David Emery Online

Reading '09 Times

As part of my normal pre-Reading preparations I’ve hunted out the schedule for this year’s Reading (as compiled by someone helpful on the internet), which I thought some of you might appreciate.

The most interesting thing though, is the mysterious gap at 16:45 on Saturday on the NME/Radio 1 stage. Odds are good that it’s a performance by Them Crooked Vultures the ‘super group’ featuring Josh Homme, John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) and Dave Grohl (especially considering the rest of the gang – Spinnerette & Eagles of Death Metal – are all there as well) which would be pretty awesome, quite frankly…

Lost In The Edit

I’m sure you didn’t fail to miss the hubbub that milled around the internet last last week; the rumours, the leaks, the falsely registered domains names – it was all finally put to rest on Monday with a simple post on radiohead.com:

So here’s a new song, called ‘These Are My Twisted Words’.

We’ve been recording for a while, and this was one of the first we finished.

We’re pretty proud of it.

There’s other stuff in various states of completion, but this is one we’ve been practising, and which we’ll probably play at this summer’s concerts. Hope you like it.

Download the audio here or torrent here.

Jonny

These Are My Twisted Words.mp3

So, is this the much vaunted ‘future of music’, then? It sure doesn’t feel like it.

Firstly, I’m a little stumped over the fact that the track leaked almost a week up front of the ‘official’ release; was it on purpose? The Radiohead ship is pretty tight these days so I vote ‘yes’ and that throws up a whole new set of questions, the most important being: why? One of the most interesting things that Radiohead have done of recent times is created a distribution platform for themselves that they...

MySpace Disables Auto-Play

MySpace has made a big change to it’s product – songs no longer auto-play when you visit a MySpace user profile. Autoplays accounted for a billion or more song streams per month, and were costing MySpace a significant amount of money. Turning off that hose is a cost saving maneuver. This also has the benefit, sources say, of improving the user experience and providing labels with better listening data.

Hallelujah.

Kurt Vile - Overnite Religion

Unexpectedly loving this – really something quite special, and it isn’t even the best track on the album.

Kurt Vile – Overnite Religion

New Jack White - Fly Farm Blues

As reported, this Tuesday was a busy release day for Jack White and his Third Man Records: the label put out singles by Dan Sartain (“Bohemian Groove”) and Transit (“C’mon And Ride”) — both produced by the Third Man main man — as well as the track that made the three-pack singles release day a press event in the first place, “Fly Farm Blues.” It’s Jack unaccompanied in fuzzbucket slide-guitar mode

Quite frankly, this is the best thing Jack has done in years, even if it does sound rather a lot like ‘Ball and a Biscuit’. Jack, could you stop dicking around with side projects and make a whole album that sounds like this? It’s why we liked you in the first place…

It’s on iTunes if you want to listen to it a bit more (interesting to note Stereogum’s use of YouTube as an audio player, while we’re on the topic of listening…).

Greatness Happening Somewhere

Is it them or is it me?

That’s the question I asked myself during The National show at Royal Festival Hall on Monday. The aforementioned ‘them’ is not the band, but the rest of the audience, who were having a great time.

I was not.

Now, that’s not to say that the band weren’t good, or put on a bad show or anything like that because they didn’t – they were on great form, played pretty much all the songs I was after and generally ticked all the boxes (including the ‘witty banter’ box). But it just didn’t ‘click’ and there’s only one reason for that: the venue.

Royal Festival Hall is, of course, a stunning place with amazing acoustics but the key problem for me was the seats – surprisingly enough, I’ve never actually been to a seated gig before (short of a couple of shows in assorted churches, but that’s different), and boy does it suck. I’ve avoided them like the plague previously because I like nothing more then getting down the front at a gig, getting as close as possible and getting a real connection with not only the performers, but also the fans that are into it – and ‘connected’...

thehorrors.co.uk

We’ve just launched the new site for The Horrors – we’d been quite happy with the way that the previous video-focused site had gone but it was (finally) time to get something with a bit more content up there.

All textpattern based, as ever, it runs with the ‘activity stream’ format so everything gets fed into the same feed on the home page, whether it’s blog posts, photos from the flickr group, polaroids posted by the band, videos or whatever else. Also watch out for the natural extension of the fading colour trick featured on version 5 of this site, but instead changing the whole background image…

Harry Patch (In Memory Of)

Recently the last remaining UK veteran of the 1st world war Harry Patch died at the age of 111.
I had heard a very emotional interview with him a few years ago on the Today program on Radio4.
The way he talked about war had a profound effect on me.
It became the inspiration for a song that we happened to record a few weeks before his death.
It was done live in an abbey. The strings were arranged by Jonny.
I very much hope the song does justice to his memory as the last survivor.

A stunning beautiful song, which falls in the Radiohead canon alongside album closers like ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ and ‘Videotape’. Haunting but with an important message – go and buy it and see for yourself.

iLike launches iPhone apps for Jeff Buckley, The Cribs, Sonic Youth…

Back in May, music service iLike announced plans for a new B2B service that would create and launch iPhone applications for artists. More than 250 of them have gone live on the App Store in the last few days.

And they’re all rubbish. I really don’t see the point in such generic, assembly line production of mediocre apps – is anyone going to care? Wow, you can download an app to listen to 30s clips of an album (err, like you can in the iTunes app), see twitter updates from the band and see upcoming tour dates (insert ticket affiliate link here).

Doubly stupid considering the only way to get decent volume on the iTunes store is to get some promotion backing it up, either on the store/top 10 charts os somewhere else – how exactly are you going to promote an app when there are 249 near identical other versions?

I’m wondering whether it’s already too late to bother with music related iPhone app development – there’s just too much noise and rubbish to get lost in.

The Pope Signs To Geffen

Geffen Records, owned by Universal Music, is producing an album that will feature Pope Benedict’s voice accompanied by the Choir of the Philharmonic Academy of Rome. According to the company, he will sing and recite verses including prayers to the Virgin Mary.

I love the fact that Lada Gaga and the Pope can be on the same label; it’s obviously all about the music for those guys. I guess that when the A&R guys put ‘flowers’ on their expenses in this case they might actually mean it…