St. Vincent followed up her 2017 Grammy Award winning album Masseduction earlier this month with Daddy’s Home, a highly referential effort that pulls from early ’70s music. All of the press materials associated with St. Vincent’s new LP are heavily influenced by the retro era, and her recent performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon is no different.
Drawing inspiration from ’70s television series, St. Vincent takes the stage to perform her groovy track “Down.” The musician wore a blonde bob wig, a staple of her Daddy’s Home aesthetic, and a beige trench coat with the word “Daddy” stitched in the lapel.
Along with the late-night performance, St. Vincent has unveiled dates to her two-month Daddy’s Home tour. It kicks off in early August in Maine and features a few appearances at festivals like Pitchfork and Austin City Limits before coming to an end with an October show in Detroit.
Watch St. Vincent perform “Down” on The Tonight Show above and see her Daddy’s Home 2021 tour dates below.
09/03 — Thompson’s Point @ Portland, ME
09/04 — Higher Ground @ Burlington, VT
09/07 — The Andrew J Brady ICON Music Center @ Cincinnati, OH
09/08 — Stage AE Indoor @ Pittsburgh, PA
09/10 — Egyptian Room @ Indianapolis, IN
09/11 — Pitchfork Festival @ Chicago, IL
09/14 — The Armory @ Minneapolis, MN
09/16 — Mission Ballroom @ Denver, CO
09/18 — SLC Twilight Series at Gallivan Center @ Salt Lake City, UT
09/19 — Life Is Beautiful @ Las Vegas, NV
09/22 — Vina Robles @ Paso Robles, CA
09/23 — The Greek Theatre @ Berkeley, CA
09/24 — Hollywood Bowl @ Los Angeles, CA
10/03 — ACL @ Austin, TX
10/05 — The Criterion @ Oklahoma City, OK
10/07 — Uptown Theater @ Kansas City, MO
10/08 — Pageant @ St. Louis, MO
10/09 — Ascend Amphitheater @ Nashville, TN
10/11 — The Met @ Philadelphia, PA
10/14 — Boch Center — Wang Theatre @ Boston, MA
10/15 — College Street Music Hall @ New Haven, CT
10/18 — Agora Theatre @ Cleveland, OH
10/20 — Fillmore @ Detroit, MI
Daddy’s Home is out now via Loma Vista. Get it here and revisit Uproxx’s review of the album here.
Some would argue that straight-to-streaming might be the new straight-to-DVD, and not everyone is happy about it. At least not when it comes to a movie like Batgirl, the upcoming superhero feature directed by Bad Boys for Life helmers Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (collectively known as Adil & Bilall). It was recently announced that the movie will forego a theatrical release and head straight to HBO Max, a decision that did not sit right with noted filmmaker/comic book enthusiast/‘Bennifer’ originator Kevin Smith. In the latest episode of his podcast Fatman Beyond, Smith made it clear that he thinks the decision to skip theaters is really, really stupid.
Speaking to his co-host Marc Bernadin, Smith took a moment to go off on an expletive-filled rant about the shortsightedness of this decision, saying:
“I have to call the mayor of Hollywood… What are you nuts! How is this just a streaming series and not a f***ing… Like, they got Wonder Woman. But I’m like, take Wonder, throw in Bat, take Woman off, put Girl, make the same amount of money. Like they could be printing big f*cking dollars. It’s a billion-dollar franchise if handled correctly. And you cast it right, oh sh*t… Look, there are wonderful streaming series. I’ll fight anybody who says Hacks isn’t one of the greatest f***ing series of all-time, now airing on HBO—and I’m not even a paid f***ing advocate. I’m just a big fan. But I would not have thought they would take Batgirl in this direction. Maybe a spinoff animated series sure, but that smells like a movie to me.”
Though he later cut his billion-dollar estimate in half, Smith righty described Batgirl—who made her first appearance 60 years ago, in a 1961 comic—as “one of the most iconic female superheroes from the DC universe.”
Then, in an attempt to paint Batgirl’s significance in terms that non-comic book lovers could understand, Smith suggested: “You cast Olivia Rodrigo as Batgirl, a billion-dollar franchise right there.”
Bernadin, however, had a different idea: “Billie Eilish as Batgirl makes you a billion dollars.”
Made In America, the music festival created by Jay-Z and Roc Nation, is returning in 2021 for a 10th-anniversary event this Labor Day weekend, September 4 and 5. The festival is returning to its usual venue at Benjamin Franklin Parkway, with a portion of proceeds going to support the ACLU of Pennsylvania and The REFORM Alliance.
In a statement, Jay-Z said, “We are thrilled to announce Made in America 2021 on the legendary Benjamin Franklin Parkway. This year will be like no other, as Made In America celebrates 10 years of music history-making moments. The artists’ performances will be even bigger and Cause Village will host a wider range of amazing philanthropic organizations. We look forward to sharing incredible memories with our festival attendees and the city of Philadelphia.”
While promoting Yearbook, his new collection of personal essays recounting his experiences in Hollywood, Seth Rogen was asked about Tom Cruise‘s possible reaction to appearing in the book during a Tuesday appearance on Good Morning Britain. In the essay on Cruise, Rogen recounts a 2006 meeting at the Mission: Impossible star’s houses where Cruise was frantically trying to downplay his increasingly erratic portrayal in the press after his infamous couch-jumping moment on Oprah.
However, in the process, Cruise also tried to pitch Rogen on Scientology, and that weird conversion attempt made it into Yearbook, which probably isn’t going over well with the Top Gun actor. Via The Independent:
“I imagine he’s not thrilled… who knows? I wouldn’t be happy if I was him and I wrote what I wrote about him in the book.”
According to the anecdote, Cruise attempted to blame the “pharmaceutical industry” for making him look bad and accused the media of conspiring against him because of Scientology. But if Rogen just gave him 20 minutes, he’d explain the whole religion to him: “it will blow your mind.” Fortunately, Judd Apatow was also in the room, and he saved Rogen from the conversion talk by pivoting the conversation back to movies.
Of course, Rogen probably isn’t sweating Cruise’s reaction. During the same appearance on Good Morning Britain, the prolific comedy actor and writer took a blunt stance on comedians complaining about cancel culture, and basically, told them to get over it. “If you’ve made a joke that’s aged terribly, accept it,” Rogen said while calling out his fellow comics who refuse to confront when they’ve said something “terrible.”
Last month, BTS and McDonald’s announced that they were teaming up for the new BTS Meal, which consists of 10 chicken McNuggets, a medium fry, Coca Cola, and sweet chili and cajun dipping sauces. Starting today, the meal is available in some countries (including the US), so to mark the occasion, BTS have appeared in a new ad for the meal. In it, they make their way through a fancy-looking McDonald’s and tell viewers about the meal.
McDonald’s US chief marketing officer Morgan Flatley talked about the meal in a new Rolling Stone feature, saying, “BTS are the definition of a global phenomenon. They have an incredibly passionate and loyal fanbase, which is a big reason why we decided to partner with them. Most importantly, BTS are true fans of McDonald’s. Each band member has their own memories with our brand going back years. […] We’ve seen incredible support from BTS’ fanbase with fans creating their own memes and positive content about the partnership in social media. I’ve even gained some new K-pop fan followers myself.”
Flatley also noted that the rollout of the BTS Meal was inspired by BTS themselves, saying, “We took inspiration from a K-pop song release — mimicking the build-up to a new single and engaged fans early and often. Between our April announcement and the BTS Meal hitting restaurants, we’ve had a steady rollout of content on social – posting the release schedule, concept photos of the band, and most recently teasing our upcoming merch collection. We’ve also incorporated subtle nods to the band on our social handles, like adding the superscript ‘7’ on Twitter, and we’ll be leaning heavily into the digital, behind-the-scenes content BTS fans look forward to with weekly drops exclusively available on the McDonald’s app.”
2019’s Escape Room was a surprise horror movie hit at the box office, earning $155 million worldwide on a $9 million budget. It was pretty fun, too, with a simple and enticing hook: “We solve the puzzles, or we die,” as one character says in the trailer for the sequel, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions. You can watch it above.
Directed by Adam Robitel, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions brings back two survivors from the first film and pairs them with four new contestants. The stakes are more dangerous in the sequel (someone literally says, “This is way bigger than last time”), including an electrified subway, lasers, quicksand, and a crashing plane. “What we’re going to realize is that on any given day, there are multiple games happening all around the world,” Robitel told CinemaBlend about Escape Room: Tournament of Champions. “They’ve all played the game before. It’s a meditation on trauma, and how people deal with trauma. But also, what they’ve learned through their first trial by fire.”
Here’s the official plot summary:
Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is the sequel to the box office hit psychological thriller that terrified audiences around the world. In this installment, six people unwittingly find themselves locked in another series of escape rooms, slowly uncovering what they have in common to survive… and discovering they’ve all played the game before.
Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, which stars Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Isabelle Fuhrman, Thomas Cocquerel, Holland Roden, Carlito Olivero, and Indya Moore, opens on July 16.
The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.
The streaming era has been great for giving listeners exactly what they want. But when it comes to music you might not want at first, the on-demand age hardly seems ideal. Songs that are difficult, inaccessible, or abrasive are so easy to avoid or click away from that the incentive to be challenging, innovative, and unapologetically original is practically nonexistent. At a time when boundless musical comfort food is at our fingertips, who wants to feast on barbed-wire salad?
I say this as a preface to what I mean as a sincere compliment: Black Midi is the rare rock band with a significant profile that is unafraid of irritating people.
When they stepped into the indie spotlight with their 2019 debut Schlagenheim —the title is a made-up word that immediately puts cautious listeners on blast — this British band set themselves apart with a thorny, elbows-out sound that drew from a compendium of music-geek influences, all of them willfully arduous: fusion-era Miles Davis, Discipline-era King Crimson, the Minutemen at their angriest and least melodic, and avant-garde classical composers like Bartok and Stravinsky. The band’s singer, Geordie Greep — if Black Midi didn’t already exist, Thomas Pynchon would’ve had to invent them — sang in an indescribable, inhuman yelp. (Here’s my attempt to describe it anyway: He sounds like a character in a Fassbinder film if that film happened to be populated with talking dolphins.)
Drawn from hours of improvisations, Schlagenheim throbbed with attention-grabbing instrumental intensity. But it wasn’t loaded with what you might call “bangers.” If Black Midi’s pop appeal was minimal before, however, it has completely evaporated on the new Cavalcade, which finds them doubling down on everything that might have seemed off-putting about the debut.
Take the opening track “John L.,” which was courageously (and hilariously) selected as the first single. When the song dropped in March, some listeners quickly likened it to the goofball funk-prog act Primus, which in 2021 indie-rock discourse (to put it mildly) is not typically considered a good thing. (Those of us who once housed copies of Sailing The Seas Of Cheese and Pork Soda inside a Case Logic CD case might argue otherwise, though perhaps not in public and certainly not sober.) But the fact is that only the first section of “John L.,” in which Black Midi pummels a furiously deranged punk-klezmer riff that sounds like a Tim and Eric bit gone awry, remotely resembles Primus. From there, Black Midi slips into a desolate ambient interlude before charging back to an intricate post-rock climax in which a math-y guitar lick performs curlicues over an obnoxiously sophisticated rhythm section.
One song into Cavalcade and it’s already exhausting. But Black Midi is just getting started on a record that proceeds to reference German cabaret, free jazz, Gilbert and Sullivan, Soft Machine, and (I doubt they would admit this but I swear it’s in there) at least two or three Mars Volta albums. If they announced that their primary influence for this record was the sound of your neighbor’s car alarm going off at 3 a.m., I would not be surprised.
But, again, I mean this as a compliment. I not only like this album, I admire it. This album cuts against the grain of a contemporary music culture that values above all else the sugar rush of instantly likable pop music. (And I’m not talking about some weak little butter knife here; this is a sonic machete.) I have no idea if Cavalcade will help or hurt Black Midi’s career, but I appreciate how they don’t seem to care either way.
The guys in Black Midi — Greep, bassist Cameron Picton, and powerhouse drummer Morgan Simpson — are all in their early 20s, but they’re already veterans of an English rock scene that includes Dry Cleaning, Squid, Shame, and Black Country, New Road. These bands are typically classified as post-punk, and they often have a culture commentary bent to their lyrics, in which deadpan singers dispassionately dissect the banalities of life under late-capitalism against clanging, muscular guitar riffs.
I like some of these bands more than others. The best of the lot is Dry Cleaning, whose 2021 debut New Long Leg is an early critical favorite due mostly to lead singer Florence Shaw’s compelling anti-charisma and deep supply of droll lyrical asides. I also enjoy moments on Squid’s uneven debut from earlier this year, Bright Green Field, which is generally funkier and more danceable than the rest of this field.
But even the strongest of these nü-post-punk acts feel slightly reheated, as the latest iteration of a revival that has already been revived several times in the past 40 years. At this point, I have to ask: Will bands like The Fall ever stop being a foundational influence for the newest generation of cool indie kids? A similar question could be posed to music critics, who still regard post-punk as a “progressive” (and therefore laudable) sound in indie music.
I exempt Black Midi from this conversation because in spite of their association with this scene, they don’t really sound anything like these other bands or post-punk in general. For one thing, Black Midi consciously avoids the de rigueur nü-post-punk themes of economic and spiritual burnout. Cavalcade exists at the opposite end of the spectrum from the workaday naturalism of a band like Dry Cleaning — the songs are highly theatrical about centered on larger-than-life characters both real (like the eponymous protagonist of “Marlene Dietrich”) and imagined. It’s a record that sounds almost nothing like the modern world, which of course is the point. Black Midi is its own world.
In terms of the music, Cavalcade finds Black Midi moving fully into prog. The meat of the album progresses like a suite, with one surly and uncompromising track somehow gliding more or less gracefully into the next. The band has said that Cavalcade was more composed and less reliant on improv than Schlagenheim, and that appears to have carried over to structuring each component piece into a cohesive album. The lurching groove of “Chrondromalacia Patella” shoots chunky, syncopated tentacles at the quieter and prettier “Slow,” which is spotlighted by a post-bop sax solo. And that blends into the spacey, ambient Americana of “Diamond Stuff,” which proceeds logically to the raging “Dethroned,” the closest Black Midi get to the aggressive guitar explosions of the first record.
This path leads to the best song on Cavalcade, the nine-minute closer “Ascending Forth,” in which Greep warbles a weird tale about an alienated and creatively blocked composer over gorgeous Selling England By The Pound guitars and more stupidly convoluted rhythms. By then, if you’ve given yourself over to Black Midi, you might find that what was initially alien or annoying now seems … kind of soothing actually. And then you’ll know you’ve been sucked into this strange, fascinating new world.
Cavalcade is out Friday via Rough Trade. Get it here.
While some Basketball Africa League players have expressed their discontent with J. Cole’s position in the newly formed league, Cole’s teammates on the Rwanda Patriots have a new reason to enjoy having him around. In a video shared to TikTok by basketball trainer Omar Khanani and reposted on TheShadeRoom, Cole gives his teammates boxes of new sneakers — presumably, his Puma RS-Dreamers — which they appreciatively try on.
The announcement that J. Cole would be playing professional hoops abroad sparked waves of excitement among his fans and brought plenty of eyes to the nascent league, a joint venture between the NBA and FIBA. However, Cole’s less-than-stellar debut — he scored three points in his first outing and just two in his most recent — prompted Morocco’s AS Sale star Terrell Stoglin, the team’s leading scorer and one of the top scorers in the league, to posit that Cole being there was “taking someone’s job.”
This is a pretty common sentiment among basketball players toward hoopers who underperform, so it’s not surprising to hear. However, Stoglin’s comments drew criticism from rapper Rick Ross, who admonished him in an Instagram video. “You should be there to support the brother,” he said. “If he made one point on the first game, by the time he get to the 10th, you should make sure he makin’ six a game.”
Check out the video of Cole supplying his teammates with new shoes above.
More details on Showtime’s Dexter revival are coming your way, non-lumberjack fans. And from the way that these tidbits are being received by fans, it’s pretty damn clear that this series is the most anticipated revival/reboot of recent times. No one’s saying, “Who wanted this?” That’s because every Dexter fan wants to see this show redeemed from that anticlimactic ending, and Dexter Morgan must get what he so deliciously deserves. The first chunk of fresh news here is actually a confirmation of what’s been reported already: Dexter’s got a new job at an establishment called Fred’s Fish & Game, which is situated near a gun shop, just to push the murderous theme home. The casting of Michael Cyril Creighton as “Fred Jr.,” the store owner’s son, solidified that report, and Showtime has now revealed Dexter’s new on-the-job name tag on Twitter.
Also, he’s got a homicide-hiding alias now: Jim Lindsay. Could this be a reference to Jeff Lindsay, the author of the Dexter novels? Seems feasible.
So, things are really coming together. Dexter’s got a new life, although he’ll never be able to suppress that urge to kill, as a teaser already revealed. From here, we can all keep running in speculative circles over what original characters might return. There’s been additional back and forth on that issue, although a fresh start indicates that it’s the right call to not start dragging Miami characters in the direction of upstate New York. Fingers are still crossed all over the place for Jennifer Carpenter’s Debra to live rent free in Dexter’s head, though, despite James Remar (who played Dexter’s dad in the O.G. cast) shutting that possibility down, at least outwardly. I’m not really buying that shut down when it comes to Debra, since Dexter could really use her presence in a Dark Passenger sort of way.
The Dexter revival will likely arrive in late 2021.
In celebration of the release of Sour, Olivia Rodrigo sent album-themed gift boxes to some famous folks. Among them was Kim Kardashian, who showed off the gifts only to get outed as a fake Rodrigo fan by her daughter North West.
As Kardashian shows off the goodies in an Instagram Story video from yesterday, she narrates from behind the camera, “How cute is Olivia Rodrigo, you guys? I can’t wait for her album. You guys know I love ‘Driver’s License.’” At this point, North chimes in, “You never listen to it.” With a laugh, Kardashian retorts, “Yes, I do! I listen to it all the time. Stop, North. Saint, don’t we listen to it in the car all the time?” After some prodding, Kardashian gets her other child to audibly agree.
Kim Kardashian shows off her ‘SOUR’ promo package from Olivia Rodrigo saying she listens to “drivers license” “all the time” only to be outed by her daughter North West:
There is certainly some evidence in this very video to support West’s claim that her mother isn’t the world’s biggest Rodrigo stan: Kardashian says she “can’t wait for her album,” but when the video was posted yesterday, Sour had already been released for a few days. As for Rodrigo’s reaction to West’s revelation, she didn’t seem too bothered by it, as she re-posted Kardashian’s video without any added comment.
Along with the Sour merch, the box included a handwritten note from Rodrigo that reads, “Kim, thank you so much for supporting my music! It means the absolute world. I just adore you & I wanted to give you a few goodies to celebrate the release of my 1st album SOUR. Sending you & ur fam so much love.”
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