Month: March 2019

Foals Talk About Their New Album

Foals
Jason Tate

Foals breakdown their new album, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 1., for Consequence of Sound:

I like records where there’s an opening of a space. You feel like you’re going through a wormhole, you’re going through a warp or it’s one of those old, cheesy TV effects from the ’60s where the picture wobbles and you know you’re into this alternate place. I think that this idea of making a record that has a define sense of place to it was important; it’s a very linked landscape. With that track, I just wanted it to be like a cleanser you go into it. The lyrics infer this idea of moving from the past into the future and it felt like the right way to start the record.

Mark Hoppus & Alex Gaskarth Talk About Simple Creatures

Simple Creatures
Jason Tate

Mark Hoppus and Alex Gaskarth sit down with Alt. Press to talk about Simple Creatures:

The first thing we did was like a diet blink-182 or diet All Time Low. It wasn’t great. We listened back and decided it wasn’t what we wanted to do at all. We started off with a completely different mindset. We had this idea of everything opposite: Whatever you’d normally do, try and do something different. If something made us feel like it wasn’t something we wouldn’t normally do, we took it as a good thing. We were trying to get away from traditional recording techniques and embracing strange keyboard sounds and ratty, shitty guitars, buzzy subs and programmed drums.

Sigrid Goes Track-by-Track Through ‘Sucker Punch’

Sigrid
Jason Tate

Sigrid released her fantastic debut album, Sucker Punch, today and breaks down the album for MTV:

“I wanted ‘Don’t Feel Like Crying’ to be a fun song,” she said. “I wanted it to be something to distract people from the sad stuff and just dance, and then when they listen to it at a club or a party with their friends, they’ll be like, ‘Woah! This is such a tune.’ But then when they listen to it alone, maybe on their way home from the party or going for a run or just sitting at home on the couch, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, this is actually really sad.’ I love that — when you can get the song to work in different types of environments.”

Zebrahead Breakdown New Album

Zebrahead
Jason Tate

Zebrahead’s new album is out today and the band did a track-by-track breakdown over at Punktastic:

We recorded this song initially with live instruments and then went back and added some loops in order to create the rap verses. In this album, we experimented more with adding loops as the song writing progressed, rather than having them be an afterthought. I really love how the chorus kicks in and lifts the entire songs. This is one of my favourites on the album.

Track List: March – Holding Onto Winter

Trevor Graham

While it may scratch more than one itch in terms of article and discussion content, it’s probably safe to say that the vast majority of us found Chorus.fm through a mutual love for music. Whether it’s listening to the classics that once mended your broken heart, or spotlighting new additions to soundtrack your growth — if you’re reading this, you’re probably the type of person that prioritizes a set of rumbling speakers before you even put on your seatbelt. You might also be the person that makes a night out of giving an anticipated new album a dedicated front-to-back listen — not daring to skip the three month old first single, of course. And hell, if you’re anything like me, you probably base what you choose to listen to on your surroundings. How long am I going to stand on this treadmill browsing my library before I eventually land on Yellowcard again, you ask? On average, maybe about 6 minutes. In any of those cases, and so many more, this feature is for you.

Welcome to the monthly Track List. Each month I’ll be handpicking 30 songs that I think match that time of year, and sequencing them into a playlist for you to vibe out to however you see fit. Hopefully some names will be familiar, and hopefully some will give you a new discography to dive into. Some may even show up on more than one list! The goal is solely to capture the essence of that season, and marry it to some tunes to we can all enjoy. Drop me a line with some of your seasonal favorites and check back every month for a new playlist!

You can find the playlist on Spotify and Apple Music and read more about the selections below.

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Spotify, Google, Pandora, Amazon Go to U.S. Appeals Court to Overturn Royalty Increase

Jason Tate

Jem Aswad and Chris Willman, writing at Variety:

Spotify, Google, Pandora and Amazon have teamed up to appeal a controversial ruling by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board that, if it goes through, would increase payouts to songwriters by 44%, Variety has learned. […] Sources say that Apple Music is alone among the major streaming services in not planning to appeal — as confirmed by songwriters’ orgs rushing to heap praise on Apple while condemning the seemingly unified front of the other digital companies.

Review: New Found Glory – Not Without a Fight

New Found Glory - NWOAF
Mia Hughes

When New Found Glory broke into the mainstream in the early 2000s, it certainly wasn’t amongst a shortage of pop-punk bands. The post-Blink boom meant that for a few years, every bunch of spiky-haired kids in Dickies was getting picked up by a major and amassing radio and MTV coverage. But what always set New Found Glory apart from their Warped Tour ilk was their genuine connection to heavy music. A teenaged Chad Gilbert was the vocalist for metalcore legends Shai Hulud before he was New Found Glory’s guitarist, and where other pop-punk bands of the time were taking influence from the likes of Descendents and Screeching Weasel, NFG were drawing more from East Coast hardcore like Madball and Snapcase. They positioned NYHC guitar tones as the backdrop to sickly-sweet pop vocals, and mastered both elements better than any of their peers could.

This distinction set New Found Glory up for longevity that outlasted pop punk’s commercial day in the sun, and such longevity makes inevitable – and perhaps relies on – a change in course. So in 2006, while bands like Midtown and Fenix TX had dissolved around them, New Found Glory released their fifth album Coming Home. It swapped the crunchy riffs for mid-tempo soft rock more comparable to, say, Journey than to their heavy early influences. It was a smart move, with pop-punk by now commercially dead in the water as emo-pop took its place, and one that paid off too; it was likely better received critically than any of their records prior.

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