A six-piece indie band from St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, Hey Rosetta! is renowned for their impressive live shows. The band’s music has evolved since they started out, when most of the songs were penned by vocalist Tim Baker while isolated in his bedroom. Today we see the result of the band’s experience on the road, and the music has blossomed as a result. With influences like Jeff Buckley and The Beatles, and with comparisons to some of today’s most successful indie bands, Hey Rosetta! is well on its way. In this video, http://www.WatchMojo.com speaks with the band about layering six instruments and personalities, and about their music as poetry.
For more information, click http://www.heyrosetta.com
Even though the band formed in 1998, it was really their 2005 release, ‘Live It Out,’ that pushed this Canadian indie-rock group into everyone’s consciousness. Their follow-up, ‘Fantasies,’ released in 2009, managed to only set the bar higher for this four-piece. In this video, http://www.WatchMojo.com speaks with Emily Haines, and James Shaw from the band to discuss their latest effort, and what guidelines they followed when recording the album. We were also enlightened with some of their personal fantasies.
Here is the new video to ‘Funeral Singers,’ the single from Califone’s critically acclaimed album All My Friends Are Funeral Singers (Dead Oceans). The album acts as a companion to Califone frontman Tim Rutili’s first feature film that he wrote and directed, also called All My Friends Are Funeral Singers. The highly anticipated film (starring cult indie actress Angela Bettis of Girl, Interrupted fame) is expected to screen at several film festivals early next year.
The music video for ‘Funeral Singers’ features footage from the film.
califone - funeral singers from Califone on Vimeo.
Critically-acclaimed indie-rock band Califone has confirmed additional tour dates that will take the band down the West Coast this December, including stops in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, among others. Their latest release All My Friends Are Funeral Singers is receiving widespread praise since its October 6 release on Dead Oceans. The New York Times declares it “a song collection at once tuneful, evasive and bittersweet,” and The Sunday Times calls it “Califone’s most accessible yet.”
All My Friends Are Funeral Singers is the companion piece to a feature-length film of the same name written and directed by Califone frontman Tim Rutili. In select cities on the upcoming tour the band will incorporate a full-length presentation of the film into the shows, performing a live, interactive soundtrack to the movie. See below for details.
The Chicago-based band consists of multi-instrumentalists Tim Rutili, Jim Becker, Joe Adamik, and Ben Masseralla. On All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, the band employs a wide range of instrumentation and electronic effects to create a dense collage of sounds. Instruments range from the traditional (guitar, violin, banjo, percussion) to the unusual (optigan, stylophone, baritone ukulele, mbira, thumb piano). Longtime collaborator and producer Brian Deck (Iron & Wine, Gomez, Modest Mouse) says, “Califone have found a sound unlike anyone else, and are able to draw otherworldly sounds from very common instruments.”
Primary songwriter and vocalist Tim Rutili’s artistic endeavors stretch beyond music and include the creation of surreal short documentaries, music video and film scores. He makes his directorial debut with All My Friends Are Funeral Singers. The screenplay for the film, also written by Rutili, draws on the same themes and inspirations as the album, and many of the songs were written at the same time and contain the same images and characters. The movie centers around a fortune teller named Zel (played by respected cult actress Angela Bettis) who lives in an old house crowded with ghosts, including a priest, a bride, a mute child, some washed up vaudvillians and a noisy, sight-impaired group of musicians (Califone), among others. The film will be submitted to film festivals in early 2010.
Tour Dates:
December 3 Husky Union Seattle, WA*
December 4 Rickshaw Theater Vancouver, BC*
December 5 The Mission Theater Portland, OR*
December 7 Great American Music Hall San Francisco, CA*
December 9 Hammer Museum Los Angeles, CA*
* denotes a film performance
Usher protege Justin Bieber canceled a signing in Long Island, a riot ensued, a girl has been hospitalized… and worst off, according to Justin, one of his peeps has been detained by police, according to a Tweet he published following the event:
“The event at Roosevelt mall is cancelled. please go home. the police have already arrested one person from my camp. I don’t want anyone hurt.”
You can’t make up this stuff. If like many people you don’t know who Justin Bieber is (or what a Tweet is for a matter), catch our own Rebecca Brayton interviewing the teen sensation below:
Founded in Mississauga (it’s near Toronto), Ontario in the year 2001, illScarlett plays what they now call ‘pop-infused rock reggae.’ While this description is mostly a joke, that is basically the best way to describe their sound. With influences including Sublime, the band was broke when they played in the parking lot outside of Warped Tour in 2004, but founder Kevin Lyman heard them and invited them on Warped Tour the following year. In this video, http://www.WatchMojo.com sits down with the boys from illScarlett to learn more about the subjects they like to write about, and about a very messy video shoot.
For more information check out http://www.illscarlett.com
Christmas is around the corner, and what better way to start thinking about the holiday season than to watch a bizarro music video where Bob Dylan sings a hyper active version of the classic tune, “Must Be Santa”… I love this:
In this music interview http://www.WatchMojo.com gets the chance to sit down with Matt McGinley drummer of Gym Class Heroes to find out more about the band.
RJD2 fans rejoice. The producer/musician/singer extraordinaire has just released three deluxe reissues of his groundbreaking albums originally released on Definitive Jux Records. 2002’s Deadringer, 2003’s The Horror and 2004’s Since We Last Spoke, lauded as one of Spin Magazine’s Top 40 Albums of the Year, are now all in stores with two previously unreleased bonus tracks per album.
All three reissues are streaming in full at AOL Spinner through the end of the week.
This year has marked a turning point in the innovative producer’s 10 year career. After scoring the theme to the hit AMC show, “Mad Men,” and starting his own label RJ’s Electrical Connections, RJ reissued 2001’s Your Face Or Your Kneecaps as well as a box set entitled RJD2 2002-2010 and announced that his first new LP in three years, The Colossus, will hit stores on January 19th, the same month RJ hits the road for a massive cross country tour.
And as if that’s not enough, he also decided that he’d spend his holiday season giving free gifts to all of his fans! On October 29th, RJ announced via his RJ’s Electrical Connections website that he’d be giving away free records, MP3s, and more each Monday until the release of The Colossus. Visit http://rjselectricalconnections.com/ for this week’s contest.
Listen to Deadringer, Since We Last Spoke & The Horror on AOL Spinner:
http://www.spinner.com/new-releases#/15
RJD2 on Tour
01/09 - Washington, DC - 9:30 Club
01/10 - Carrboro, NC - Cat’s Cradle
01/11 - Charlotte, NC - Visualite Theater
01/12 - Savannah, GA - Live Wire
01/13 - Orlando, FL - The Social
01/14 - Tampa, FL - Crowbar
01/15 - Tallahassee, FL - Club Downunder
01/16 - Atlanta, GA - Masquerade (Heavan Room)
01/17 - Birmingham, AL - Bottletree
01/18 - Chattanooga, TN - Rhythm and Brews
01/19 - Knoxville, TN - Valarium
01/20 - Asheville, NC - Orange Peel
01/21 - Charlottesville, VA - Jefferson Theatre
01/22 - Morgantown, WV - 123 Pleasant Street
01/05 - Columbus, OH - Sully’s Music Diner
02/06 - Newport, KY - Southgate House
02/07 - Louisville, KY - Headliners Music Hall
02/08 - Nashville, TN - Exit In
02/09 - Memphis, TN - Hi-Tone Cafe
02/10 - Oxford, MS - The Lyric Oxford
02/11 - New Orleans, LA - Tipitinas
02/12 - Baton Rouge, LA - Spanish Moon
02/13 - Austin, TX - Emos
02/14 - Denton, TX - Hailey’s
02/18 - Columbia, MO - The Blue Note
02/19 - Grinnell, IA - Grinnell College - Harris Center
02/20 - Urbana, IL - Canopy Club
More RJD2
Vagrant Records will release EELS’ eighth studio album End Times on January 19. EELS is the ever-changing project of singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mark Oliver Everett (aka E). End Times follows on the heels of EELS’ critically acclaimed 2009 release Hombre Lobo, hailed by Vanity Fair as “anti-anthems that get your dopamine pumping instead of your fist” and praised by Rolling Stone for its “muddy roadhouse rockers.” Largely self-recorded on an old four track tape machine in the basement of Everettt’s Los Angeles home, the “end times” he writes about isn’t “Mayan calendar conspiracy theory bullshit,” says Everett, but, “the state of the desperate times we live in. The bottom line-ness of it all.”
While Hombre Lobo was written from the point of view of a fictional character (namely, the Dog Faced Boy of EELS’ 2001 album Souljacker), End Times is purely real life as Everett sees it: a “divorce album” with a modern twist. He equates his personal loss with the world he lives in losing its integrity. This isn’t Everett’s first break-up record. His 1993 solo effort, Broken Toy Shop, chronicled the broken heart of a young man in his twenties. End Times focuses on the loss of a middle-aged man growing as an artist. The loss has more weight.
As for the timing of the release, “I felt guilty about the long gap between the last two albums so I’m making up for lost time,” Everett says. The longest gap between EELS albums (four years between the 2005 release Blinking Lights and Other Revelations and the 2009 Hombre Lobo) is being followed by the shortest (six months between Hombre Lobo and End Times).
During the four years prior to Hombre Lobo Everett embarked on a number of projects including his acclaimed book Things the Grandchildren Should Know and the BBC produced multiple-award winning Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives documentary film about Everett and his quantum physicist father, Hugh Everett III, which was broadcast on PBS’ Nova series in the fall of 2008. Everett says he’s now “back to my real job: making music full time.”
Check out the new track “Little Bird” from End Times :
PLAY
