Dublin band Sickboy make pretty enjoyable music that isn’t particularly out of the ordinary; better than most stuff on the modern rock stations, but not exactly revolutionary, either.

But check out the video for their new single, Silence In Conversation, which was made on a copy machine. Literally.

Director Lorcan Finnegan made thousands of copies with the singer’s face smooshed down on the platen glass. Then he filmed the rest of the band against a white background and made photocopies of the film stills. It’s pretty awesome.

[via Wooster Collective]

Isaac Hayes, musician, composer, bearded fellow, honorary king of Ghana, and the first non-acting black man to ever win an Academy Award, died yesterday at his home in Tennessee.  He was 65, and apparently on a treadmill when it happened.  I was never a huge fan–the Shaft Soundtrack is great, but then there was that whole dreadful Chocolate Salty Balls thing–but I thought it might be nice to watch him perform Walk On By in some sort of abstract mod laundromat.

His version of the song, of course, also provided the inspiration for Hooverphonic’s 2Wicky, a song which I happened to come across when I was alphabetizing my CDs today.  It samples, quite liberally, Hayes’s version of the Bacharach standard.  Here’s that video:

Now that retired musician and lover of visual ghastliness MIA suddenly has a song in the trailer to a teen comedy (and the current #3 song on the itunes store), it seems like the American masses are finally, finally starting to take notice. Specifically, the kinds of Americans that consult E! Online when they have a question. Mela in Los Angeles writes:

I really like that M.I.A. single “Paper Planes.” But I hear she supports terror. Is that true? Is she a terrorist?

I don’t know about you, but when I want to know whether or not someone is a terrorist I use E! to get my answers.

Anyway. Here’s a terrible video of some lamewads who were at least hip enough to catch on to this song last year:

[via idolator]

This week you can head over to MTV.com to vote for the nominees in the Best Video By A New Artist and Best Dancing In A Video Categories. While I feel obligated to vote for the not-so-new-anymore-but-awesome-nonetheless Bat For Lashes in the first category, I’m conflicted about who to vote for in the dancing category! Should I go for the Fruit of the Loom inspired dancing of Yelle’s “A Cause Des Garcons,” or the ghost dancing in the Raveonettes’ bleak teen drama video for “Dead Sound?”

Help! I only have until tomorrow morning to decide, and the fate of the VMAs is clearly on my shoulders!

*

[*No, I don’t understand that speech bubble at the beginning, either.]

What the hell was I so busy doing last October that I didn’t get out to see — and hear — this amazing movie in a theater? Oh yeah, the Red Sox were in the World Series. No excuse! The reviews had certainly been great; The New York Times loved it, Ebert swooned. But perhaps I was not the only Beatles fanatic fearful that the music would get Idol-ized and belted out in that dreadful Broadway howl. And maybe I was conflating it with the Vegas-y cheese that is Cirque du Soleil:Love. Maybe I was just out of weed. But I am here to tell you, these arrangements and performances are so original and beautiful, you will hear this music in a whole new way*. The movie holds up in every other respect as well. The story is genuinely poignant, never cloying. As to the visuals, they are so astounding, getting high would be redundant. Love is all you need.

*’I Want to Hold Your Hand’ made me cry.

For those of you that like music, drinking, dark wood, or the opportunity to drink cynar in public, Jason Knuckles Tranchida and Timothy O’Keefe and I will be playing tunes at Local 121 tonight. Not sure what I feel like playing yet, but since I’m on a big 80’s kick lately there might be some Lisa Lisa involved.

Local 121
10 PM
Washington St
Between Wheels and the bus stop

Heard a sliver of this at past weekend’s Providence is Burning. It’s Muscles. Go Tuesday!

Tonight tonight tonight is your last chance to catch Providence’s own Ammanuel Santa Anna in the skankeriffic local ska sensation the Nice Ups before he leaves us FOREVER for Colorado. They’ll be playing tonight at the Living Room with the Jerk Tones and some band that has the last surviving Ramone in it.

Doors at 8PM, Nice Ups go on at 11.

We’ll miss you, Ammanuel.

Thanks to Joe.My.God, I just discovered Cake Wrecks, a new blog that hilariously analyzes the worst in professional cake decorating. It covers everything from tacky airbrushing to mysteriously inappropriate photo cakes [See right. Under what circumstances would you give that cake to someone you address as Mister?] It also has cakes disguised as meat, and a number of cakes with baby motifs, making you wonder what sort of person would ever want to spend their baby shower dissecting a marzipan newborn.

And, to make up for my lack of ability to post that Marissa Nadler video earlier, here’s something I just found on the Youtube.

Who knew there even was a clean version of this song? Or that the clean version would take out the line about the Vietnam War?

The MTV awards have always been kind of a crapshoot (or crapfest, depending on how nice you want to be.) In twenty-five years of its existence, the network has yet to figure out whether or not to be celebrating the best videos, the flashiest videos, the most entertaining singers, or just the videos for the songs that the tweens are most likely to be enjoying at that specific moment, regardless of how boring the clips themselves might be.Maybe that’s why they’ve decided to make pretty much every category a Viewer’s Choice this year. You can go to mtv.com now to vote for Best Female Video and Best Male Video. Former AS220 resident Marissa Nadler’s up for the former, along with 123 other people (literally.) She’s not getting lots of votes, I don’t think, since she’s currently listed in the ninth row of the third page of nominees, and I can’t imagine that anybody but me is bored enough to read that far down the list. She is beating Lykke Li and Karina Pasian, though, which is something. I really likethe video for “Bird On Your Grave”, actually, and the song’s grown on me since I first heard it last fall.

In the Best Male Video category, the top 40 nominees are all hip-hop videos from boys that twelve-year old girls like (Chris Brown has three of the top eight videos, currently) but Rhode Island native Elvis Perkins is currently the 177th most viewed nominee, ahead of the far more endearing Thurston Moore and Jens Lekman.

Tons more stuff lined up for tonight. More pix after break.

(more…)

And beer. The Department of Environmental Management has declared Saturday another Air Quality Alert Day. This means all RIPTA bus lines are free — including the beach routes (but not special services). So, you could go to the beach where they have sand and seaweed and sunburns OR you can just zip back and forth to the IndieArts Fest in Kennedy Plaza all day long.

Fest sched/1PM to 11PM/three music stages/a groovy light-show tunnel/ cute dj’s/a beer garden/a yard sale/did I mention the cute dj’s

That’s as good a description of Ponytail as anything I could make up. Tonight is our chance to find out what the Baltimore press has been going on about. Much high praise for the band but it’s

Molly Siegel, the screeching and cooing Thumbelina who sounds like Ari Up imitating Elmo and Cookie Monster, that makes Ponytail something special.

I’m not hearing Cookie Monster frankly, and the guys are pretty damn special too. Check out the Aug/Sep issue of Bust. The band takes you on a tour of Baltimore where they met at the Maryland Institute College of Art (wonder if they know my niece.) The amazing video on their myspace (very bottom) indicates that their tuition dollars were not wasted.

Check out songs ‘Beg Waves’ and ‘Die Allman Bruder’ and tell me they won’t be insane live. If you are in need of a soul-cleansing spazz-out then get your sweaty carcass out to Olneyville tonight. Dear god it’s gonna get ripe.

starts 11-ish/Jeremy’s Sloth Zone/50 Agnes Street

The Obama team stunned us all with their decision to move his nomination acceptance speech from the 19,000–seat Pepsi Center to the 76,000–seat Invesco Field, home of the Denver Broncos. Today, the Dems’ Convention Committee announced another exciting twist, in the form of three special performances: Kanye West, Wyclef Jean, and N.E.R.D.

Rolling Stone reports:

This year’s Democratic National Convention Committee revealed that a trio of hip-hop artists — Kanye West, Wyclef Jean and N.E.R.D. — will perform when the party gets together in Denver. A native of Barack Obama’s Chicago, West was likely included to keep all those politicians’ egos in check. Let’s just hope Obama’s speech doesn’t run long, otherwise Democrats might be in for a long night. Wyclef is becoming as well known for his humanitarian work with Haiti as his music, so his appearance at the convention makes sense. The most left-field pick is N.E.R.D., though the Democrats obviously view the band’s single “Everybody Nose” — with its chorus of “All the girls standing in the line for the bathroom” — as a shocking indictment of the current administration’s futile War on Drugs.

Other celebrities slated for attendance include Scarlett Johansson, Ben Affleck, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, but let’s pray that Scarlett isn’t performing.

I seem to have gotten at least part of my Christmas wish — it appears that former Darkness frontman, Justin Hawkins, has indeed gotten his shit together. He is launching a new project called Hot Leg which sounds like it totally rocks (no ocarinas and harmoniums for these boys). But here’s the local connection… listed among Hot Leg’s influences on their  myspace page is none other than the Upper Crust. We are all connected.

Here they are performing an acoustic set. They’ll be plugged in tonight or I’ll kick their ass.  Also tonight Chris Rosenquest and Michael Minto.

10PM/downstairs at Trinity Brewhouse/186 Fountain Street/no cover