Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2016 i Rolling Stone Australia

THIS YEAR, IF YOU WANTED TO keep up with new albums by Beyoncé, Drake, Frank Ocean and Kanye West, among many others, you would have had to subscribe to not one but two streaming services. In a strategy that could represent a fundamental shift for the record business, Apple Music and Tidal have sought to pull users from Spotify, the world’s biggest streaming service, with a series of competing exclusive releases. As part of the deals, Apple, in particular, funds superstar artists’ songs and videos, and showcases them on TV commercials and online radio stations. But over the past few months, a backlash has developed against this new reality. The tipping point may have come in August, when Frank Ocean delivered a video album, Endless, to fulfil the terms of…

1 GENRE BENDS UK artist Laura Mvula carved her own space in 2013 with the release of her debut album, Sing to the Moon; a fusion of pop, jazz and soul that garnered the singer international acclaim. Mvula’s second record, The Dreaming Room, showcases her musical finesse and emotional depth: “I wanted to make an album that feels sexy in the truest sense of the word, that’s in my own skin – it’s raw.” 2 BYRON BOUND Mvula is an apt addition to the 2017 Bluesfest line-up. She notes how The Dreaming Room’s rich textures fill festival stages, whereas Sing to the Moon was suited to intimate venues. “This time it’s big, it’s ethereal, there are a lot of layers to the music. It’s much more enjoyable for me than…

ON A HOT NASHVILLE LATE- summer afternoon, 38-year-old Sturgill Simpson sits at a small table and looks me dead in the eye. We’re in the city’s Germantown section, in the writing room he shares with singer-songwriter John Prine. A pool table dominates the space. An antique jukebox stands silent. Down the hallway is the studio where last year Simpson cut his haunting album A Sailor’s Guide to Earth in less than a week. Simpson’s conversational currency is unfiltered sincerity. His humour is built on self-deprecation. “ROLLING STONE is doing a long-form exposé on what an asshole I am,” he tells engineer David Ferguson, who drops in at one point. Months earlier, we’d met at a birthday dinner for Shooter Jennings, where Simpson’s intellectual range took me by surprise. Most country…

Gallant SOUNDS LIKE: Every era of R&B – classic soul to slick Eighties to an EDM-infused modern strain – blended together and lifted higher by a fluid falsetto that would’ve made Prince wince. FOR FANS OF: Frank Ocean, Sam Smith, Prince, Curtis Mayfield WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: Growing up in Columbia, Maryland, as an introverted kid who nonetheless participated in drama and choir, 24-year-old Christopher Gallant’s musical education came in the most Millennial way possible: by downloading every bit of music his internet connection could handle. Time logged studying music in New York City was followed by a move to Los Angeles where a partnership was formed with Canadian producer Stint, the pair recording debut album Ology in a variety of home studios. After being praised by the likes…

“If you don’t start unpacking your baggage, it gets heavier as you move along. The weight becomes impossible to carry, and it can get pretty messy.” ENTER BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, WHISTLING. He’s cradling a couple of leather jackets for a photo shoot and looks a touch tired, probably because he was just on a stadium stage outside Boston 36 hours ago, wrapping up the last in a series of four-hour-plus concerts with the E Street Band. A week before his 67th birthday, Springsteen is back on his farm in New Jersey’s Monmouth County, on a cloudless mid-September afternoon lovely enough to justify allegiance to his oft-maligned home state. He has a grey shadow of a goatee, and is dressed as you’d expect him to be dressed: black T-shirt, slightly stretched at…

Metallica Hardwired . . . To Self-Destruct Blackened Recordings/ EMI Few bands are subjected to the kind of scrutiny when releasing a new album as Metallica. But that’s what happens when your first five records – from 1983’s Kill ’Em All to 1991’s ‘Black Album’ – are regarded as metal classics. Of course, it doesn’t help that the past few decades have yielded more ups and downs than a stock market, testing the patience of even the most ardent fan, whether it be the perceived sell-out of 1996’s Load, St. Anger’s songless din or the much maligned collaboration with Lou Reed, 2011’s Lulu. If, as many believe, Metallica righted the ship with 2008’s Death Magnetic, the 12 tracks spread across this double album continue that trajectory. There are nods to…

FEATURE SUMMER FESTIVALS THE RS GUIDE From the big, multi-stage events to the off-the-grid boutique parties, we profile the essential upcoming music and pop culture festivals. VIDEO WALTER SCHREIFELS LIVE Frontman of NY post-hardcore band Quicksand stops by our Sydney office for an exclusive solo acoustic performance. TV RETURN OF BLACK MIRROR INTERVIEW Showrunner Charlie Brooker on the Netflix series’ unsettling new season about the dark side of technology. POLITICS TRUMP VS. CLINTON U.S. ELECTION As America heads to the polls, we cover the up-to-the-minute action of the wildest presidential contest in history. LISTEN BEST NEW MUSIC EVERY DAY From exclusive video and album premieres to our ‘Five for Friday’ spotlight, we profile the best local emerging acts. MUSIC NEWS, AROUND THE CLOCK Get breaking music news from ROLLING STONE’s…

ON NOVEMBER 22ND, 1957, A nervous 16-year-old from Forest Hills, Queens, found himself in an absurd position: singing a cute, Everly Brothers-inspired song he’d written called “Hey, Schoolgirl” on American Bandstand, moments after Jerry Lee Lewis had a studio audience full of girls screaming to “Great Balls of Fire”. Standing next to his pompadour’d singing partner, Tom Graph, the kid – who called himself Jerry Landis – meekly delivered the tune. Then he walked offstage, forked over the payola cash required of some Bandstand performers, and went back to the normal teenage life where everyone knew him as Paul Simon. It would be eight years before Simon and Graph (real name: Arthur Garfunkel) would land another hit, a wilderness period that’s quickly glossed over in most Simon books. But Peter…

   WHEN JIMMY BARNES stepped up to our Ed-In-Chief just minutes before heading onstage for his planned Q&A and said, “Let’s just wing it, OK?”, all hope of a civilised chin-wag flew out the window. Instead, the crowd stood transfixed as Barnesy seamlessly flowed between answering audience questions, telling stories and dipping in and out of the songs that inspired him (not to mention the odd Chisel classic). The night was typical of this year’s Live Lodge, with night after night of surprises. Whether it was REMI playing through their new album Divas & Demons for the first time, A.B. Original’s first sold-out show (not to mention the stage invasion by the aptly named “Patriot”), or Luke Million playing his You-Tube-breaking Stranger Things theme, 2016’s Lodge was defined by…

“You get tired of the myths and don’t want to stay in the game. When you are famous you see the lies.” THE ANSWER IS QUICK, BLUNT and impatient. “Yeah, yeah, I agree,” Van Morrison says, responding to a question about a song on his new album, Keep Me Singing. There is a brief silence. “What’s next?” ¶ I had asked him about the first lines on the record, which sum up Morrison’s life in music over five decades: “Put another coin in the wishing well/Tell everybody got to go to hell.” Pressed for additional comment, Morrison, 71, curtly declines. “No, you got it,” he says in his low brogue. “There’s no need to explain it any further.” ¶ It is a beautiful late-summer day in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where…

THEY’RE FINE IF YOU CALL THEM “BROS”: “WE’RE TWO WHITE GUYS WHO MAKE STUPID JOKES AND LIKE TO PARTY.” ALEX PALL HAD a date planned with his girlfriend the other night, but he got stuck in the studio jamming with Chris Martin, so he had to stand her up. It’s not the kind of thing Pall does often, he says, because he likes to make music in the daylight hours, clocking out before sundown. “I treat it like a job,” he says. “I’ve had rappers be like, ‘Let’s meet up at 10 p.m.’ And I’m like, ‘Uh, no!’ I can’t understand that way of working.” But on this one night, hunkered down with Martin in Malibu, “like, a $300 UberX ride from my place in Hollywood”, Pall made an exception,…

Sting 57th & 9th Universal “Dear leaders please do something quick/Time is up, the planet’s sick.” That’s the worst of Sting’s surprise rock return after a decade of Renaissance lutes, stage musical autobiography and other un-danceable shenanigans. But the listless climate change rumination of “One Fine Day” is far from the only clanger here. “50,000”, a half-spoken musing about rock & roll immortality, plays just as clumsily into the hands that would paint him as a pompous pranny intoning his humble wisdom in a deep, thespian rasp that Russell Crowe might deem a tad ponderous. The lead track and single, “I Can’t Stop Thinking About You”, is much more clever, casting elusive inspiration as a lover lost in the snow with a melody and attack that would have fit the…

American Honey Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf Directed by Andrea Arnold “STEADY AS A PREACHER, free as a weed,” goes the Lady Antebellum tune that gives filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s teenage-island-of-misfit-toys road movie its title. You can see why those two things might be aspirations for Star (newcomer Sasha Lane), the teenager we first meet digging through the trash for food, grubby kid siblings in tow. Stability and liberation aren’t things she comes across a lot. Her life is a wreck, her residence is a parody of Southern trashiness (ants on the counter, handsy step-dad in the living room) and this podunk town offers her nothing but poverty and pain. So why wouldn’t that guy (Shia LaBeouf) making eyes at her in a passing minivan attract her attention? And when this Romeo…

When REMI are on stage, you’d be forgiven for thinking they might eschew a solid work ethic in favour of partying and sleeping in. This couldn’t be further from the truth, at least as far as one half of the duo is concerned. When we turn up at drummer/producer Justin “Sensible J” Smith’s house at 10:30 in the morning, the soft-spoken creative force behind REMI is already on the job, digging through music, and listening for potential samples over a morning coffee. “Remi likes his sleep,” chuckles J as he flips vinyl on-and-off dual turntables in his loungeroom. He has the mixer connected to a Sonos Connect streaming to a PLAY:5 smart speaker. When he’s at home, J says he’s never not listening to music. “I think it’d be rare…

ON THE DAY IN 2014 WHEN Sum 41 frontman Deryck Whibley came out of a three-day coma at Cedars-Sinai hospital in L.A., the first person he saw was his mother. “I knew something was really bad, because she lives in Toronto,” he says. “Nothing really made sense, but I knew something bad had happened from drinking.” Whibley didn’t know how bad until he fully regained consciousness. His doctor explained that years of alcohol abuse had left him facing multiple organ failures. “He said to me, ‘You’re barely hanging on’,” says Whibley. “‘We’ll know in the next few days if you’re gonna make it.’” Whibley had been a drinker since he was 17. But it didn’t become a problem until Sum 41 hit the road in support of their 2001 debut…

“As we walked, the air hung heavy with the smell of sewage.” LAST SEPTEMBER, I WAS IN Australia doing shows that took me all the way from Sydney to Perth. From there, as I have been doing the last few tours, I went to South Africa for two shows in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Since 2008, I always visit a township near Hout Bay, outside of Cape Town, called Imizamo Yethu. I was first made aware of the township when I worked on a documentary on HIV and AIDS in South Africa that took me there to interview a man who guides visitors through the winding streets and paths of Imizamo Yethu. The guide, a man named Afrika Monie, is one of the most charismatic and interesting people I have…

“My relationship with Lars, we’ve been friends for a long time,” says Hetfield. “We hate each other, we love each other, but at the end of the day we realise, this works.” THE LONG-HAIRED TWENTYSOMETHING WALK- ing forlornly along the queue outside New York City’s Webster Hall holds in his hands a sign: “I need a miracle”. He is but one in a parade of punters combing the queue for anyone who might have in their possession a spare ticket to tonight’s fan-club-only show by Metallica, the tickets to which were solely available through the band’s website at a cost of $25, with all proceeds going to City Harvest, which rescues food for New York’s hungry. To borrow a line from the quartet’s recent single “Hardwired”, however, tonight that guy…

Tkay Maidza Tkay Dew Process/Universal There’s a lot of expectation riding on the shoulders of young Tkay Maidza. Over the past two years, the Zimbabwean-born, Adelaide-raised 20-year-old has been impressing crowds and cognoscenti at home and overseas with a string of impressive singles and a mini-EP, blessedly obfuscating the memory of one Iggy Azalea and instead earning comparisons to the far more talented Azealia Banks (in talent, not attitude – anyone who’s seen Maidza perform live knows the girl is pure sunshine). By now, she’s had enough smoke blown up her arse to know that she’s a bit of all right, and it shows in the steady-eyed, unapologetic swagger of tracks that, while not as incendiary as the likes of “M.O.B.” or “Switch Lanes”, hold your attention as Maidza ducks…

Billions Paul Giamatti, Damian Lewis, Maggie Siff, Malin Akerman Cr. by Brian Koppelman, David Levien et al Straight out of the gate, Billions is an unapologetic dick-swinging contest that offers two macho character actors masticating the scenery relentlessly. What surprises most is that over the course of its 12-episode first season, the show transforms from guilty pleasure to genuinely compelling drama. Paul Giamatti is obsessed New York district attorney Charles “Chuck” Rhoades, who’s hell-bent on jailing Damian Lewis’s charismatic and corrupt hedge fund billionaire Bobby “Axe” Axelrod. As much as we want to see Wall Street get its comeuppance for pillaging Main Street, our lawman is as much of a rogue egomaniac as his adversary. Moves and countermoves play out in various corridors of power and elite playgrounds until the…