Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2016 i Rolling Stone Australia

“The lock-out laws are killing Sydney’s night life and, by default, damaging our cultural identity and music scene.” Exploding Soho I WANT TO CONGRATULATE you on your recent feature article on Violent Soho in April 2016 magazine [RS 763]. It is good to see you have resisted the urge of putting a more popular artist in Chris Martin on the cover and instead have focused on promoting an Australian band who really may be just about to explode. Keep up the good work. Hayden McCarthy, Mount Annan, NSW Let Buckley Be IN YOUR STORY ON THE RE- lease of the new Jeff Buckley album, “You and I”, you ask Buckley’s A&R man Steve Berkowitz what Jeff would make of his archives being raided and released. Though Berkowitz waives the question…

AS RIVERS CUOMO began writing his latest batch of Weezer songs, his producer, Jake Sinclair, asked what it would take to get back into the mindset that produced the band’s classic first two albums. “I need to get out of the house,” Cuomo replied. He ended up doing way more. He grew back the beard he wore when the band recorded 1996’s Pinkerton. He started watching young surfers at Venice Beach in hopes of finding lyrical inspiration. He even signed up for Tinder – for purely platonic purposes. “My wife’s cool with it,” Cuomo says with a shrug. The result is the band’s fourth self-titled LP (out now), destined to be known as the White Album, thanks to a cover image that shows the band near a lifeguard tower on…

Juan Thompson spent his earliest years playing under the table while his legendary father, Hunter, held court at the Hotel Jerome Bar in Aspen, Colorado. After Hunter committed suicide in 2005, his outlaw myth only grew. But the idolisation didn’t sit well with his only child. “I love my dad, but that doesn’t mean I was blind to his shortcomings,” says Juan. Now, at 51, he’s written Stories I Tell Myself, a book that sheds light on Hunter’s life from a fresh, intimate perspective. Juan, who lives in Denver and has a successful career in IT, follows Hunter from upstart Louisville bad boy to fame at ROLLING STONE to later years as his mind and body began to fail him. “Hunter would have appreciated the book,” says Paul Scanlon, a…

By the time she was 20, Lita Ford had gotten crabs from Dee Dee Ramone, toured the world with all-female punks the Runaways, and got her nose broken by a belt-buckle-wielding woman in a fight. Ford’s fearless Living Like a Runaway is a vivid account of life as “the one-and-only guitar-playing rocker chick who could shred like I did”. Personal struggles mount: Exploitative Svengali Kim Fowley calls the band “dogs”, and Ford battles music-biz chauvinism and estrangement from her kids. It’s a fast-paced read – and, at its best, an inspiring one.…

1 ‘ CHAOSMOSIS’ IS CONCISE POP Primal Scream are synonymous with psychedelic dance-rock and retro soul. Not this time. “We like to not repeat ourselves,” says frontman Bobby Gillespie. “Our manager said to us, ‘You should try write some singles.’ It was a good discipline. We like making double albums but there’s something cool about an album under 40 minutes. It’s classic. The aesthetic was, ‘Let’s not fuck about.’” 2 THEY TAPPED SOME SURPRISING GUESTS HAIM and Sky Ferreira both appear on Chaosmosis. Gillespie says it’s not about marketing but being fans and friends first – they’d played with HAIM and helped Ferreira produce her own music. “She’s got a great voice, very soulful with a bit of darkness,” says Gillespie of Ferreira’s turn on “Where the Light Gets In”.…

According to Epitaph Records, California punks Plague Vendor have matured and mellowed since they released their debut LP, Free To Eat, in 2014. Nothing could be further from the truth. “Epitaph might just be saying that because I don’t take off my shirt as much at shows these days,” says frontman Brandon Blaine. “The truth is that we’re still very rebellious. We perform every show like it’s our last.” That attitude comes to the fore on the band’s new LP, Bloodsweat, which was recorded in a matter of days. “Our aim for the recording was just to get in and get out,” says Blaine. “We didn’t overthink the process.” Blaine concedes that some of the new sounds on the LP – including organ and piano – could be labelled ‘mature’.…

For Potential, his follow-up to 2013 debut Nonfiction, 27-year-old producer James Hinton figures he spent “hundreds of hours” combing YouTube to find vocal performance videos that he would scour for samples to use on his atmospheric, emotive electronic tracks. More than just a gimmick, Hinton’s use of the technique comes from a genuine place of wanting to understand what makes others tick. “The idea is that each person is going through some kind of catharsis or working through an idea . . . that’s really what I was drawn to and I think that emotional thread is what connects a lot of the vocal samples on the record for me,” Hinton says. Also coming later in the year is Superimpose, a documentary about the making of Potential and Hinton’s efforts…

Led Zeppelin “Zeppelin were quoting Tolkien and seemed in their own mystical world,” says Spiller. “I’ve never really read books, but this kind of fantasy rock & roll thing was really cool to me. I didn’t realise it could be perceived as pretentious.” Queen “I adore Freddie Mercury, and there’s so much freedom in Queen’s music. They sound almost like Victorian rock & roll – to me, Queen was the soundtrack I’d hear if I was to enter the world of Downton Abbey.” Thin Lizzy “I bought a cassette of their Whiskey in the Jar album when I was a kid. They were like Queen, but harder and more manly. It was like Queen’s tough cousin. I think that a lot of people have just totally nicked their sound.” The…

No AUSTRALIAN ENTERTAINER has achieved the same level of broad-based success – on TV, in the theatre, on stage and record – as Jon English, who died on March 9th, aged 66. English was perfectly at ease with whatever role he was playing, whether he was hamming it up on the Channel 9 sitcom All Together Now – playing faded, jaded rocker Bobby Rivers in a nifty piece of typecasting – or winking his way through 1000-plus performances of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, cutlass at the ready; belting out such psychodramas as “Hollywood Seven” and “Turn the Page” straight to the business end of the charts; or rocking sweaty suburban beer barns. His ability to move seamlessly between his many gigs was a rare skill, which dated all…

“Seeing Sonic Youth and Firehose probably changed my life.” The Song That Makes Me Think Of Home Firehose “Chemical Wire”, 1986 “The first real concert I went to was by a band called Fire-hose, and they were my favourite live band in high school. I was probably 18 years old, or 17, and I’m surprised I got in. When I hear this it takes me back to high school and going to see live music. I’ll never forget the feeling of seeing these guys – the way they played their instruments was just completely eye-opening and probably life changing. It made me want to go out and buy an electric guitar. I had been playing acoustic guitar, and seeing Sonic Youth and Firehose in L.A. in the late Eighties…

“I had a massive chip on my shoulder,” says Corby of the years after ‘Idol’. “I had so much to prove.” AT 5PM ON A MONDAY AFTERNOON in late January, a queue is starting to form outside the Teragram Ballroom. Nestled amongst a strip of nondescript, slightly decrepit shops in a nondescript, slightly decrepit part of downtown Los Angeles, the Teragram counts amongst its neighbours a skate shop (Thrash Gnar), a Thai restaurant (the Excellent Thai Cafe), a liquor store and, across the road, the San Lucas Senior (62+) Apartments, the sign to which is painted with pictures of balloons because getting old is, presumably, quite the party. At the front of the queue is Jill Johnson, 20, and her father. They arrived in L.A. this afternoon after a 12-hour…

“I was really depleted,” says Raitt. “When there are multiple losses and illnesses, it can be almost overwhelming.” ‘I LOVE THAT DOUBLE-TIME shit!” says Bonnie Raitt, grinning behind a piano. The singer-guitarist has just led her longtime band through a furious impromptu take on Ray Charles’ “Mess Around”. Raitt, 66, has a reputation as a tenacious perfectionist, but today at her rehearsal studio in North Hollywood, she’s loose and mischievous. At one point, she sets aside a sheet of lyrics for a new ballad to prove she doesn’t need them – but then breaks up laughing when she can’t remember the first line. “So much for losing the training wheels!” she says. After practice, Raitt heads down a hallway deeper into the studio; there’s a chore she’s been meaning to…

Ratings are supervised by the editors of ROLLING STONE. M83 Junk Pod/Inertia “Epic” is a word that gets bandied about these days with inane regularity, but it’s an apt descriptor for the music of M83, the French dream-pop outfit masterminded by Anthony Gonzalez. His sixth album, 2011’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, was his most epic yet – a double-disc jammed with the most expansive iterations to date of his signature cosmic nostalgia: huge walls of synths, impassioned, high-pitched vocals, and a cinematic sense of drama and urgency that held you captive from the get-go, even as his band meandered from cutesy pop to crashing orchestral ballads. Hurry Up also boasted M83’s biggest single to date, “Midnight City”, a track huge enough to turn Gonzalez from an indie concern into an…

PJ Harvey The Hope Six Demolition Project Island/Universal Travelogue, social commentary, art project – The Hope Six Demolition Project is many things. Over four years, Harvey travelled to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington D.C. for inspiration. She then set up a studio in London’s Somerset House behind one-way glass, so members of the public could come in for 45-minute blocks each day to watch the recording process. Call it performance art, living sculpture or stickybeaking. She called it Recording In Progress. The result is one of her most visceral albums, in a catalogue not exactly lacking in that department. But you’d have to go back to 1998’s Is This Desire? to find her in such a forceful, primal mood. The tone is set from the get-go on “The Community Of Hope”,…

Clairy Browne Pool Caroline Phew, is it hot in here? Clairy Browne’s debut sans her Bangin’ Rackettes jettisons the vintage soul vibe for a much more down and dirty definition of R&B. From the Jacksons to TLC to Destiny’s Child, her touchstones are clear but can’t hope to detract from her particular brand of class, both as a turbo-lunged singer and a writer on a supremely confident roll. Even the horns sound like they’re sliding out of the lady’s way in the opening boast of “Vanity Fair”, a deliciously loose groove of clattering drums and lean bass that sets the agenda with due reference to dropped trousers, dripping juice and grown men weeping. The scintillating image of clothing hit- KEY TRACKS: “Vanity Fair”, “Love Song To the World” ting the…

OUT OF THE DORM ROOM, INTO THE STUDIO Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo wrote most of the 2015 LP Teens of Style as an angsty college kid. The follow-up, Teens of Denial (out late autumn), takes his psych-pop vision to new heights, with a sharp-edged sound abetted by Seattle producer Steve Fisk. “My viewpoint has changed a lot since the songs started,” Toledo says. “I was feeling much bleaker about life at the time.” DE LA SOUL’S BIG, GUEST-PACKED BLOWOUT For their first LP in 12 years, the Kick-starter-funded And the Anonymous Nobody, the rap trio went all in, recording with a live band, L.A.’s Rhythm Roots Allstars, and getting assists from Damon Albarn, Usher, Snoop Dogg, Jill Scott, Pete Rock, Estelle and even David Byrne. “He’s asking me for…

ON A CHARMED NIGHT IN August 1969, residents of tiny Woodstock, New York, had the choice of seeing Van Morrison or blues great Johnny Winter, who were both in town performing at intimate venues. If that wasn’t enough entertainment, Jimi Hendrix was a few blocks away, holed up in a converted Methodist church workshopping the rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” he’d make legendary just weeks later, 100 kilometres down the road at Max Yasgur’s farm. Veteran music journalist Barney Hoskyns’ fascinating new history of Woodstock, Small Town Talk, explores one of rock’s most mythic settings, drawing on interviews with dozens of residents and visitors, including Morrison, the Band, Todd Rundgren, Patti Smith and Bonnie Raitt, as well as memories from his own years living there during the Nineties. Hoskyns, who…

Now that seemingly every record ever made is just a couple of clicks away, how do we process it all? In his incisive new essay collection, Every Song Ever, New York Times critic Ben Ratliff finds one way: by locating common ground among artists as different as Black Sabbath and Mozart. Ratliff draws up idiosyncratic playlists and focuses on shared traits like loudness and repetition. Thanks to Ratliff’s vast knowledge, what could have been a dry academic exercise is more like a trip into the world’s coolest record store.…

BILLY CORGAN DOESN’T know exactly where he is right now, but it’s somewhere outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Smashing Pumpkins frontman recently began work on a film project that has him travelling back roads along the old Route 66 and hanging out with the everyday Americans he encounters. “I’m still figuring it out, but I’m hoping to get it made into a series,” he says. “I’m trying to rekindle my understanding and appreciation for the core American value.” Corgan is also, at the time of speaking, gearing up for the Pumpkins’ In Plainsong Tour, where they’ll play stripped-down versions of tunes from their catalogue. “We’ve organically stumbled into a new way to play,” Corgan says. “Although I know that no matter how many interviews I give where I explain it,…

AT LEAST HALF A DOZEN PEO- ple have tried to kill Michael Moore. But the attempt that really stands out in his mind is the guy with the fertilizer bomb in 2004. “He was going to plant it under my house in Michigan,” says Moore. “But one night he was cleaning his AK-47 and it went off. Neighbours called the cops, and when they showed up he had all this ammo, bomb-making stuff and a hit list, with me at the top. He went to the federal penitentiary.” Few liberal activists have a stronger track record of infuriating conservatives than Moore, whose new film, Where to Invade Next, hits theatres nationwide on April 7th. In recent years, though, the death threats and murder attempts have subsided – as has Moore’s…

After staying off the road for more than three years, Chris Martin is charged up for the band’s Head Full of Dreams tour, which has the group rumoured to hit Australia toward the end of 2016. “I’m getting into a rhythm,” he says. “I’ve cut down on the doughnuts. And I’ve done loads of exercise. You can’t do these things without working your ass off.” Martin promises an “awesome” production spectacle, inspired by Beyoncé and U2 shows he caught during the band’s downtime (“They raised the bar”), when he was questioning how to move Coldplay forward. “I’m happy that we’ve stuck together. We’re excited to tour and just to be in this absolute dream world for the foreseeable future.”…

“I’m turning 50 and I feel like pop culture’s passing me by.” CALIFORNIAN COMEDIAN BRIAN Posehn (pronounced ‘Puh-sain’) is your classic “seen the face, can’t place the name” type, despite an extensive CV amassed over a 22-year career. He’s done stand-up and acting work (his first TV gig was Mr. Show With Bob and David opposite Bob Odenkirk and David Cross in 1995; he’s since had roles in Friends, Seinfeld and The Sarah Silverman Program, to name a few); voice work (Metalocalypse, video game Halo 2); writing (comic book Deadpool); and music making (his comedy song “Metal by Numbers” has clocked up almost 2.5 million YouTube views; a full comedy metal LP featuring members of Testament, Death Angel and Anthrax is due this year). A first-time visit to Australia this…

ELTON JOHN SITS AT A giant red piano left over from his Vegas days, wearing the same brownish Adidas tracksuit I saw him in two days earlier. Today is a Sunday rehearsal at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles for the debut show behind his 32nd album, Wonderful Crazy Night, and he is jawing with his crew about his vocals. They don’t seem to be getting the sound to his liking, so he sings to them in an unrhymed couplet: “You’ll know when my tits/Goes up your ass.” Everyone laughs, and then Elton breaks into a few bars from Oklahoma! before dropping down to his bass range and crooning lines not from the Rodgers and Hammerstein original: “Why do all the queers come from Tulsa?/Why do all the fairies live…

Metallica, ‘Metallica’ Snooty rock critics may have sneered at the Spinal Tap-esque ‘none more black’ cover, but Metallica had the last laugh, selling 16 million copies of their stripped-down, punishingly-direct fifth album in America alone. Massive Attack ‘Blue Lines’ Soulful, symphonic, hazy, hypnotising and haunting, the debut album from Bristol DJ collective Massive Attack introduced the world to the concept of ‘trip-hop’, billed as ‘dance music for the head’. Guns N’Roses ‘Use Your Illusion’ Two albums and a massive statement of cock-swinging braggadocio from LA’s most dysfunctional hard rock outfit. Sadly, guitarist Izzy Stradlin quit upon its completion, taking Gn’R’s soul with him. Primal Scream ‘Screamadelica’ The Scottish indie band entrusted their album to a clutch of maverick, bugged-out DJs who spiked it with house beats, gospel choruses, spoken word…

“From the moment that I woke up to the moment that I went to bed, I just cared about getting drugs.” MACKLEMORE SENDS A TEXT AT A quarter to noon: “Pulling up in 1 min. I’m in a crimson Hummer.” The Hummer part’s a joke, it turns out, but right on time, the Seattle hip-hop star arrives in something no less eye-popping: a black 2008 Cadillac DTS Biarritz with tinted windows, a cream-colour vinyl top, whitewall tires and rows of tiny cactuses painted along its rear flanks. Macklemore – 32, Seattle-born and the hugest white rapper since Eminem – became a Cadillac obsessive as a kid, mainlining California gangsta rap through his Walkman; he bought the DTS a few years ago “with my first real rap money”, he says. He’s…

Gwen Stefani This Is What the Truth Feels Like Interscope If there’s a moment that sums up why Gwen Stefani is so eternally beloved, it’s the surreal scene from The Voice last year when she led her team through New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” in a swirl of confetti. Only Stefani could sound so perky while threatening to kick Marilyn Manson’s ass in. This is the first solo album in a decade from one of the Nineties’ most improbably long-running superstars – the dowager countess of the world’s ska mums. Stefani hasn’t had much spare time since the last No Doubt album, in late 2012; she’s had another baby, joined The Voice, divorced Gavin Rossdale and jumped into a high-profile tabloid romance with Voice co-star Blake Shelton. So…

Potential Domino On 2013 debut LP Nonfiction, Williamsburg-based electronic musician James Hinton took what on the surface smacked of hipster pretentiousness – taking vocal samples from obscure, unwatched YouTube performance videos – and created a lush and deservedly lauded LP. Hinton refines the technique on skilful follow-up Potential, the sampled amateur voices painstakingly sourced from all corners of the globe – a Jamaican dancehall artist, a UK grime MC, a teen singer from the U.S. – adding a vulnerable, raw heart to his elegant electronic compositions and creating an emotional thread that solidifies the album into a cohesive, rewarding whole. By turns meditative (“Regular”) and hands-in-the-air jubilant (“Florida”, a rework of Ariana Grande’s “You’ll Never Know”), it manages to connect disparate strangers via the seemingly impersonal medium of the internet…

Deftones Gore Warner Of all the bands to emerge from the mid-Nineties heavy music scene, none have aged as gracefully as Deftones. Where one-time contemporaries such as Korn, System Of a Down and Incubus are either M.I.A. or ran out of ideas years ago, the Sacramento quintet hit a vein of form on 2010’s Diamond Eyes that’s showing no sign of abating. Exhibit A: this, their eighth studio album. As you’d expect of a Deftones record, there are riffs here – such as those in “Doomed User” and the title-track – that are heavier than an elephant with a ton of bricks on its back. But the five-piece have always been at their best when balancing the concepts of light and shade, and so you have highlights such as “(L)…

Brian Fallon Painkillers Island After spending a decade singing openhearted confessionals as the frontman of New Jersey punks the Gaslight Anthem, gravel-voiced Brian Fallon is turning down his amp for a solo debut full of acoustic ballads and midtempo alt-country songs. Fallon references heroes like James Brown and Van Morrison as he transforms rough old memories “from a long, long time ago” into communal punk-folk therapy. For a guy whose songs have always traded in the pains and pleasures of nostalgia, the Fallon of Painkillers seems to have arrived at a newfound, forward-looking clarity. As he puts it on the wistful closing ballad: “I don’t let reminders get me down like before.” Fallon recruited studio pros like Catherine Popper and Butch Walker to add delicate harmony vocals, spectral synths, and…

“As much as I love hard-hitting docudramas, ‘Family Feud’ is it for me.” The last time I swore at the telly During every single fast money final round of Family Feud. As much as I love hard-hitting HBO docudramas, when I turn on the TV all I want is vacuous fluff, especially recently when my days have been pretty intense, and Family Feud is it for me. I kind of get a power trip every time an idiotic family screws up the final fast money round. The last time I was rude to someone I’ve got a potty mouth on stage. I can’t help but swear when I get on some kind of raised platform. So it was probably someone taking a selfie with an iPad at one of my…

Bieber Crushes Seattle Justin Bieber kicked off his 100-plus date Purpose tour in Seattle with all the spectacle you’d expect – blasting off the stage on a pressurised platform and dancing through fire and water. The night also had its unscripted moments: “This guy offered me a banana in the front row,” he told the crowd. “I don’t know what he’s trying to insinuate, but I’m good on potassium right now.” Iggy Pop: Raw Dog Twenty-one New York Academy of Art students got a big assignment when Iggy Pop posed as a nude model for a series that will be exhibited in the autumn. The students “were very impressed with his poses and his presence”, says professor Jeremy Deller. PARTY CRASHERS Lorde and Taylor Swift (she recently called Lorde her…

This engaging biography of the troubled soul heroine serves as a companion to the 2015 Netflix documentary of the same title. Journalist Alan Light chronicles the life of a civil-rights icon who “grudgingly accepted the popular nickname ‘the High Priestess of Soul’ ”. Simone’s mental-health struggles led to violent episodes (she brought bodyguards to shows to protect fans from her), and a tragic end. But as Light shows, her intensity fuelled music that reflected and transformed the volatile America of her times.…

TULSA, OKLAHOMA, IS ABOUT to become the centre of the Bob Dylan universe. The singer-songwriter has sold a treasure-trove of some 6,000 artifacts from his private collection to the University of Tulsa and the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation, run by the billionaire Democratic fundraiser. Soon, they will be accessible to Dylan scholars. “There are a lot of books written about Bob Dylan,” says Steadman Upham, president of the University of Tulsa. “But there are going to be a whole lot more based on these materials.” The size and scope of the collection is staggering, especially since it was assumed that Dylan had saved few artifacts from his past. It includes the master recordings of complete sessions for all of his albums, the vast majority of which have never been…

The godfather of shock rock is touring with Hollywood Vampires and his solo group throughout this year. Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Had I been born later, I could have written this. But when you’re my age, you can’t write for teens. When I first heard it, I was like, “Oh, yeah!” Aerosmith “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” They wrote this about Vince Neil. Mötley Crüe were a bunch of good-looking girls then. They aren’t so cute anymore. My Chemical Romance “Teenagers” I looked at this band as the next Def Leppard. This song has a great message: “Teenagers are dangerous!” Billy Talent “Red Flag” These guys were Canada’s Green Day. This song reminds me of “My Sharona”. It’s one of those hooks you can’t explain. Twisted Sister “We’re Not…

FORMED IN THE LATE EIGHTIES and signed to iconic art-rock label 4AD, London quartet Lush confounded tidy genre tags during the media’s obsession with both shoe-gaze and Britpop. They were dreamy and poppy, but also melancholy and subversive. And their songs hold up remarkably well today, whether it’s stinging anthems like the openly feminist “Ladykillers”, airy confection like “500 (Shake Baby Shake)” or noise-swept vistas like “Nothing Natural”. Lush have reconvened for their first material in two decades, after the 1996 suicide of drummer Chris Acland effectively ended the band’s output. They’re playing their first reunion shows this month – including a spot at Coachella – and are releasing a richly textured EP, Blind Spot. Coinciding with a new vinyl box set plus a repressing of a previous box set,…

“I was obsessed with everything Sixties and Seventies,” says Spiller, who has a “Sir Rock & Roll” tattoo. BEFORE THE STRUTS WENT ON tour last year with Mötley Crüe, Luke Spiller got a bit of fatherly advice from Nikki Sixx. “He said, ‘Look, you guys are shit-hot’,” says Spiller, the U.K. glam-rock group’s 27-year-old frontman. “ ‘Go easy on the drugs. Go easy on the pussy. Stay focused, and just keep it about the music.’ Those words coming from a man of his stature really mean something. You’d have to be stupid not to listen.” On this particular shit-hot afternoon in Los Angeles, the Struts are about to perform at Shaun White’s Air + Style Festival – a bleak parking-lot gathering whose lineup is a mish-mash of rock, hip-hop and…

THE CLASSICAL MUSICIANS WHO showed up at EMI Studios in London on February 10th, 1967, had no idea what they were in for. The Beatles were constructing “A Day in the Life”, the song that would become the grand finale of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Paul McCartney had a vague idea to bridge its two sections with some kind of grand sonic hurricane. The string players were baffl ed, until producer George Martin came to the rescue. “These were classically trained musicians, and they said, ‘We can’t do that!’ ” recalls engineer Geoff Emerick. “It was 20 minutes of George trying to explain it to them, saying, ‘Let’s try this.’ And they did.” Martin sketched out an impromptu score for the musicians, and with him and McCartney…

The New Shure Thing Shure KSM8 RRP $948 Shure’s SM58 vocal mic is such a standard fixture on live stages that it’s easy to forget the company have been improving on their classic for decades. Their latest offering, the KSM8, looks set to dethrone the SM58 as the microphone of choice for venues looking to up the ante when it comes to vocal reproduction. Essentially, the KSM8 brings studio quality to the stage in the world’s first dual-diaphragm dynamic handheld microphone. It sounds incredibly accurate and has virtually no “proximity effect”, which is bad news for stand-up comedians but great for everyone else. Vinyl Streaming Audio Technica LP60WH-BT Bluetooth Turntable RRP $299 While vinyl has been making a solid return, it’s often difficult to pair a turntable up with many…

AURORA SOUNDS LIKE: Norse folk ballads served on the rocks. Tales over a variety of synth claps, trills and other electronic curios FOR FANS OF: Of Monsters and Men, Lorde, Sia WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: Like many budding pop stars, 19-year-old Norwegian Aurora Aksnes was first discovered online after posting her original songs on Soundcloud and Youtube. She’s since been signed to Glassnote in the States and Decca in the UK, and has gone on to sell out shows in London, where she scored the opening slot for Icelandic pop titans Of Monsters and Men. Across the pond she won over Katy Perry, who visited Aurora backstage after her show in Los Angeles. “She wasn’t wearing her usual dresses or make-up, she was very lovely and down-to-earth,” says Aksnes.…

“My vision of music really changed over the last five or six years,” says Gonzalez. ‘Since I was a teenager I’ve always expected change from the artists I love,” says M83 leader Anthony Gonzalez from his adopted home in Los Angeles. “I want them to take me on a different journey. This is the kind of career I’m trying to achieve. It’s not easy. But the idea really was to come up with something I didn’t make before.” Change isn’t an uncommon theme for artists to grapple with. But Gonzalez isn’t kidding. His playful new album, Junk, is a wild U-turn from the serious, noir-space anthems that litter the M83 catalogue. Named after the escalating rate that art is consumed and discarded in the digital age, Junk’s genre-surfing dynamic is…

“The rise of smart machines raises serious questions we need to consider about who we are as humans,” Elon Musk says, “and what kind of future we are building for ourselves.” ‘WELCOME TO ROBOT NURSERY SCHOOL,” PIETER ABBEEL SAYS as he opens the door to the Robot Learning Lab on the seventh floor of a sleek new building on the northern edge of the UC-Berkeley campus. The lab is chaotic: bikes leaning against the wall, a dozen or so grad students in disorganised cubicles, whiteboards covered with indecipherable equations. Abbeel, 38, is a thin, wiry guy, dressed in jeans and a stretched-out T-shirt. He moved to the U.S. from Belgium in 2000 to get a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford and is now one of the world’s foremost experts…

The Lumineers Cleopatra Dualtone/Universal Clocking in at just over 33 minutes, the Simone Felice-produced sophomore outing from the Lumineers feels like an effort in reaching for enough material to produce a full-length album. Which would be beside the point if Cleopatra were a collection of uniformly solid tracks – only it isn’t. The problematic “Gun Song” has been a fixture of the band’s live set since at least 2011, overwrought bildungsroman “Sleep on the Floor” since at least 2013, while Sixties folk-revivalist entry “Gale Song” itself featured in acoustic form on the Hunger Games: Catching Fire OST (2013) – and suffers for the rendition of some mightily tired platitudes (“and all this too shall pass…”). Both “Angela” and “In the Light” prove that a slow-building composition must have a starting…

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Ellie Kemper, Tituss Burgess Created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock Following 30 Rock must have been daunting for Tina Fey. But with co-creator Robert Carlock she’s done well with Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s charming debut season. Produced for Netflix, this has Ellie Kemper (The Offi ce) as Kimmy, who’s nearly 30 when she’s rescued from a cult bunker in Indiana, where she’s been held prisoner for half her life. Now this “mole woman” is trying to make her way in New York City, sharing a basement with unemployed gay black actor Titus (Burgess) in a house owned by senior hippie Lillian (Carol Kane) and working as a dogsbody for billionaire trophy wife Jacqueline (Jane Krakowski). So far, so sitcom, and indeed UKS’s first few episodes are gently…