We recently stumbled across an impressive trove of rock ‘n’ roll portraits by Ontario artist Laurie Masters over at Behance Network. Masters is apparently entirely self-taught and creates her portraits of celebrities from photographs – she was originally a musician, and as such it’s perhaps no surprise that her work focuses largely on musicians (PJ Harvey, M.I.A., the Arcade Fire), although her subject matter also encompasses a variety of other artists and actors. Endearingly, she also creates dolls of her subjects, some of which can be seen at her website (apparently Flight of the Conchords were particularly impressed by their stuffed likenesses). We’re not necessarily always fans of the whole painting-directly-from-photos idea, but Masters’ rock ‘n’ roll portraits are an interesting and ongoing project. We’ve collected some of our favorites after the jump.
We’re on a bit of a PJ Harvey kick at Flavorpill at the moment, and recently we’ve been investigating the work of one of her more fascinating collaborators – Irish photographer/filmmaker/polymath Seamus Murphy. Murphy has made a video for each song on Harvey’s new album Let England Shake, but is best known as a photographer – Harvey apparently discovered his work while researching the war in Afghanistan in the course of writing the record. You can certainly see why it affected her so deeply – Murphy’s work is visceral and hugely powerful, focusing largely on human conflict and privation, both military and psychological. His website collects photos from a huge number of battlefields and conflict zones all over the world, from the drug wars of Mexico and the ruins of Mogadishu to the ostensibly civilized surrounds of the Ascot racecourse in England, often working as photo essays that relate a story over the course of multiple images. See some of our favorites after the jump.
We were lucky enough to score tickets to PJ Harvey earlier this week at Terminal 5, and were rewarded with one of the best shows we’ve seen in ages. She played every track off her new album Let England Shake, and it got us thinking about how consistently excellent her career has been, save for a slight dip in the early 2000s. There have been plenty of artists who’ve had one or two good albums in them but found it ever more difficult to maintain that level of quality once the initial rush of ideas is gone. Artists who’ve been able to put out a string of great albums without intervening stinkers are few and far between –- so we’ve rounded up ten of our favorites. We’ve set our bar at four consecutive great albums, which rules out a surprisingly large number of artists -– it’s tough to turn out nothing but goodness over a number of years! Feel free to add your suggestions in our ever-accommodating comments section.
The best tattoos have a deeply personal meaning for the person whose body they adorn. So it makes sense that music fans would want to decorate their skin with lyrics to their best-loved songs — or the art from their favorite album. After the jump, we round up 20 fantastic tattoos inspired by equally wonderful album covers, from Bob Dylan and The Smiths to PJ Harvey and Kanye West.
A while back, we posted a selection of our favorite opening lines from literature -– everything from Albert Camus from Mark Twain. The whole thing stirred some healthy debate in the comments section (as did the follow-up post about closing lines), and we liked the idea so much that we thought we’d extend it to the world of music. So here’s a selection of our favorite opening lines of songs. As ever, feel free to add your own in the comments section!
The latest Thom Yorke side project — a joint effort with UK dubstep mystery man Burial and excellent producer Four Tet — is out this week, adding another entry to an extensive and eclectic list of collaborations. Indeed, it’s gotten harder and harder over the years to keep track of all the projects to which the Radiohead singer has contributed — so if you want to investigate his extra-curricular activities further, here’s a round-up, organized (roughly) from the best to the worst.
We’ve known for a while now that the ’90s are back in a big way. But as we followed the new, fall 2011 collections from New York Fashion Week, references to the decade were inescapable: plaid, lace, layers, maxi skirts. They were so ubiquitous, in fact, that many of them conjured images of our favorite grunge-era icons, from Courtney Love and Björk to Kelly Bundy and Rayanne Graff. After the jump, we pair ten looks from Fashion Week with the ’90s stars and characters who were born to wear them.
Championed by Nick Cave and Brian Eno and drawing noirish comparisons to early PJ Harvey, British siren Anna Calvi takes a widescreen approach on her stunning debut album.
Calvi, who is half English and half Italian, eschews the de rigeur retro blues of modern English pop in favor of a more cinematic palette. She covered Edith Piaf’s “Jezebel” as her debut single, cites Morricone among her influences, plays stirring flamenco guitar, and revels in the visual aesthetics of Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch.
These days, it’s quite the thing to be in a band and, like, make sweet music with your spouse. But crucially, couples are doing so without a hint of Abba-shaped novelty. Even King Hippy himself, Devendra Banhart, is in on it all: just look at him frolicking around in the nude with his girlfriend in this new “love-in” promo video for Olivers Peoples sunglasses, unafraid of being called a soppy, willy-brandishing hipster. The next thing you know they’ll be writing songs together under an Ayahuasca-inspired moniker and asking for organic massage oil on their tour rider.
OK, we get it. We know you’ve had enough of Valentine’s Day schmaltz already and you’d rather stare into Sarah Palin’s cold, dead eyes than face another playlist to get you in the mood, baby. But these kinds of couples make the cutest kinds of love songs because, well, they really wanna jump each other’s bones all the time. Hopefully our video playlist will make you want to sway from side to side — or at least e-mail it to your object of woo-dom — rather than bend over and retch.
A couple of days back, The Guardian ran a piece declaring that rock ’n roll was dead, on the premise that only three rock songs had made the list of the 100 highest-selling songs in the UK in 2010. Plenty of articles have been written rebutting this idea – most notably at the excellent UK site The Quietus. But really, The Guardian article states a truism within the context of the premises it sets out: if rock ’n roll isn’t selling, it’s dying commercially, end of story. The more interesting question is what sort of state rock is in creatively: obviously, whether or not a genre is selling any records or not has never been a measure of its artistic worth or general utility.
Setting aside for a moment the issue of how much relevance the concept of genre even has in 2011, and looking beyond the FM radio bilge of Nickelback, Kings of Leon et. al., you’ll find that rock isn’t dead at all. In fact, it’s in fairly good health. Here we give you ten guitar-wielding bands – a mixture of respected veterans and up-and-coming types – who prove that whether or not rock music is past its apogee as a commercial force, it’s still home to plenty of creative impetus.
