Throughout the week, we update our Best New Songs playlist with the new releases that caught our attention the most, be it a single leading up to the release of an album or a newly unveiled deep cut. And each Monday, we round up the best new songs released over the past week (the eligibility period begins on Monday and ends Sunday night) in this segment.
Compared to last week, there weren’t that many new bops to dance along to, but Carly Rae Jepsen came in and graced us with a euphoric quarantine tune that has excited for whatever she has in store for us in the future. On the other end of the musical spectrum, both established post-punk outfits Metz and newcomers TV Priest delivered bracing, fiery songs that pierce right through your brain, while Angel Olsen unveiled another stunning stripped-back track from her upcoming album. Echoing a similar kind of intimacy, Lomelda offered up the beautiful, shimmering ‘Hannah Sun’, the final preview from her upcoming record Hannah, while Tomberlin returned with an Alex G-assisted new tune that’s both subtle and playful. Finally, Open Mike Eagle announced his forthcoming album with a contemplative, vulnerable new track, while Father John Misty came through with not one but two piano ballads, one of which is just a tad bit more elegant and evocative than the other.
Justin Townes Earle, the Nashville singer-songwriter and son of country legend Steve Earle, has died at the age of 38. A representative confirmed the news last night on social media, writing: “It is with tremendous sadness that we inform you of the passing of our son, husband, father and friend Justin. So many of you have relied on his music and lyrics over the years and we hope that his music will continue to guide you on your journeys. You will be missed dearly Justin.” No cause of death has been disclosed.
Named after his father’s friend Townes Van Zandt, Justin Townes Earle was born in South Nashville, Tennessee in 1982. His father having left his mother when he was just two years old, Justin grew up spending much of his childhood without seeing him. “One thing that needs to be made clear is that people always say, ‘What’s it like growing up with Steve Earle,’ and I don’t fucking know,” Justin said in a 2009 interview. “You have just as good of an idea of what it’s like growing up with Steve Earle as I do. I grew up with Carol-Ann Earle.”
The singer-songwriter returned to live with his father after he got sober and immersed himself in Nashville’s music scene, playing in bands including The Distributors and The Swindlers. He briefly toured with his father’s band, The Dukes, but was ultimately fired due to his own struggles with drug addiction. His solo recording career began in 2007 with his debut EP Yuma; he released eight albums throughout his lifetime, his most recent one being last year’s The Saint Of Lost Causes.
The social media post also included these lyrics from Earle’s 2014 track, ‘Looking for a Place to Land’, from his record Absent Fathers: “I’ve crossed oceans / Fought freezing rain and blowing sand / I’ve crossed lines and roads and wondering rivers / Just looking for a place to land.”
Below, read tributes to the late singer-songwriter from Jason Isbel, Samantha Crain, Steven King, and more.
Had a lot of good times and made a lot of good music with JTE. So sad for his family tonight.
My friend, Justin Townes Earle, has passed away. Such a tremendous songwriter…he took me on 2 tours and always treated me so kindly….he understood struggle, he understood joy…I saw him at the peaks and valleys of both through the 13 years I knew him…we will miss you JT ❤ pic.twitter.com/rq74Qu3Hif
I am beyond heartbroken. You were my muse, my friend, and my brother. I will always remember your kindness. Your songs will live forever. You can rest easy now. #justinTownesEarlepic.twitter.com/E9vKDlQSWh
On what would have been Kobe Bryant’s 42nd birthday, Nike has shared a tribute video narrated by Kendrick Lamar. Watch the inspirational ad, titled ‘Better: Mamba Forever’, below.
“Kobe taught us to be better,” the rapper begins, followed by clips of Bryant in action. “Better dreamer. Better waker. Better stretcher. Better walker. Better talker. Better walking the walk and talking the talk.”
“Better leader. Better generation. Better nation. Just be better. Can you do that?” he continues.
Kobe Bryant died January 26 in a helicopter crash, along with his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna. Multiple artists have paid tribute to the late icon since his death, including Kanye West, Frank Ocean, Drake, Cardi B, Flea, and others. Earlier this year, Lil Wayne performed his 2009 single ‘Kobe Bryant’ in honour of the late NBA legend during the 2020 BET Awards.
In 2017, K. Dot and Bryant sat down for a talk in an interview with Complex. That same year, the rapper released his most recent studio album, DAMN., followed by the Black Panther soundtrack a year later.
Luxury fashion brand Louis Vitton has shared a recording of Ms. Lauryn Hill‘s livestream set, which she performed as part of its Spring-Summer 2021 menswear show. Accompanied by a full band, it included performances of her most recent single ‘Guarding the Gates’ as well as her 1998 hit ‘Doo Wop (That Thing)’. Check it out below.
Directed by Naima Ramos-Chapman, the 20-minute set was filmed in late July at MLH Studio in New Jersey. The set was then projected onto a shipping container during the fashion show, which took place in Shanghai earlier this month, marking one of the first fashion shows since restrictions were put in place due to COVID-19. “Ms. Lauryn Hill is, to me, forever a muse,” Louis Vuitton Men’s artistic director, Virgil Abloh, wrote in the video’s description.
Earlier this year, Hill was featured on Teyana Taylor’s ‘We Got Love’, from her third full-length LP The Album. She released ‘Guarding the Gates’ last year.
Survival Skills, Quinn Armstrong’s feature debut and an expansion of his 2017 short of the same name, is a jet-black satire of American law enforcement and an affecting rumination on society’s response to domestic violence that is presented with a unique aesthetic. Our Culture reviews the film here as part of its selection for the 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Framed as an instructional video for police cadets entering the fictional Middletown Police Department – which exists to serve the equally fictional town of Ronald Reagan’s dreams, an Americana dreamscape that belongs to 1950s sitcoms and is, as our narrator (Stacy Keach) tells us, “89% white” – Survival Skills follows rookie cop Jim Williams (Vayu O’Donnell) during his first year on the job. Jim is conjured into existence via outmoded movie magic, is given a doting girlfriend (Tyra Colar) and a brightly decorated suburban home, and then sent out to work. But his rose-tinted glasses begin to slip when he is called to a domestic violence incident at the home of Lauren Jenning (Madeline Anderson), her daughter Leah (Emily Chisholm) and her violent husband Mark (Bradford Farwell), and he begins to see the world for what it really is.
Survival Skills employs a truly innovative formal system through which to communicate its narrative and themes; much of the film is designed to look like a lost VHS tape from decades ago, a shamelessly propagandist instructional video complete with early-1990s CGI, rampant tape hiss and the kind of cringe-worthy narrator common to corporate training materials everywhere. It is admirable that this aesthetic never feels like a gimmick; it is used for a specific and very clever purpose, satirising the false public image that any given police department would like to project – one that attempts to hide any number of systemic and deeply troubling issues that have long been endemic to American law enforcement.
Stacy Keach’s narrator.
In fact, the film generates much of its black, farcical comedy from the narrator’s attempts to (both figuratively and literally) control the narrative as Jim begins to develop free will and the whole thing veers off-course. And even once Keach’s narrator has lost all power and the rookie cop has started to dictate what we see and hear, it is interesting that scenes of violence are still hidden by heavy glitching and distortion, the film hinting at the side of American policing – and even American culture – that the establishment doesn’t want you to see.
Similarly to a film like Pleasantville (1998), then, Survival Skills borrows an outdated aesthetic to indict outdated values. In the second and third acts, hilarious retro cheese gradually gives way to the disturbingly surreal as Armstrong reflects on the ways in which America routinely fails to achieve justice for the most vulnerable (here represented by Lauren and Leah as they try to escape the abusive Mark). So this is a film that has not a shred of sympathy for the police as a unit, and utter contempt for the system individual cops represent. However, it clearly does ask us to identify with just one officer: Jim.
And sympathising with Jim isn’t difficult; O’Donnell gives a purposely wooden performance (Jim is often called “RoboCop” by those around him) to create a picture of a man who has been brainwashed into perceiving the world as a battle between the forces of good and evil, and his slow realisation that justice does not always prevail is genuinely heart-breaking. However, it must be said that it feels odd to sit down with a film that asks us to side with a police officer in 2020, given the charged debates that are currently raging around police brutality and accountability – and our alignment with him becomes genuinely uncomfortable at a point in the narrative when he chooses to take the law into his own hands, an action that threatens to undermine the film’s message.
But Survival Skills is based upon a 2017 short, which itself was inspired by Armstrong’s own experience of working in domestic violence shelters. While it has plenty of comments to make on the police, then, it is not a direct product of our current cultural moment and its primary concern is with drawing attention to a far more specific issue: America’s systematic failure of women. It undoubtedly succeeds in doing that – even if some elements of its narrative feel poorly timed – and does so in a genuinely inventive way.
In this series, we take a deep dive into a significant song from the past and get to the heart of what makes it so great. Today, we revisit AC/DC’s ‘Hells Bells’, a tribute to the late Bon Scott that’s also one of the most ambitious songs the band have ever penned.
Picture this: the year is 1980, one of the biggest rock n’ roll bands in the world have tragically lost their lead singer, and just a few months later, you’re holding their new record, boldly titled Back in Black. Instead of the straightforward, no-frills riff you might have expected the record to open with, you’re treated with the slow, funereal sound of a church bell. It doesn’t take long to realize exactly where you are. It was only a year ago that the Australian rockers had released their commercial breakthrough, Highway to Hell, so it makes sense that their newest one would transport you right into the fiery pits of hell. But where ‘Highway to Hell’ immediately comes off like it’s all just in devilishly good fun, ‘Hells Bells’ sounds ominous and foreboding. Add to that the fact that the guy AC/DC have decided to replace Bon Scott with, Brian Johnson of the British glam band Geordie, was spitting out lines like “You’re only young, but you’re gonna die”, and you might feel a bit alarmed.
Except, not really. Sure, it takes a full one-and-a-half minute for guitarist Angus Young and company to break into their familiar, mid-tempo guitar rock schtick. And yes, there’s something grim and perhaps even menacing about opening your new record with a song sung from the perspective of Satan ready to take you to hell right after the beloved singer of your band has died. (Later on the record comes a song called ‘Have a Drink on Me’ that’s about exactly what the title implies, which seems harmless until you remember that Bon Scott died after a night of heavy drinking – the police ruled it “death by misadventure.”) But it’s also oddly fitting, a band making a statement simply by continuing to do what they do best: kicking ass. And whatever subtext you might want to attach to it, it becomes no less true that the band have once again managed to make eternal damnation sound like a hell lot of fun.
Still, it’d be unfair to dismiss just how ingenious of a move it was to include that church bell. For one thing, it was not an easy sound to reproduce: engineer Tony Platt was tasked with recording the 2000–pound bronze bell, manufactured by John Taylor Bellfounders in the Leicestershire town of Loughborough and ordered by AC/DC for their next tour; but when he arrived in the town, the bell hadn’t come out of the mould yet. Attempts at recording another bell from a nearby church were unsuccessful; in Platt’s own words, “the first thing we’d hear was this mad fluttering of wings as pigeons flew away” (I, for one, would love to hear that version of the recording.) So that idea was thrown at the window, and Platt had no choice but to go back to the studio and record the custom-made bell as soon as it was ready. As Platt recalls: “The bell itself weighed one ton because that was the largest feasible size to take on tour, but the pitch of the bell as you hear it on the record is an octave lower than the actual bell; it was slowed down to half–speed to replicate the sound of a two–ton bell that would have been impossible for the band to take on the road with them or to hang in the venues.”
Platt talks more about the technical details of capturing that sound here, but in short, it was an arduous process, though one that definitely paid off. Not only was it mournful enough to honour Bon Scott’s memory, but it also introduced an element of theatricality to the band’s subsequent live shows and became an essential part of their iconography – one that was replaced only a year later by the iconic cannon that came with ‘For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)’. But where the use of the cannon was more or less the product of coincidence, the church bell was imbued with at least some symbolic significance. Not only did act as a necessary sonic transition from Highway to Hell to Back in Black, but it also added a kind of dramatic weight to the track, especially coming from a band mindlessly devoted to the classic rock n’ roll formula. Sure, AC/DC were no strangers to an epic build-up; they would go on to master the technique with ‘For Those About the Rock’, and a decade later, ‘Thunderstruck’. But there’s something elegiac and perhaps even subtle about the way Angus’ guitar melody creeps into the mix, a quality that’s somewhat lost in the group’s sped-up live performances of the track (though the massive crowd’s phantom-like singalong normally makes up for it, especially during this 2009 show).
The dramatic shift indicated by the song’s intro is accompanied by a narrative one in the form of Brian Johnson’s lyrics, which seem to be in direct conversation with Bon Scott in ‘Highway to Hell’. “Hey, Satan, paid my dues/ Playing in a rocking band,” Scott sang on that track, and now Brian Johnson answers back: “I got my bell, I’m gonna take you to hell/ I’m gonna get you, Satan get you!” he howls, reaching into a register high enough to satisfy the demands of any AC/DC fan. But Johnson delivers his lines with a sort of wink, proving that the band still have a good amount of humour in them: “If you’re into evil, you’re a friend of mine,” he sneers, displaying a kind of playfulness that’s amplified in his later live performances (he stopped touring with the band in 2016 due to ongoing hearing difficulties.)
Adding even more heft to the track’s somber atmosphere are the multiple allusions to catastrophic weather phenomena of all kinds. As Johnson tells it, he was having difficulty writing the lyrics for the song until a tropical storm began – which he of course interpreted as a sign from Scott. As he recalled in an interview with Classic Rock: “Mutt said, ‘Listen, thunder!’ And I said, ‘That’s rolling thunder, that’s what they call it in England.’ He says, ‘Rolling thunder, write that down.’ And this is true, it went ‘Boom!’ The fucking rain came down in torrents, you couldn’t hear yourself … I was gone. The song was ready that night. I hadn’t even heard the track ‘cause they were busy doing it. It was whacked down in the greatest haste.” Johnson might humorously insist that he was just “literally giving a weather report!”, but he was also introducing himself as a force of nature to be reckoned with, and thus, worthy of his new gig as the singer of a band who literally used a high voltage symbol in their logo.
Needless to say, it worked: not only was Johnson immediately accepted by the band’s legions of fans, but he – along with his oversized flat cap – is also considered to be an integral part of the band’s legacy. But with a lot of rock n’ roll classics seemingly losing their relevance in a contemporary context, perhaps the real question isn’t so much whether it worked at the time, but whether ‘Hells Bells’ and the album as a whole still hold up after all these years.
I’ll admit that were it not for the 40th anniversary of Black in Black, I would have practically no reason to revisit the album or its opening track. It’s not so much because of the general lack of substance or repetitiveness that’s often associated with the band’s songwriting, but more so the fact that the music just doesn’t resonate with me in the same way. It also reminds of a time in my life when music was little more than a marker of ‘cool’: when I was as young as 10 or 12, I distinctly remember our music teacher asking us to bring a song to play at the end of class, and practically every boy chose a song by AC/DC (I was a fan, too, but thought I was edgier for having picked Three Days Grace, so joke’s on me). Whatever you think of the band’s music, there’s something unique about the way it’s managed to stand the test of time, even if it’s precisely because of how rudimentary and uncomplicated it can be. Just like Angus Young can still pull off that schoolboy uniform in his 60s, teenagers will continue to listen to AC/DC, because the qualities that render their music enjoyable will always stay the same. “Rock ‘n’ roll ain’t no riddle man,” Johnson declares later on the album.
There are a lot things to criticize AC/DC for – as The Observer’s Kitty Empire put it, Back in Black is “built on casual sexism, eye-rolling double entendres, a highly questionable attitude to sexual consent […] and a crass celebration of the unthinking macho hedonism that killed the band’s original singer.” She also named it her favourite album – like manycriticsreappraising the album decades later, she acknowledges just how much of a triumph the record was without ignoring some of its problematic lyrics, which are perhaps the only thing keeping it from not feeling dated. But ‘Hells Bells’ shares virtually none of these faults. Only a group like AC/DC could turn death into the butt of the joke while also respectfully paying tribute to their recently deceased frontman, a comeback most bands would probably need years – not mere months – to perfect. There was little doubt that AC/DC would keep on doing their thing and doing it well, but the opening seconds of ‘Hells Bells’ feel like a brief acceptance of the real darkness in the world, one whose echo persists long after that church bell is replaced by Angus Young’s killer riffs.
The Killers celebrated the release of their new album, Imploding the Mirage, with a performance of the track ‘Blowback’ on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Check it out below.
Originally scheduled for release back in May, Imploding the Mirage arrived this Friday (August 20) via Island. Following 2017’s Wonderful Wonderful, the record was co-produced by Shawn Everett and Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado and recorded in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Park City, Utah. It features guest appearances from the likes of Lindsey Buckingham, Weyes Blood, The War On Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, Blake Mills, and more.
Previously, the band performed early singles from the album in their own bathroom and recording studio, but on their latest performance, they played on an actual concert stage – albeit without an audience.
A rare Ella Fitzgerald live album is getting its first ever release. Recorded at Berlin’s Sportpalast in 1962, The Lost Berlin Tapes comes out October 2 via Verve. Below, you can hear one of the recordings, ‘Mack the Knife’, alongside an animated video, and scroll down for the album’s tracklist and cover artwork.
The concert took place just two years after Fitzgerald’s seminal release, Ella in Berlin: Mack the Knife, and sees the jazz singer performing alongside a trio consisting of pianist Paul Smith, bassist Wilfred Middlebrooks, and drummer Stan Levey. A recording of the concert was discovered unopened within the private collection of Norman Granz, Verve Records founder and Fitzgerald’s longtime manager, who regularly recorded her concerts.
The Lost Berlin Tapes will be available to purchase on vinyl, CD, and digitally. Pre-orders are ongoing.
The Lost Berlin Tapes Cover Artwork:
The Lost Berlin Tapes Tracklist:
1. Cheek To Cheek
2. He’s My Kind Of Boy
3. Cry Me A River
4. I Won’t Dance
5. Someone To Watch Over Me
6. Jersey Bounce
7. Angel Eyes
8. Clap Hands, Here Come Charlie
9. Taking A Chance On Love
10. C’est Magnifique
11. Good Morning Heartache
12. Hallelujah, I Love Him So
13. Hallelujah, I Love Him So (Reprise)
14. Summertime
15. Mr. Paganini
16. Mack The Knife
17. Wee Baby Blues
Former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Jack Sherman has died at the age of 64. The band confirmed the news in a statement posted on social media, writing: “We of the RHCP family would like to wish Jack Sherman smooth sailing into the worlds beyond, for he has passed. Jack played on our debut album as well as our first tour of the USA. He was a unique dude and we thank him for all times good, bad and in between. Peace on the boogie platform.” No cause of death has been disclosed.
Sherman joined the alternative rock group in 1983, replacing founding member Hillel Slovak. He played on the band’s self-titled debut album and first US tour, and co-wrote a large part of their 1985 follow-up, Freaky Styley. Though he left when Slovak rejoined the group shortly after quitting his other band, What Is This?, Sherman went on to contribute backing vocals to their 1989 LP Mother’s Milk, including on the popular cover of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Higher Ground’ as well as ‘Good Time Boys’.
In 2012, when the Red Hot Chili Peppers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside the likes of Faces/Small Faces, Guns N’ Roses and Beastie Boys, neither Sherman nor Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro were invited to attend the band’s induction. Though the Hall of Fame stated that this was because they weren’t eligible for induction due to only being part of the band for a short amount of time, Sherman criticised the members of the band, telling Billboard: “It’s a politically correct way of omitting Dave Navarro and I for whatever reasons they have – that are probably the band’s and not the Hall [of Fame]. It’s really painful to see all this celebrating going on, and be excluded.”
Despite his difficult time in the band, he believed he “soldiered on under arduous conditions to try to make the thing work – that’s what you do in a job. That’s being dishonoured. I’m being dishonoured, and it sucks.”
Later in his career, Sherman’s credits included Bob Dylan’s 1986 album Knocked Out Loaded as well as collaborations with the Undertones’ Feargal Sharkey, singer-songwriter Peter Case, George Clinton, Tonio K, and more.
A magical-realist genre mash-up that draws on influences from The Most Dangerous Game (1932) to Wolf Creek (2005) via I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and The Company of Wolves (1984), French/Belgian co-production Hunted is the new horror feature from Persepolis (2007) co-director Vincent Paronnaud, which pits a new-age Red Riding Hood against a personification of the Big Bad Wolf in an isolated forest. Our Culture reviews the film here for its selection as part of the 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Éve (Lucie Debay) is a French woman working in Belgium. One night, tired of climbing the walls in her hotel room, she decides to hit a bar – where she is promptly harassed by a sleazy pick-up artist. She is rescued by a charismatic American stranger (Arieh Warthalter) who claims to be on a mission to cheer up his brother (Ciaran O’Brien). But her saviour is not who he says he is. He is, in fact, a deeply misogynistic rapist and murderer, and his ‘brother’ is his reluctant accomplice. They intend to make Éve their next victim, but a twist of fate allows her to escape their clutches and run deep into dense woodland. As she tries to make her way back to civilisation, a hunt begins. But there is something very old swirling about the trees, and nature itself will play a part in the tale.
While its basic premise is recognisable from the decades of revenge cinema that have preceded it, Hunted immediately declares an intention to do something innovative by introducing fantasy elements into a narrative otherwise told with a horrific realism. Its cold open sees a mother (Simone Milsdochter) sitting around a campfire with her son (Vladimir Ryelandt) in the woods where much of the film’s action will later take place. There, she regales him with a folktale set during the Crusades, in which a young woman is saved from a group of predatory men by a valiant pack of wolves. This story informs everything that we will see throughout the rest of the film, as Paronnaud comes toblur very real patriarchal violence with fairytale logic.
Éve, as played by Lucie Debay.
Driven by admirable central performances from Debay and Warthalter, Hunted is a celebration of one woman’s refusal to become a victim that slowly transitions from a grounded nightmare into a fantastical tale of bloody retribution. Its fantasy elements are subtly on display even early in the narrative; for example, the film is littered with beautiful, otherworldly images of prey animals (including wild hogs, deer, rabbits and birds), while costume designer Catherine Marchand has dressed Éve in a red-hooded coat, her aggressor in shades of lupine grey and black. But it is only in the film’s final act that Joachim Phillipe’s cinematography truly takes a turn into the realms of fantasy and the woods seem to come alive.
To acknowledge the film’s fairytale leanings is not to say, of course, that itshies away from horror. While never exploitative, it contains some utterly brutal violence and is at times deeply uncomfortable to watch. Hunted‘s villain is perhaps the most despicable killer since Wolf Creek‘s Mick Taylor: a personification of toxic masculinity who manipulates, abuses and tortures men, women and – as subtly suggested only by the sound of a baby crying on a video recording of one of his crimes – even children. He is the embodiment of patriarchy, a man who believes that everyone and anyone is his to use and abuse. Warthalter’s performance is at once captivating and repelling in a way that recalls Benoît Poelvoorde’s chilling turn in what remains Belgium’s most infamous horror film: Man Bites Dog (1992).
Hunted is, essentially, a story that has been told many times before, in which a woman – tortured and brutalised – exacts her righteous vengeance against heartless tormentors. In fact, it was only a few years ago that another French horror film, Revenge (2017), took the festival circuit by storm as it reclaimed the rape and revenge formula at the beginning of the Me Too era. What makes Hunted equally special, though, is that it recognises that this is a tale as old as time. As it weaves elements of folktales and fairy stories into its own narrative, it astutely reflects on the fact that women are not just suffering patriarchal abuse in our current moment but have been continually suffering it for many hundreds, even thousands of years – and asks just when, exactly, that suffering will stop.
