Monday, September 8, 2008

NEW KAISER CHIEFS VIDEO




















It's a party at Animal Collective's house! No, it's a musical based on that episode of the Twilight Zone where the dying rich guy forces a masquerade on his family. Okay, it's just the new video from Kaiser Chiefs, wherein a bunch of folks in funny wildlife masks dance around and make like West Side Story: The Barnyard Years. "Never Miss A Beat" is the single from the band's forthcoming album, Off With Their Heads, due out on October 13, and the song's sense of visceral fun is effectively translated to the kooky antics of the aforementioned characters (though the Chiefs remain conveniently unmasked throughout). For a band that started out so promising and got too big for its britches on its outsized second album, its encouraging to hear them getting back to the proper, punchy, tight-as-a-drum approach in the hands of superproducer Mark Ronson.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

NEW ORDER REDUX


















Well it's about freakin' time. In the wake of deluxe-reissue treatement for the '80s catalogs of everyone from Depeche Mode to Haysi Fantayzee (okay, we were just kidding about the second one, but you never know...) New Order is going the expanded-edition route for their classic, enormously influential '80s output. Movement, Power, Corruption & Lies, Low-Life, Brotherhood, and Technique are all set to greet the 21st century on September 28, complete with bonus discs of alternate versions, b-sides, and other esoterica, and the accompanying booklets will include interviews with all the band members. Here's hoping that A) revisionism will be on the side of justice this time, and all those who gave the woefully underrated Movement short shrift until now will soon be eating their words, and B) the same process will not occur 20 years hence with the deluxe reissue of 2001's Get Ready.