Month: May 2022

After skipping last year’s Met Gala due to its COVID-19 vaccine protocols, Nicki Minaj made her return to the charity event last night. According to Mediaite, the “We Go Up” rapper wore an all-black gown designed by Burberry chief creative officer Riccardo Tisci with a leather baseball cap. However, despite the triumph of her return, it wasn’t without drama, as Nicki encountered and confronted a reporter who had apparently leaked what was supposed to have been a surprise for her fans.

Stopping halfway up the steps to the Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Nicki pointed out the offending journalist, saying, “Hey, you. Are you the man that leaked that I was gonna be here?” After confirming that he was the culprit, she growled, “About to come up to you and slap the sh*t out of you. Come here.” While she (apparently) didn’t follow through, the message came through loud and clear.

Nicki doesn’t play around with her planned surprises. When Coi Leray’s dad Benzino leaked that Nicki would appear on the younger rapper’s new single “Blick Blick,” she nearly pulled the plug on the whole collaboration, only relenting later. Given her playful rapport with her loyal fans, the Barbz, she doesn’t seem to want to deprive them of the full experience — surprises and all (she must hate Marvel spoilers!).

As for why she missed last year’s Met Gala, it’s probably better not to rehash that potentially embarrassing chapter. You never know, I might run into Nicki and be the next writer she threatens to beat up.

In early April, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a motion to hold Donald Trump in contempt of court for failing to turn over relevant documents in her civil investigation. James also requested a fine of $10,000 for every day that Trump failed to deliver the necessary materials, which a judge approved last week. The former president, as you can imagine (and please do take a second to imagine it in detail), is not loving it. On the heels of his legal team filing a motion to stop the fines, Trump ranted to Bloomberg about how he’s being treated so unfairly. No one has ever been treated this unfair before. It’s very, very mean.

“We have a judge that frankly has been unbelievably unfair,” Trump said on the phone Monday, one week after state court Judge Arthur Engoron ruled the former president violated a court order by missing a March 31 deadline to respond to the state’s demand for records.

“We’ve given millions and millions of pages and he says give more, give more, always give more,” Trump said.

As for Trump’s lawyers, they’re calling the fines “patently improper and impermissible by law” while also arguing that he doesn’t even have the personal records the state is looking for. According to his legal team’s filing to halt the fines, the former president “performed a diligent, thorough and comprehensive search for all of the documents and items called for in the subpoena and provided complete and accurate responses,” which totally sounds like Trump. “Diligent, thorough, and comprehensive” is practically his middle name.

(Via Bloomberg)

From Joyce Manor’s seminal 2011 self-titled debut to their last 2018 album Million Dollars To Kill Me, the California now-trio have been balancing their heavy, sharp-edged side with their more pop, buoyant side. Their genre is always up for debate; fans argue about whether the band fits into the emo or pop-punk, or just indie rock. They announced a new album 40 Oz. To Fresno last month and released the crashing “Gotta Let It Go,” which only furthered this confusion about their sound.

“Don’t Try,” their blazing new single out today, is a refreshing burst of off-kilter rock—whether it’s emo, pop-punk, or indie rock. It’s just an undeniable jam. The riffs are eerie and enticing; Barry Johnson’s vocals are used more as an instrument than ever before. It helps that the band recruited Tony Thaxton of Motion City Soundtrack for drums on this album, giving the songs an even harder kick. The track is shorter than two minutes, from an album that’s shorter than 18 minutes. As per usual, in a Guided By Voices kind of way, they don’t take up too much time or space.

Listen to Joyce Manor’s “Don’t Try” above.

40 Oz. To Fresno is out 6/10 via Epitaph Records. Pre-order it here.

Before he was an internationally famous rap star, Drake got his foot in the door of the entertainment industry as an actor. Well, it’s been a while since he’s pulled those skills out of his bag of tricks with his last non-music video credit coming in 2012 (a cameo in Anchorman 2 as “Soul Brother”). However, fans apparently nearly got to see him on the big screen as a superhero, if character designer Jared Krichevsky is to be believed.

Over the weekend, Krichevsky posted a mock-up of Drake as Justice League character Cyborg, which he says was a concept for a TV series about the half-man-half-machine former football star turned superhero. “They wanted to cast Drake at one point,” he explained.

It isn’t terribly surprising that the series concept fell through. After all, hundreds of shows are conceived and pitched without even making it to a pilot, let alone actually onto TV, and setting sights on such a big name to lead the show likely brought up all kinds of issues with budget and schedule. Again, Drake’s a huge music star who would have wanted to be properly compensated and most networks just aren’t shelling out that kind of dough for new shows — even ones with recognizable faces like his.

Besides, what with Drake recording new albums and feature verses for friends like Future, showing up at NBA Playoff games to heckle players, and participating in his own homegrown hoop league (not to mention touring), Drake doesn’t exactly have time for much world-saving. Still, somewhere out there in the multiverse, there’s a version of Drake blasting aliens with his sonic cannon alongside a Black Lightning played by Future and that’s a world I wouldn’t mind seeing.

If we could all open our Rock Band 101 textbooks to page 233, we will proceed with recounting the three steps to mounting a comeback for an embattled superstar act.

Step 1: Play a “secret,” “intimate” club show. This will make you look humble and “hungry again.” It will also compel the journalists in attendance write and/or tweet praise about how you have “reconnected with a lost sense of self.”

Step 2: Go on a media “forgiveness” tour. Implicitly acknowledge that your previous album wasn’t very good, an act of self-deprecation that will disarm the critics and make them open to the idea of loving you again. (You can also do this explicitly, but only if you have a sense of humor about it.)

Step 3: Give the people what they want. Put out an album that sounds like your older albums. Deflect accusations of pandering by insisting that “looking back is sometimes the only way forward” or “nostalgia is the newest form of innovation.” (It’s better if you put this sentiment in your words.)

In recent weeks, Arcade Fire have been following these steps with careful compliance. They performed a buzzy concert at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City. They were profiled by the New York Times under the Affleck-referencing headline, “How Arcade Fire Found The Way Back.” And on Friday they will release their sixth album, We, a severe course-correction from 2017’s pranksterish dance-rock misfire Everything Now that genuflects reverently in the direction of their first three (and most beloved) records. If you bailed on this band once they started aping ABBA while complaining about how these damn Gen-Yers won’t get off Instagram already, Arcade Fire wants you to know that your old fave has returned to their gloriously anthemic aughts-era prime.

When they previewed the album back in March with the lead single “The Lightning I,II,” the hype was awfully seductive. The most famous Arcade Fire songs unfold as a series of gear shifts, in which the instrumentation, choral voices, and sense of momentum are gradually amped up over the course of several minutes. (Or it can happen in just the opening 25 seconds of “Wake Up,” in which a droning guitar riff is soon accompanied by “We Will Rock You” drums, and then elevated by those stadium-cheer vocals.) When these gear shifts are done right, a Pavlovian feeling of exhilaration is impossible to avoid for the listener, like sitting in a car that goes from zero to 90 in 10 seconds before careening off of a bridge. “The Lightning I,II” suggested that Arcade Fire might still be masters of this primitive form of body-chemistry manipulation. In the song, a stately fanfare played on piano and acoustic guitar is lifted by a fluttery synth line. A mid-tempo drum part soon enters to add muscle. And then Win Butler says “one, two, three, four!” and suddenly the rhythm goes faster and faster and FASTER! When Butler sings “we can make it baby, if you don’t quit on me,” it’s as if he is singing to us (or We, in the parlance of our times), signaling a subliminal apology to prodigal fans.

We begins with Arcade Fire returning to this same bag of tricks. “Age Of Anxiety I” also opens with a stately fanfare that is lifted by a fluttery synth line. Somewhere in the middle, the rhythm starts to go faster and faster and FASTER! You know what Arcade Fire is doing to you, but your heart is beating faster anyway. It is thrilling, sure, but it’s also reflexive, the musical equivalent of a doctor tapping your knee to watch your leg move. It sets the tone for an album in which even the best moments are performed by rote and, therefore, feel kind of empty.

I was no fan of Everything Now, but I never doubted that Arcade Fire was following their muse down whatever daffy corridor it recklessly drifted. I could even admire Win Butler’s initial insistence on defending the record against its many critics. At the very least, nobody could accuse him of making a predictable Arcade Fire record. We, in comparison, sounds like a transparent bid to keep them from slipping irrevocably from arena-rock status. Which, perhaps, wouldn’t be a problem if they still had a tight grasp on how to write “classic” Arcade Fire songs. But while “The Lightning I,II” can pass as a suitable “Beautiful Day”-style reboot, the cloying “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)” evokes the dozens of forgettable semi-indie also-rans who scrambled to imitate the big twinkle of Funeral in the 2000s, only now Arcade Fire has Phillip Phillips’ed themselves.

The most confounding aspect of We is that, despite clocking in at a seemingly svelte seven songs and 40 minutes, it manages to be just as bloated as their other recent albums. This is not a leaner Arcade Fire record, it’s a smaller one, a snack-size bag of potato chips with the same fixed percentage of stale air. After the promising start of “Age Of Anxiety I” and the similarly surging “Age Of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole),” the record grinds to a halt with the interminable nine-minute dirge “End Of The Empire I-IV.” On this song the gears fail to move one iota, settling instead on an endless piano ballad about the collapse of the modern world that sounds like the product of mixing way too much weed with way too many listens of Norman Fucking Rockwell and Pure Comedy. (Father John Misty was enlisted as a consultant during the making of We.) Though no lyric manages to be as cringe-y as the part in “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)” when Butler sings, “Some people want the rock without the roll / but we all know there’s no God without soul.” Actually, scratch that: The most wince-inducing moment has to be from “Unconditional II (Race And Religion),” when Regine Chassagne trills the chorus contained within that parenthetical over a musical retread of “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”

As was the case with Everything Now, the worst parts of We will make you question whether Funeral, Neon Bible or The Suburbs really are as good as you remember. And yet, at the same time, I find myself weirdly appreciating the overreaches more than the songs that squarely push my buttons. After all, overreaching isn’t a bug with Arcade Fire, it’s a feature. Unapologetic earnestness is their brand, and fearlessly ignoring the possibility of embarrassment has resulted in most (if not all) of their best music. There’s no shame in failure when you’re in pursuit of greatness.

What I find less charming is how resigned to replicating faded glories the rest of We is. That triumphant joie de vivre in which The Killers reveled on their 2020 comeback Imploding The Mirage is conspicuously absent here. Instead, the vibe is “a lesser retread of our greatest hits.” Is it coincidence that Will Butler, once the most energetic member of Arcade Fire on stage, departed shortly after this album was announced? Was it already apparent that the pursuit of greatness has been replaced by competent fan service? Yes, Arcade Fire finally gave us what we want. But at what cost?

Phoebe Bridgers reportedly had a major life change recently, as there are rumors floating around that she and actor Paul Mescal are engaged. On top of that, for at least a little while, some Bridgers were convinced she debuted another big adjustment at the Met Gala yesterday: a shaved head.

Early in the evening, before professional red carpet photos started showing up online, some lower-resolution snaps of Bridgers (screenshots from a live video, it appears) made it look like her hair was substantially shorter than fans are used to. The most-cited example seems to be a photo shared by journalist Ilana Kaplan. This led to some conversation on Twitter, with a number of fans convinced of, or at least wondering about, Bridgers’ apparent shaved head.

However, the speculation was short-lived, as other photos and videos from the event (including the Vogue interview below) show clearly that Bridgers just had her hair tightly pulled back into a small bun. In that Vogue video, Bridgers speaks about how she was managing to not freak out at her first Met Gala, noting, “I’ve reached an adrenaline threshold.”

Meanwhile, some good news to emerge from the gala is that while Bridgers and Mescal didn’t walk the red carpet together, they met up later and saw a dog.

The first reviews for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness are rolling in, and there’s definitely a consistent theme coming through: Sam Raimi was the right man for the job. The famed Spider-Man director took over after the first Doctor Strange director, Scott Derrickson, exited the project. As several of the reviews have noted, Raimi has basically grafted together a multiverse-spanning adventure with the Evil Dead II, and it surprisingly works well.

While the there are some quibbles over the overwhelming Marvel-ness of it all, Multiverse of Madness is being roundly praised for finally pushing the MCU into new directions after the first few entries have barely hinted at a plan for Phase 4. You can check out what the critics are saying below:

Mike Ryan, Uproxx:

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the closest the MCU has ever come to a straight-up horror movie. And not in a scary way, but in a Sam Raimi hyper-visual style that mixes gore with comedy. Honestly, it’s kind of remarkable what Marvel let Raimi get away with.

Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly:

The director’s take on Doctor Strange (in theaters May 6) feels like many disparate and often deeply confusing things — comedy, camp horror, maternal drama, sustained fireball — but it is also not like any other Marvel movie that came before it. And 23 films into the franchise, that’s a wildly refreshing thing, even as the story careens off in more directions than the Kaiju-sized octo-beast who storms into an early scene.

Brian Truitt, USA Today:

While the Marvel-ness of “Madness” will make your head spin, Raimi’s signature style, penchant for the macabre and sense of humor oddly ground the film. Scenes that feel akin to his Tobey Maguire Spider-films of the early 2000s – and the zombies, demons, monsters and schlocky weirdness reminiscent of “Evil Dead” and “Drag Me to Hell” – almost seem nostalgic.

Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times:

Raimi’s sheer passion for his material can sometimes overwhelm the coherence of his storytelling, and his unfashionable sincerity doesn’t always mesh with the breezy quip-a-minute tone that is the Marvel enterprise’s preferred comic idiom. I mean those both as compliments. Some overly busy cross-cutting and a few flubbed punchlines are a small price to pay for a filmmaker with enough of a vision to make you briefly forget that you’re watching another assembly-line product.

Susana Polo, Polygon:

The real hero in Multiverse of Madness isn’t a person; it’s the visuals — particularly the way Raimi and his team depict mind-rending magical abilities, ones that obey no wands or Harry Potter-like pig-Latin incantations. Director Scott Derrickson leaned on shifting kaleidoscope worlds and Inception-esque landscapes for the original Doctor Strange. But once a single sequence nodding at that film’s fractal magic visuals is out of the way, Multiverse of Madness completes a full transformation into Sam Raimi’s House of Magical Spooks and Monsters.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety:

It’s a movie set in several universes at once, and it keeps shooting off into ever more insane dimensions of alternate reality. Its story doesn’t develop so much as it multiplies. In theory, this should multiply the fun, though that’s not necessarily the way it works out. “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness” is a ride, a head trip, a CGI horror jam, a what-is-reality Marvel brainteaser and, at moments, a bit of an ordeal.

David Ehrlich, IndieWire:

A violent, wacky, drag-me-to-several-different-hells at once funhouse of a film that makes good on the reckoning Chiwetel Ejiofor promised at the end of the original by cutting away the safety net that previous installments of the MCU have tried to pretend wasn’t there.

Charles Pulliam-Moore, The Verge:

Watching Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, you do get the distinct sense that you’re seeing the beginning of a new chapter for Stephen Strange and his associates, which is interesting given how listless the MCU has sometimes felt following the Infinity Saga. Clearly, Marvel’s already planning for a future that’s filled with even more of Strange’s brand of magic and far-flung characters you wouldn’t have dreamed of seeing in the MCU just a few years back.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness opens in theaters May 6.

UK indie rockers Porridge Radio, who were nominated for a 2020 Mercury Prize for their last album Every Bad, are known for songs that ache. This new single “End Of Last Year” opens with Dana Margolin speaking over a piano and spectral, surrounding sounds: “Do you remember when we all fell apart? / At the end of last year / I always break my own heart.” Though it’s powerful from the start, she still manages to build up the anguish and poignance of the song with more intense lines delivered with raw emotion.

The full album Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky, is sure to be an immersive, moving experience, and previous single “The Rip” proves that as well. The band will be bringing the album on the road with a just-announced North American tour in addition to already-announced UK and Europe dates.

Margolin said about the new track and video:

“‘End Of Last Year’ is a love song for my bandmates and for myself. It’s about not trusting my intuition, not trusting my body to heal itself, not trusting the people closest to me, but it is also an ode to all those people, and to difficult platonic love. It came out of a particularly painful period of communication breakdown and high pressure that hurt a lot, but ended in reconciliation and understanding.

The video is by my friend Maura Sappilo. I’ve been a fan of her work for a long time, and I wanted her to make the video for this song because whilst her work is playful and bright, she knows how to bring the dirty and painful and disgusting aspects of being a person and having relationships into her paintings. Her art is lyrical and sensual and painful and beautiful, and I love how she brought all that to this song.”

Watch the video for “End Of Last Year” above. Check out tour dates below.

05/20 — Manchester, UK @ Piccadilly Records
05/21 — Edinburgh, UK @ The Great Eastern
05/22 — Leeds, UK @ Crash Records
05/24 — London, UK @ Rough Trade East
05/25 — Brighton, UK @ Resident Music
05/26 — Bristol, UK @ Rough Trade Records
05/26-29 — Walton-on-trent, UK @ Bearded Theory’s Spring Gathering
05/27 — Totnes, UK @ Sea Change Festival
06/04 — Barcelona, ES @ Primavera Sound Weekend 1
06/08 — London, UK @ O2 Academy Brixton
06/11 — Hilvarenbeek, NE @ Best Kept Secret Festival
06/29 — Sat. Jul. 2 — Ydynia, PL @ Open’er Festival
07/08 — Soliera, IT @ Arti Vive
07/09 — Siena, IT @ LARS ROCK FEST
07/14-16 — Budapest, HU @ Reflektor Festival
07/15 — Stirling, UK @ Doune the Rabbit Hole Festival
07/22 — Southwold, UK @ Latitude Festival
07/23 — Macclesfield, UK @ Bluedot Festival
08/09 — Stockholm, SE @ Hus 7
08/11 — Oslo, NO @ Øyaestivalen
08/14 — Kiewit-Hasselt, BE @ HEAR HEARI
08/15 — Wubterthur, CH @ 47. Winterthurer Musikfestwochen
08/16-20 — Paredes de Coura, PT @ Paredes de Coura Festival
09/01-04 — Sixpenny Handley, UK @ End of the Road Festival
09/06 — San Diego, CA @ Casbah
09/07 — Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room
09/09 — San Francisco, CA @ Rickshaw Stop
09/12 — Portland, OR @ Doug Fir
09/13 — Seattle, WA @ Barboza
09/15 — Boise, ID @ Neurolux
09/16 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court
09/17 — Denver, CO @ Lost Lake
09/19 — Minneapolis, MN @ 7th Street Entry
09/20 — Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle
09/23 — New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom
09/24 — Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s
09/25 — Washington, DC @ DC9
09/27 — Atlanta, GA @ Earl
09/28 — Nashville, TN @ Basement East
09/30 — Dallas, TX @ Three Links
10/01 — Austin, TX @ Parish
10/15 — Digbeth, UK @ The Crossing Digbeth
10/20 — Sheffield, UK @ Southampton 1865
10/22 — Exeter, UK @ Exeter Phoenix Arts Centre
10/24 — Nottingham, UK @ Metronome
10/25 — Bristol, UK @ Trinity Centre
10/26 — Cambridge, UK @ Cambridge Junction
10/28 — Glasgow, UK @ Saint Luke’s
10/29 — Manchester, UL @ Manchester Academy 2
10/30 — Leeds, UK @ Leeds Irish Centre
11/01 — Hove, UK @ The Old Market
11/02 — Hove, UK @ The Old Market
11/03 — London, UL @ 02 Shepherds Bush Empire
11/11 — Amsterdam, NE @ Melkweg OZ
11/12 — Maastricht, NE @ Muziekgieterij
11/13 — Cologne, DE @ Club Volta
11/16 — Lyon, FR @ Le Sonic
11/17 — Milan, IT @ Biko
11/19 — Bologna, IT @ Covo Club
11/20 — Annecy, FR @ Le Brise Glace
11/22 — Barcelona, ES @ La 2 de Apolo
11/24 — Vigo, ES @ Radar Estudios
11/25 — Guimaraes, PT @ Centro Cultural Vila Flor (CCVF)
11/28 — Madrid, ES @ Independance Club
11/29 — San Sebastián, ES @ Dabadaba
12/01 — Bordeaux, FR @ Rock School Barbey
12/02 — La Rochelle, FR @ La Siréne
12/04 — Bruges, BE @ Cactus Club
12/05 — Luxembourg, LU @ Rotondes
12/07 — Zürich, CH @ Bogen F
12/08 — Munich, DE @ Kranhalle, Feierwerk
12/10 — Vienna, AT @ Flex
12/11 — Prague, CZ @ Café V Lese
12/12 — Berlin, DE @ Festsaal Kreuzberg
12/16 — Hamburg, DE @ Hafenklang
12/17 — Copenhagen, DK @ Lille Vega, VEGA

Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky is out 5/20 on Secretly Canadian. Pre-order it here.

Rootin’ tootin’ Lauren Boebert’s been absolutely thrilled over the prospect of Elon Musk bringing his “free speech absolutism” to Twitter. However, she’s singing an entirely different tune for the approximately 70% of Americans who aren’t in favor of the Supreme Court (as indicated in a leaked memo) standing poised to over turn abortion rights (as made possible by Roe V. Wade). And Boebert has shown herself to not pay much attention to the U.S. Constitution either, but that’s beside the point.

Rather, she’s all about simply wielding far-right rhetoric as a weapon while taking a swing at the Women’s March activists for daring to speak their minds. “If your response to the SCOTUS news is to dust off your stupid pink hat from 2016,” Boebert tweeted. “[A]nd go march to support infanticide, re-evaluate your entire life.”

Yep, that’s how she said “good morning” to Twitter.

Naturally, people were quick to fire back on several fronts, including how Boebert could very well be mobilizing her opponents, and it’s self-righteous (not to mention hypocritical) to champion “free speech” but tell pro-choice (and women’s healthcare) activists to shut up and not protest.

The “reevaluate your life” portion of Boebert’s tweet also received some comebacks:

And of course, Boebert botched the definition of “infanticide,” so that was fair game for Twitter, too.

The day is young, as is the week. Yep, Boebert will probably keep on tweeting.

On Monday night, Politico got a hold of a leaked draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito indicating that the Supreme Court is getting ready to overrule the momentous Roe v. Wade decision that gave women the legal right to safe abortions nationwide.

While the immediate reaction was, understandably, one of outrage. Opinions were written and spoken, and old speeches, tweets, and other quotes promising to never let such a thing happen—most notably from then-candidate, now-president Joe Biden:

The Daily Show, however, took a slightly lighter and more honest approach to the news and, in less than 20 words, perfectly skewered the hypocrisy of a group of nine people—most of whom have penises, two of them accused of sexual improprieties, and one of those two married to a woman who texted with Donald Trump’s chief of staff about overturning the 2020 presidential election—making the most private of health care decisions on behalf of nearly 170 million women across America.

While not everyone initially got the point the tweet was making, those who did appreciated the subtle slam on the Right to Privacy.

It should be noted again that the abortion ruling still isn’t official, but most experts expect is will be soon. Buckle up.

(Via The Daily Show)