. Given everything we’ve all had to deal with, it’s understandable that you might not remember music that was released last week, much less albums that came out earlier in 2021.

Hopefully this list of my favorite albums from the first half of the year will refresh your memory. Believe it or not, a lot of really good records have dropped so far in 2021. Here are 20 of them.

The Armed – Ultrapop

These hyperactive Detroit rockers specialize in merging combustible noise and frenetic rhythms with surprising bursts of bubblegum melody. Oh, and they’re also extremely ripped and sort of mysterious. On Ultrapop, they come on like a punk version of The Avengers, a highly enjoyable real-life comic book.

Julien Baker – Little Oblivions

The acclaimed singer-songwriter subtly expanded her spare, emotionally wrenching emo-folk sound on her third album. But while Little Oblivions is lusher than Baker’s previous releases, the confessional authenticity of her past work remains unvarnished. You’ll want a box of tissues to be handy before you press play.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney – Superwolves

You might recognize this indie-rock dynamic duo from their classic mid-aughts collaboration Superwolf. While their paths have only fitfully intersected since then, I always hoped that Matt Sweeney and Will Oldham would find reason to work together again. On Superwolves, they pick up pretty much where they left off, spinning mournful songs with a malevolent undertow.

Black Midi – Cavalcade

This buzzy British outfit emerged a few years back just in time keep the “lad guitar band” trend alive. Though you can’t really pigeon-hole Black Midi. The generic “post-punk” signifier doesn’t do them justice — on their second full-length Cavalcade, they play highly theatrical songs that draw on an idiosyncratic mix of prog, goth, funk, and classical influences.

Dry Cleaning – New Long Leg

There is no shortage right now of British post-punk bands that deploy talky vocals, clanging guitars, and loose-limbed rhythm sections. Dry Cleaning certainly fits that mold, and while they don’t always transcend the conventions of this genre on their debut New Long Leg, lead singer Florence Shaw does have a strikingly unique presence that ultimately sets them apart.

Floatie – Voyage Out

This Chicago band makes jumpy and rhythmically intense guitar jams that unfold in mesmerizing fashion. Their latest album Voyage Out could be broadly classified as math rock, but that shouldn’t intimidate anyone not conversant with algebraic time signatures. The casual complexity never comes at the expense of winning melodies.

The Hold Steady – Open Door Policy

You expect a certain kind of thing from Hold Steady, namely bar-band rock with regionally specific, funny-sad lyrics. But on Open Door Policy, they have evolved sonically, integrating the more layered production of Craig Finn’s solo records (steered by excellent indie producer of the moment Josh Kaufman) into their bedrock, rough-and-tumble sound.

Home Is Where – I Became Birds

This Florida emo band has released one of the year’s most bracing and ecstatic rock records. Singer-songwriter Brandon MacDonald has expressed admiration for Bob Dylan, but their turbulent and explosive tunes instantly evoke the intensely spiritual expressions of prime-era Neutral Milk Hotel. This is the kind of record where if you hear it between the ages of 13 and 17, it might change your life.

Japanese Breakfast – Jubilee

Michelle Zauner has already put out one of the year’s most warmly received and bestselling memoirs in her debut book Crying In H Mart. But she’s also killing it with her regular job in Japanese Breakfast. The band’s latest, Jubilee, is their best and biggest sounding album to date, evoking the grand scale of big-tent indie classics from the ’90s and ’00s

Manchester Orchestra – The Million Masks Of God

These emo veterans have matured a lot over the years, evolving from a volatile post-hardcore outfit on albums like 2009’s Mean Everything To Nothing to the expansive and philosophical indie rock of their latest, The Million Masks Of God. Along the way, they’ve managed to somehow grow their audience while retaining committed fans who connected with the early records as teenagers, including famous acolytes like Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker.

Mannequin Pussy – Perfect

This Philadelphia punk band’s progression on albums like 2019’s Patience recalls the leap that Nirvana made from Bleach to Nevermind — the sound is more muscular, and the songs are much sharper and more assured. You hear that evolution continue on their great EP Perfect, which distills their mix of melody and venom to, well, perfection.

Mdou Moctar – Afrique Victime

While these are hardly great times for guitar heroes, at least those of us who still enjoy a good shred can dig into desert rock from Africa. One of the most exciting stars of this scene is unquestionably Mdou Moctar, whose latest album, Afrique Victime, not only displays his thrilling, Hendrix-inspired technique, but also his sensitive and politically minded songwriting, which achieves a new peak here.

Jimmy Montague – Casual Use

Imagine if Jim O’Rourke had joined Wilco after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and together they decided to make a Chicago record. I think it would sound a lot like Casual Use, a loving homage to ’70s soft rock by recovering emo rocker James Palko, who’s a natural with arranging horns and strings over laidback but insistently sticky melodies.

Silver Synthetic – Silver Synthetic

I’m always on the lookout for some choogle — newbies are encouraged to learn about this mystical musical element by listening to this — especially now that the weather is getting warmer. Thank goodness for this band from New Orleans, one of the great American choogle meccas, who make chunky, feel-good jams with steady but chilled rhythms.

Spirit Of The Beehive – ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH

This experimental Philadelphia outfit creates highly unnerving soundscapes that set out to disquiet or possibly just annoy audiences. Is this punk? Industrial? Art-damaged synth-pop? A psy-op? Whatever else can be said of Spirit Of The Beehive’s latest effort, ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH, you can’t say it sounds like any other indie album released this year, or in any other year.

Sunburned Hand Of The Man – Pick A Day To Die

When the going gets tough, the tough get weird. And times this exceedingly weird call out for a band like Sunburned Hand Of The Man, the free rock collective that gratefully reassembled for their first album in a decade. If you wish the Grateful Dead sounded more like Can, this is the album for you.

The Reds, Pinks, and Purples – Uncommon Weather

This project spearheaded by San Francisco singer-songwriter Glenn Donaldson put out their album on Slumberland Records because they had to. Uncommon Weather is the most Slumberland album that ever Slumberlanded. It’s just the ticket for anyone whose heart starts to ache at the sound of jangly guitars, a shambolic rhythm section, and sweet sad-dude vocals.

Ryley Walker – Course In Fable

A die-hard fan of the English pop-prog band Genesis and a devout student of Chicago post-rock, this singer-songwriter has somehow merged these influences on his best album, stitching together multi-part songs heavy on wonky guitar solos and unexpected time signature changes. In the studio, he was assisted by John McEntire, a Chicago indie legend known for his work with Tortoise and The Sea And Cake. The result is one of 2021’s most unabashedly gorgeous and grand indie records.

Wild Pink – A Billion Little Lights

On previous Wild Pink albums, John Ross wrote sensitive story songs about millennial ennui set to surging synth-based rock, producing a rich, stirring sound. On the new A Billion Little Lights, Wild Pink integrates Americana instrumentation like pedal-steel guitar and fiddle into his usual heartland rock mix, producing an even more epic surge.

Yasmin Williams – Urban Driftwood

There is no shortage of instrumental guitar albums in the underground primitive scene, and while many of them are pleasant enough they rarely distinguish themselves from the pack. And then there’s Yasmin Williams, whose new Urban Driftwood is one of the best instrumental guitar records to come out lately. This record is like medicine for anxious souls.

SPECIAL BONUS SELECTION: Van Morrison – Latest Record Project, Volume 1

The year’s funniest trainwreck and a record I find myself weirdly compelled to revisit. It is not a great album. But it’s not nearly as bad as it could have been or perhaps should have been. And knowing myself and my sick habits, I expect to eventually talk myself into thinking it’s actually a subversive masterpiece. Stay tuned.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Back in February, Lil Uzi Vert did something that was unprecedented (or at least unusual): He had a $24 million pink diamond embedded in his forehead. At the time, he explained why he had the diamond shoved into his forehead instead of put on something like a ring, saying, “I’m Lil Uzi. I’m turnt up. So $24 million on a ring is the stupidest idea because I’m gonna look down and that ring ain’t gon’ be there. I know me. I wake up in odd places and different sceneries.”

Now, though, things have changed, and Uzi no longer has the diamond on his face. Over the weekend, the rapper was spotted in Miami without the diamond in his head, and DJ Akademiks also shared a recent video that shows Uzi sans face diamond.

Uzi has not addressed why he decided to have the diamond removed, although it did seem to cause him some health issues. He previously shared a photo of himself bleeding from the diamond and wrote, “If I don’t get it took out the right way I could die. No seriously.” After deleting that post, he shared a video of himself with the diamond in his forehead and wrote, “Ok we good.”

The name Karen has been all the rage over the past year—and by that we mean physical, angry rage. Though the name itself, which is Scandinavian in origin, has been an American standard for the better part of a century, it has been making headlines in recent months for all the wrong reasons. Specifically, it has become a kind of shorthand for what Nameberry describes as “a hostile white woman—one who usually wants to speak with the manager.” And apparently, fewer parents than ever want their kid to grow up to be that. Which is sort of good news?

As HuffPost reports:

“In 2020, Karen fell 171 spots on the popularity list to No. 831 (down from No. 660 in 2019). That decline makes Karen the name with the 14th-biggest decrease on the girls list in 2020 and marks its lowest ranking on the annual SSA list since the year 1927.”

Karen hasn’t been particularly fashionable for a while; its heyday was during the Baby Boom of the 1960s, where in 1965 alone nearly 33,000 bouncing baby Karens entered the world, ready to one day become fierce anti-vaxxers who would refuse to wear face masks during a future pandemic. By 2019, that number had dropped to a mere 439; in 2020, there were even fewer Karens—325 total, marking a decrease in popularity of more than 25 percent. Which is bad news for Karens, but great news for the manager of your local big box store.

(Via HuffPost)

John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place Part II dominated the box office over the holiday weekend, to the tune of a pandemic-era record $58.3 million, but another post-apocalyptic action-horror movie unexpectedly popped up in the top 10 too.

World War Z, starring Brad Pitt as a former-United Nations field agent who’s tasked with stopping a zombie pandemic, made $448,000 this weekend on 80 screens. That was good enough to push Mortal Kombat out of the top 10, although it still finished behind Godzilla vs. Kong ($1.06 million) and Dream Horse ($639,636), which has a 30 Rock-esque poster. Still, not bad for a movie that came out eight years ago.

And it made for a solid — if depressing — double feature with A Quiet Place Part II:

Attendance-wise, the figures for World War Z are not as easy to analyze since the movie was part of a double-feature with A Quiet Place Part II at eighty drive-in locations across the country. If we broke it down based on the average ticket price, that’d be about 38,000 people over three days (and 49,000 over four days), but we can’t assume that sort of breakdown with a double-feature price point, which typically offers two movies for the price of one and can vary tremendously among those eighty drive-ins.

It appears A Quiet Place Part II played before World War Z, in case people weren’t in the mood for a pandemic movie. I can’t imagine why.

(Via Film School Rejects)

A violent overthrow of the government is no laughing matter, but if there’s even an ounce of humor to be found in a disgraced former National Security Advisor telling an unhinged group of conspiracy theorists who actually believe that Donald Trump is their rightful leader that a coup is a pretty good idea, then swearing he didn’t say it, Jimmy Kimmel will find it. And on Tuesday night’s show, he did, telling the audience:

“Trump’s old pardon pal Michael Flynn, a man who admitted to lying to the FBI, who went to prison for it, appeared at what was essentially QAnon-Con this weekend. Where he quite plainly supported an idea from a man in the crowd who asked, ‘Why don’t we just overthrow the government?’ Keep in mind, the man on stage answering this question is a former general and National Security Advisor.”

After taking a moment to address the way the QAdude in question pronounced the name Myanmar, Kimmel went on to explain the situation in question—and paint a more detailed picture of what people were witnessing in the video taken of Flynn’s talk:

“Myanmar is a country in Southeast Asia. In February, the military seized control of the… country. They refused to accept the results of an election there so they organized a coup. Thousands of protestors have been imprisoned and hundreds have been killed and General Lie-senhower up there thinks we should do that here, too. Although after it was suggested that he be court-martialed for that remark, Flynn tried to walk it back.”

Flynn took to social media to actually claim that he did not say the very thing you just watched him say.

You can watch the full segment in the video above (it starts around the 4:05 mark).

Finally, concerts are returning and festival season is coming up. So, yesterday, SZA was rehearsing some songs, but when it came time to run through one of them, she had a hard time: On Twitter yesterday, SZA revealed that she cried after performing her Ctrl song “20 Something.”

SZA wrote in a pair of tweets, “Jus tried to get through 20 something at rehearsal n burst into tears LMAOOO what ? Is wrong w me ? 20 something makes me think of my granny . N everyone else I’ve lost . What a ride .”

It’s certainly one of the more vulnerable songs from SZA’s discography. On it, she sings about feelings of instability and uncertainty she was experiencing at the time: “How could it be? / 20 something, all alone still / Not a thing in my name / Ain’t got nothin’, runnin’ from love / Only know fear / That’s me, Ms. 20 Something / Ain’t got nothin’, runnin’ from love / Wish you were here, oh.”

Meanwhile, SZA is a couple months removed from the release of her Doja Cat collaboration “Kiss Me More,” which is a strong contender for the unofficial Song Of The Summer title. Also, as SZA tends to do from time to time, she shared her frustrations with her record label, a stance she later clarified.