The Weeknd – Starboy (ft. Daft Punk)
The Weeknd has been very busy. He’s found the time to announce a new album, get a fall haircut, and, as of Wednesday, release a new single from said album. “Starboy” is the title track off Abel Tesfaye’s upcoming release; The Weeknd announced the title and cover art for Starboy on Twitter earlier today. The album will drop on November 25, but until then you can listen to the Weeknd’s latest single — which features Daft Punk!
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Leonard Cohen – You Want It Darker
Thanks to a seemingly endless series of cover versions, Leonard Cohen’s iconic song “Hallelujah” has, in the popular imagination, been transformed into a standard-bearer of schmaltz—a capable backdrop to any television melodrama as it kills off a character. (Cohen even agreed that film and television producers should stop using the track.) “Hallelujah” has been sung by choral groups, too, including one led by Rufus Wainwright.
But from the opening seconds of “You Want It Darker,” the title track of his forthcoming album, the synagogue choir that animates Cohen’s new single seems to know that this tune won’t be turned into a heavenly petition quite so easily. The bass groove that accompanies the world-weary chanting is too brisk to be mistaken for a profound elegy. Cohen’s wizened voice and sharp lyrics aren’t in the business of uplift, either. The narrator’s gaze at mortality here is a welcoming one: “I’m ready, my Lord.” Why is he so eager to leave this mortal coil? Perhaps because the narrator’s past engagements with the world (and with the divine) have been so dispiriting.
A mordantly witty line like, “I struggled with some demons/ They were middle class and tame” shuts off the avenue of “woe-is-me” whining. A portion of an early stanza sounds like the testimony of a divine agent who’s done taking orders from above: “Magnified, sanctified/ Be thy holy name/ Vilified, crucified/ In the human frame/ A million candles burning/ For the help that never came.” The singer’s considered judgment is that if things seem dark, the local governing authority must want them that way. In other words: “If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game.”
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Dirty Projectors – Keep Your Name
The lo-fi “Keep Your Name” is a solo about detaching from another person, constructed atop a warped loop of Swing Lo’s “Impregnable Question.” “We don’t see eye to eye,” it chimes. That fragment aligns with the song’s central theme: that here, in this love, there is no longer room for compromise. Read literally, “Keep Your Name” uses the language of divorce, keeping one’s name as an indicator of estrangement or disunion. “What we imagined and what we became/ We’ll keep ‘em separate and you keep your name,” Longstreth croons. Things unfold in slow motion as his voice lags. The song forgoes the colorful baroque pop of Bitte Orca or the experimental chamber music ofSwing Lo Magellan for something far more animatronic, pitched down and glitchy.
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Tangerine Dream – ;-) (without glitch)
Tangerine Dream, the German electronic group that inspired the music of Stranger Things, have shared their own version of two of the score’s tracks, including the show’s opening theme.
The members of Survive, the group who composed the music for the overnight cult classic Netflix sci-fi series, have cited Tangerine Dream as a key influence for their work on Stranger Things. With the two covers, Tangerine Dream pay homage to the homage, tinkering with the tracks to showcase their own hypnotic, synth-driven style.
Although Tangerine Dream’s founder and longest serving member Edgar Froese died in January 2015, the group continues on a trio with keyboardists Thorsten Quaeschning and Ulrich Schnauss and violinist Hoshiko Yamane. In June, Tangerine Dream performed their first concert together since Froese’s death.
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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – ‘I Need You’
“I don’t believe in an interventionist god,” Nick Cave sang in the opening track of 1997’s The Boatman’s Call, “But I know, darling, that you do.” Until now, it was the starkest, saddest album of Cave’s career. On this song, “Into My Arms,” he employed the second person to counterbalance his own nihilistic tendencies, using another person as a conduit to a spirituality and purity he could not achieve himself. “Into My Arms” was a love song by an artist inherently skeptical of the form, praying to a God he didn’t necessarily believe in. But there was a palpable sense of faith in it, one that transcended Cave’s principles and logic and gave him peace. “I believe in love,” he sang firmly, “And I know you do, too.”
“I Need You” is the stirring core of the Bad Seeds’ devastating new album,Skeleton Tree. Here, Cave is at a loss for words. “Nothing really matters,” he repeats, leaning on the hard R of “matters,” as if to further pronounce the distinct lack of poetry in the phrase. The words bend and break the more he uses them; Cave continues saying more with less, the tenderness in his voice filling all the negative space. “Nothing really matters when the one you love is gone,” he sings at one point, honing in on the song’s gravitational pull: the void left when our love is no longer directed at a living thing but rather at a memory. Though just a moment later, Cave subverts that notion as well: “We love the ones we can/Because nothing really matters.”
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