Kanye West – Saint Pablo

Hours before The Life of Pablo hits streaming surfaces worldwide, a track from Kanye West’s next album, Turbo Grafx 16, has surfaced online. Kanye first premiered “Saint Pablo”, fka “Closest Thing to Einstein”, during a DJ set in Los Angeles last month. Tonight, the studio version, which features vocals from Sampha, hit the web.

“Saint Pablo” addresses recent events, including his backstage meltdown at SNL and Twitter feuds with Wiz Khalifa and Bob Ezrin.  As you might expect, Kanye embraces the drama head on, rapping, “The media said it was outlandish spendin’/ The media said he’s way out of control,” adding, “I just feel like I’m the only one pretendin’/ I’m not out of control, I’m just not in their control/ I know I’m the most influential/ That TIME cover was just confirmation/ This generation’s closest thing to Einstein/ So don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

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Former WU LYF member Ellery Roberts has been making music as LUH (Lost Under Heaven) for a couple of years now alongside Ebony Hoorn, but the project is just now picking up momentum. Roberts dropped the Haxan Cloak-produced 12″ “I&I” shortly after signing with Mute Records, so it seemed an offering with some more meat to it was in the works. It turns out that inkling was correct as LUH will release the full-length Spiritual Songs For Lovers To Sing later this spring. Today, he shares the one-off “Beneath The Concrete” with a strobing visual loop.

The song is a monstrous unification anthem, with big, triumphant horns and drums and huge, hard-beating drums right from the jump. Roberts scratchy vocals soar over it all as he sings “All we are is people trying/ All we are is people trying to live/ Trying to live a life that means something/ Trying to live a life that means something more.” Each section of the song feels like it’s own moment either building or maintaining a hardly containable drama before a cinematic outro provides a slight reprieve before the close.

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Frightened Rabbit – Lump Street

We heard Frightened Rabbit make that kind of emotional impact on early offerings “Death Dream” and “Get Out”. The Scottish outfit do the same on this week’s “Lump Street”, a lushly arranged number

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CLEVELAND, Ohio – Kid Cudi appears to be back to his old self.

The Cleveland native released a new song on Friday and it marks a return to form after Cudi’s very strange alt-rock album, “Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven,” released late last year.

“The Frequency,” produced by Mike Dean and Plain Pat, is a space-rock rap anthem that finds Cudi in “Man on the Moon” form. The track could be a foreshadowing of what’s to come with Cudi’s long anticipated “Man on the Moon III,” which may or may not drop before the end of the year.

Listen to “The Frequency,” which is reminiscent of Kanye West’s “The Life of Pablo,”

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As a huge fan of Daughter and more recently of Dahlia Sleeps, it is simply not possible to me not to love Wildes‘ debut single Bare. The voice, the guitar strumming, the vibe: everything reminds me of Elena Tonra’s creature at its best. But please, don’t think about this brand new project simply as a mere copycat. Writing a song like this one, so honest & raw & sensitive, requires a lot of talent and even more courage, because your life and the emotions you feel suddenly become available to anyone gifted with a gentle heart. Wildes is Ella Walker, a 19-year-old singer/songwriter based in London, and Bare is out now through Hometown Records.

Read the rest of this article at Going Solo

PJ Harvey: a Singular Talent, she Dances to her Own Tune

If there were any rules about what makes a genuine rock god, then Polly Jean Harvey has torpedoed most of them by now, and probably has the rest in her sights. Petite, ebony-browed, unswervingly avant-garde, she is a powerhouse. Yet PJ, as she has been known to her fans for 25 years, remains a decidedly unlikely rock proposition: a one-woman band from Dorset.

True, she has played and written for three decades now with John Parish, the musician she hooked up with in her first band, Automatic Dlamini. And true, for the past eight years or so she has worked closely with the photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy. But the fact remains that PJ Harvey, mistress of a bewildering array of instruments – from guitar and saxophone to violin, autoharp, harmonica and drums – is artistically accountable only to herself. She can take pretty much all the credit – or the blame.

“She is one of those very few musicians who strikes me as a pure artist,” said Mike Smith, vice-president of A&R at Virgin EMI. “She is someone who gets up in the morning and wants to do something groundbreaking. They are the musicians you mark your life by.”

Read the rest of the story at The Guardian

400 Million Streams Later, Kanye West’s ‘Pablo’ Gets a Wider Release

What makes a successful album in 2016? A No. 1 debut on the Billboard chart? Steady play across streaming services? A hit radio single or a viral music video?

For more than six weeks, Kanye West’s “The Life of Pablo” (Def Jam) has managed to achieve a level of online and cultural ubiquity, despite having none of the above.

Instead, beginning on Feb. 14, a first draft of this still-shifting album was made available as a stream exclusively on Tidal, Jay Z’s relatively small music service, of which Mr. West is a part owner. (A short-lived paid download option malfunctioned before being removed.)

The music and method got fans and industry watchers listening and talking. But even in this age of big data, the project — which Mr. West has called “a living breathing changing creative expression #contemporaryart” and vowed “will never be for sale” — did not have its popularity ranked or tallied at all in an official, public capacity.

Now, however, as Mr. West begins to loosen his grip on the music, releasing a traditional single (“Famous”) to radio this week and, starting on Friday, selling the album as a download and sharing it with competing streaming services, Tidal is pulling back the curtain on his experiment: Songs from “The Life of Pablo” were streamed 400 million times, globally, through Monday, according to data provided to The New York Times by the company. Of those streams, Tidal said 250 million came in the first 10 days.

Read the rest of the story at The New York Times

‘The Dude’: Remembering Quincy Jones’ Most Important Album Ever

Legendary music producer Quincy Jones recently was blessed by two landmark events. First, there were the festivities earmarking his 83^rd birthday on March 14 and then, weeks later on March 26, Jones commemorated the 35^th anniversary of the most successful, poignant, and critically acclaimed yet slightly controversial solo record he has made throughout his incredibly extensive career.

All these years later, the quality of repertoire, performance and production on Jones’ 1981 album, The Dude (released under A&M Records) has indeed stood the test of time. Once called “a quiet storm masterpiece,” there were others at the time who dismissed The Dude as nothing more than a slick, commercial set of tunes that only incited a yearning for Jones’ previous work.

While those earlier albums were soul chart hits, anyone who knows the full body of his canon understands that Jones can be unpredictable especially once he gets in the studio. “Quincy has a way of shedding his musical skin every seven years,” says friend and former employee Ed Eckstine. “In terms of artists he’s working with and music he’s working on he is constantly changing.”

Read the rest of the story at Ebony