“Just to be able to lift up their eyes to a sky not black with savage devouring birds…”

Motown and Soul music has made a strong comeback with Blue-Eyed Soul singers like Adele, Amy Winehouse, Duffy and Jamie Lidell. The U.K. has definitely monopolized the genre with some phenomenal talents, until now. Fitz and The Tantrums are a Los Angeles-based Soul group that has managed to join the ranks of Mayer Hawthorne and Cee Lo Green in the American Neo-Soul scene.

Their first full length album Pickin’ Up the Pieces was released in August and channels the musical elements of Motown greats like Marvin Gaye with tinges of Crosby, Stills and Nash. The group recorded their first EP Songs for a Break Up, Vol. 1 in lead vocalist Michael Fitzpatrick’s living room and still managed to create a great classic sound. Fitzpatrick used the same method for the full length album with much success.

If you are into the soul classics and the Neo-Soul movement, check out Fitz and the Tantrums’s single Money Grabber (above). It’s bound to get your toes tapping.

Nothing screams it’s Christmas (or perhaps the Apocalypse) like Peaches, the Canadian-born Electronic-Punk musician, performing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar. Whether it be the end of the world or the Second Coming, store up on water and rations because this is happening.

Peaches, well known for her gender-bending, fist-pumping, screaming, vodka-fueled shows, began performing the one-woman rendition of the rock opera earlier this year. Aptly titled Peaches Christ Superstar, the performance is a stripped-down version of the epic 1970 musical featuring Electro musician Chilly Gonzales on piano and Peaches performing the rock opera in its entirety with no additional music backing.

It really makes you wonder, but why?

Peaches:

“When I was sixteen I often sang the whole musical to myself all alone in my room. It tells an entire story without spoken text, only with vocals, in the style of a rock opera. I’m a performer, my concerts are extravagant and play with exaggerations. This project allows me to do without all this. I want to confront this task totally exposed, because it is a possibility. It’s a question of stamina.”

(read the full article)

A mid-’90s side-project for Paul Oakenfold — somewhat mystifyingly marketed as Grace, State of Grace, and Planet Perfecto feat. Grace — whose “Not Over Yet” was a club staple of the day and still maintains the cool, intense, obsessive, and vaguely dark sound I remember when I first heard it.

Alison Goldfrapp — you know, that ahead-of-every-curve thrush whom the daringly original Lady Gaga and Christina Aguilera have been ripping off for years — manages to outdo even herself in what is likely the closest I’ll ever get to seeing my dream of a live-action adaptation of Jem & The Holograms fulfilled. Watch as The Little Voice (looking like my beloved, still shelf-bound Starburst She-Ra) and her coterie of aerobicizing Liliths take back the night from The Knights In Satin‘s Service. Not even Anne Rice‘s Akasha could embody a more splendid Queen of The Damned.

I’m jizzing rainbows right now.

Presenting an assembly-line floorfiller from the early ’90s heyday of Bitch-Can’t-Sing Italo House that became a dance chart Number 1 smash and a gay club staple thanks to its perfectly-balanced piecemeal design: typically ace production by super producer Gianfranco Bortolotti, some seriously ballsy sampling, a pulsating bass line worthy of Bomb The Bass, hilariously inept lip-synching, then-innovative video effects, and an unintelligible chorus ranking up there with Manfred Mann‘s “Blinded By The Light” — interpreted as anything and everything from “Peter Pan had a plan!” to “Take a perv at my pants!”

Nensha, bitches.

It’s a term I tangentially referred to in an earlier post this month, and a theory I’m frankly fascinated with.

Its essence is this: the human mind with all its untapped power has the ability to psychically impress or burn an image into our physical reality, and thus alter it irrevocably. Post-War Japanese researchers devoted much effort into proving its existence — it would later serve as the basis for the nation’s much-praised film Ringu and its equally effective American remake The Ring — but the doctrine was for decades deemed merely a The Men Who Stare At Goats-type of new age hokum. A flight of fantasy. A failure.

All that changed in 1999 when Nensha was revealed to be a wholly factual (and utterly terrifying) phenomenon brought about not to revolutionize telecommunications or create a super soldier, but from sheer corporate music industry greed and folly.

An affront to Nature of the highest order. (read the full article)

“Arcing ropes of jism.” How could I not open my song of praise to Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme and not feature that description? I had to work it in somehow.

Sure, flying jism is a visual you’d associate with a porn site — but not a Joe Cocker song. And yet that’s the way Homme — the sexy and smart frontdude for the Queens — describes his reaction to a certain snare drum sound that he’s been “chasing” (to mimic and record) ever since he heard it on the Cocker tune.

The jism quote was featured in a recent Pitchfork interview that celebrates the release of the Queen’s exhilarating new album Era Vulgaris.

The title is Latin for “common era.” But don’t take that as an arty snub against our culture’s Last Days cluster fuck. Homme enjoys the times we’re all wallowing in, and considers the current zeitgeist a character building challenge — or as he puts it: (read the full article)