Category: Music On TV, Film, Web

The Flaming Lips Return With A New Album, A Chocolate Heart, And An ‘Epic Playdate’

The Flaming Lips' new album, The Terror, is out now. (George Salisbury/Courtesy of the artist)
The Flaming Lips’ new album, The Terror, is out now. (George Salisbury/Courtesy of the artist)

If you were one of the millions to tune into the Super Bowl Sunday night, it’s likely you saw a musical performance that caught your eye. No no, not Beyonce’s halftime show (though, wow, that performance was pretty incredible, and I’d say, the best halftime show I’ve ever seen). No, I’m actually talking about The Flaming Lips, who pop up in a 60-second Super Bowl commercial for Hyundai, set to its brand new song, “Sun Blows Up Today,” a collaboration with pop duo Phantogram.

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The Knife Unveils Its Uncompromising ‘Full Of Fire’ Video

The Knife's Shaking The Habitual is out now.
The Knife’s Shaking The Habitual is out now.

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly seven years since The Knife’s last record, Silent Shout, but in the last few weeks the long-dormant Swedish electronic duo has shown some new signs of life. On April 9, The Knife is set to release a new album, Shaking The Habitual, a 98-minute-long double CD (and triple LP) that’s bound to make up for any lost time.

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Breaking Bad’s Superb Use Of Editing And Music In Montage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH-CWq6jVeo

Has there ever been a more perfectly used piece of music on a TV show montage? Maybe, but I’m struggling to think of one.

Sunday’s mid-season finale of Breaking Bad had a gorgeous montage, even for a show known for its gorgeous montages. This scene, which (mild spoilers ahead) serves as a culmination of the kind of success Bryan Cranston’s Walter White has been aspiring to ever since he decided to go into the meth business. The montage is always a bit of a cheat when it comes to displaying the passage of time in movies and television, but Breaking Bad effectively uses it here to push us forward into a new chapter. It would be one thing if they montaged over major drama, but this is peacetime and seemingly very little happens outside of the clockwork precision of cooking and selling meth.

This is about as happy an ending as this show is gonna get — showing the man making a boatload of money in an impossibly synchronized dance of cooking, handing off bags of money and embezzling it. You can see Walt’s increasing exasperation on his face, as he seemingly has made his business into a never-ending treadmill just to keep up with the unquenched demand for his product. This is his job now, a routine as wearying as his old chemistry teacher or car washer jobs.

I also love the coordinated fades and bleeds between shots in this, showing how everything, even people fit together. Truly a masterclass in editing.

This is not the final scene of the episode, there’s a few more scenes that set up Walt’s downfall, which will come next year. But still this series of shots is expertly edited, with the perfect song to back it up: Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crystal Blue Persuasion.”

Surely Vince Gilligan and the show’s producers have had this song in their back pocket for some time — I mean obviously Walt’s signature 99% pure product is bright blue. It must have been tempting to use the song earlier in the show’s run.

But you have to think that they had this scene (or one like it) in mind that they were saving it for. That takes a lot of restraint. Breaking Bad has always incorporated excellent needle-drop song picks, as well a great score from composer Dave Porter. But I’ve gotta say, it might not get any better than this iconic scene from one of the best shows on television.

Old Things That Are New To Me: ‘Save It For Later’

I recently watched the oddly nostalgic gross-out comedy Hot Tub Time Machine. The film stars John Cusack (and Clark Duke, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Lizzie Caplan, Chevy Chase) as he and his old pals travel back in time to the late 1980s via a ski resort hot tub. Yup. There they are their same old selves, trapped in their ’80s bodies, reliving a trip they took when life was still full of promise and not made terrible life choices. Antics ensue, as expected.

Also as you might expect, the film employs an array of classic and cliched period hits of the 1980s: the hair, the legwarmers, the jackets, the big hair. But also the music. A lot of it was expected, but buried beneath some of that was this song:

The song is “Save It For Later,” by a band called The Beat, or here in the U.S. were better known as The English Beat. I had never heard of them, nor heard this song. But I sorta fell in love with that very typically British sound: the brightly strummed guitars, the XTC-esque singing, the great chorus. So yeah, who knew that a weird buddy comedy would be a place to discover an ’80s band I probably should’ve known about. Go figure.

Fiona Apple Returns And Continues To Surprise

It’s been seven years since we last heard new music from the elusive and enigmatic Fiona Apple. Now with her latest, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than The Driver Of The Screw, And Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, that wait is over. And I’m glad to say that Apple continues to surprise with a record full of excellent songwriting and excellent percussion sounds from drummer and co-producer Charley Drayton.

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Old Things That Are New To Me: ‘O Superman’

We all come to music differently, but it never ceases to amaze me when I discover an artist from an unlikely source. I had been hearing this voice in a television commercial for weeks before I finally decided to check it out. It was just a tiny snippet of a song in some smart phone commercial in frequent rotation during baseball games played on MLB.tv — and if you’ve ever watched live sports on the web, you tend to notice they play the same spots over and over. It has a way of getting inside your head.

That voice was hauntingly cold, filtered through a vocoder, and the robotically looped “ha”‘s sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

Finally I pulled out my phone, fired up the ol Shazam app, expecting to discover it was a brand new synth pop band, who licensed its music for this ad. Maybe it was The Books. Or maybe it was a new song from Imogen Heap, the singer best known for employing a similar vocoder sound on her hit “Hide and Seek.”

Instead, it was an old song: Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman (For Massenet),” a minimalist half-sung, half-spoken word 8-minute single from her 1981 record Big Science.

Needless to say, it was a jolt: Here was this groundbreaking, but not-so-user friendly 30-year-old piece of electronic music — based on the aria “Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père” (O Sovereign, O Judge, O Father) from Jules Massenet’s 1885 opera Le Cid — that felt so vibrant and completely of this time. There’s something almost subversive about the ad’s use of this song, especially as the lyrics philosophize about our relationships to technology and on the nature of communication.

It’s a little embarrassing to admit I didn’t know the song, nor Laurie Anderson’s music much at all. I’ve read about her in passing when reading about other artists from the same time, but her exploratory and idiosyncratic music always seemed so daunting. Like so many experimental or challenging artists, it can hard to know where to start, and easy to put off diving in. And yet, here I was connecting to this artist through a phone commercial no less. Still, thanks to that advertisement, I felt encouraged to start addressing a blind spot. That’s sometimes all you can ask for from a commercial.

Bruce Springsteen, ‘We Take Care Of Our Own’

In case there was ever a) confusion about what Bruce is singing or singing about; or b) a desire to see him jam out on rooftops and in what looks to be an abandoned industrial meat freezer, Bruce Springsteen has released a video (annotated with lyrics) for his single “We Take Care Of Our Own.” As a call to arms for the United States to band together and help out the unemployed and the homeless, it was easy to envision this song becoming a big time campaign song for Obama’s re-election efforts — it’s this year’s “The Rising.” Sure enough, this anthem is part of the just-released Obama 2012 playlist. The song will be on Springsteen’s upcoming record Wrecking Ball. It will predictably have some rockers and some wistful ballads about forgotten towns in the Rust Belt.

Ryan Adams + Laura Marling, ‘Oh My Sweet Carolina’

This is from a season four episode of Live From Abbey Road. Ryan Adams is a frustratingly inconsistant artist, but “Oh My Sweet Carolina” is still one of his best songs from Heartbreaker, an album that will likely forever be the high watermark that — rightfully or not — he’ll have his new music compared to. Oh, and Laura Marling’s harmonies are pretty great too.