Yes, I’m milking the 30 minutes I got with Aaron Paul (see the Sundance interview), but Breaking Bad. He was in a movie that showed at the fest which I dug. Peep the review below, with one for The Sleepwalker (score by Sondre Lerche) and a few from ’13. Continue reading
Whatever you think “going to the Grammys” means, we guarantee it’s less glamorous and more bizarre than what you’re imagining. At least for most of the press, who sit in small room adjacent to the ceremony, watching the thing on TVs and praying that a famous person will make a wrong turn and wind up on our measly little stage with a microphone miraculously in hand.
And it’s not just Music’s Biggest Night. In the awards season bridging 2012 to 2013, I attended the MTV Video Music Awards, the American Music Awards, and, yes, the Grammys, and my surreal behind-the-scenes experience wound up the stuff of an unexpected trilogy. In 2014, I returned to the Grammys just to make sure its was still weird (spoiler alert: it was). Continue reading
We went on a rave cruise and it was ridiculous. For your vicarious enjoyment (not ours, no, of course not) we left from Miami on January 9 and returned three days later, stopping along the way at two private Bahamian islands for beach parties featuring the likes of Diplo, Chromeo, Disclosure, and Duck Sauce. There were also a ton of skull-drilling EDM performances within the hull of a mega-ship. And 4,000 fellow revelers. And a never-ending pizza buffet. And that time Skrillex smoked us out onstage while Pharrell performed two feet away. Continue reading
It finally happened. After covering the politics of America’s biggest, brightest rave, Electric Daisy Carnival, yours truly actually attended the thing accompanied by one of my favorite photo-takers of all time, Wilson Lee. The long, hot days (spent in a hotel room with blackout blinds) and long, neon lights (spent decidedly among the neon) made for some strange experiences and even stranger writing. But despite the fact that I was not on any of the drugs, I found EDC to be very uplifting and sufficiently trippy. Click through the SPIN gallery to get a taste. And revisit my print piece, Dance Music Industry Fights for Its Rights, and web followup about the arrest of EDC promoter Pasquale Rotella. Needless to say, I’ve chosen a side in the War on Raves.
One of our favorite young music-making weirdos of the past five years is Chaz Bundick — a dude better known as Les Sins and best known as Toro y Moi. Befitting his chosen aliases, he’s a musical polyglot, weaving psych-rock and summery pop into rap beats and dance pulse. Unsurprisingly, Bundick is a sharp guy with a sweet disposition, as we learned first hand upon sitting down with him at a coffee shop across from the SPIN offices in Hollywood. Read here:
Done? Have some B-sides:
This site was relaunched in November of 2015, but the blog’s been around since April of 2009. It’s been through many changes, so what lies beyond is almost certainly not formatted properly and often (yuck) written in third person. It’s also incomplete. I’m still filling in my two-plus years as a SPIN staffer, and moving even older posts over to this site. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The headline kinda says it all, but if you’d like to read an 803-word version of it, may we suggest the full-length SPIN review of the new album II by the new band Nude Beach? You can read that yon, and an excerpt right here:
Brooklyn doesn’t always breed bands like Nude Beach — bands without DJ nights or vintage synth gear or famous friends or food blogs. But though this power trio(!) calls the big borough home, BK didn’t breed them. No, Chuck, Ryan, and Jimmy are Long Island boys, children of a village called Northport, the kind of place that only winds up on the news when enough of its manhole covers are jacked for scrap to make it a national concern. And the kind of place that held onto its Reagan-era heartland rock well into the Clinton age. Which is to say, through the formative years of Misters Betz, Naideau, and Shelto, respectively. The three played Rancid-inspired punk together as teens, but after recording a fun but messy self-titled tape in 2008, they’ve returned with II, an album that excises the oi! in favor of those other influences, of songs with easy-rolling guitar solos and keywords like “baby,” “radio,” and “dreams.”
We’ve joined SPIN’s Twitter reviews team. Watch us completely dismiss or irresponsibly champion an album in 140 characters or less! In all (well, some) seriousness, we’re pretty sure there’s an art to this–like a haiku for assholes who like the sound of their own quickly jotted words ricocheting off of the intensely labored-over musical works of our time. Anyway, check these out:
This one’s been out for a minute, but we never got around to sharing our SPIN review of Lex Hives. There’s an excerpt (below). And here’s the rest of it.
A fresh album [is just] 12 excuses to get the band back out on the road so they can deliver what live guitar music needs in the Chillwave Era: a hearty kick to the mid-pelvis, to that spot where balls go when they’re not being used.
First things first. Twenty years ago, friends, this happened:
We were a tender 10 years old at the time, but Bay Area born and bred, so you best believe those lovelorn, summertime emanations beat on our rap-seasoned eardrums. Which is why it was a particularly special pleasure to interview Fatlip and Slimkid3, responsible for the most memorable verses on “Passin’ Me By,” as well as producer J-Swift and Delicious Vinyl head Mike Ross, about the birth of that unusual ode to unrequited love and its legacy since. Our favorite insight:
“I found Quincy Jones’ ‘Summer in the City’ and a second loop that I can’t remember. We were gonna do two beats and Bootie Brown was like, ‘Man, let’s just combine them.’ So we did that, and then we ended up renting The Doors. We were on shrooms or some shit, all wigged out watching Val Kilmer transform into Jim Morrison, and right after, Fatlip walks into the booth and starts screaming like Morrison: ‘She keeps on passin’ me by!'” — J-Swift
So if you haven’t already, bounce over to SPIN to read the entire thing.
Chris Writes Things 