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During the second encore of Sunday’s Radiohead concert for Haiti, Thom Yorke debuted “Lotus Flower,” a brand-new track presumably one that will end up on their next album.  It’s just him on guitar but it has all the trademarks you’d expect from the band — cryptic and mumbly lyrics, a coiled energy, and some sweeet falsetto.  [via]

Looks like Thom Yorke is going to retire his new band with Flea and stop recording just singles and head back into the studio with the rest of Radiohead to record a follow-up to In Rainbows this winter.

“In a festival heavy on over-familiar or unimpressive bands, it was left to last night’s closing act Radiohead to wrong-foot everyone. The odds on their angst-ridden singer Thom Yorke’s first words being ‘Whassup?’ followed by the initial hit song they’ve all but disowned, ‘Creep’, would have been prohibitively long,” writes Nick Hasted for The Independent. It’s disarming to hear Yorke turn himself into a Budweiser commercial.  Still, there’s no doubting how good “Creep” followed by “The National Anthem” sound together.

 

Last we checked in with Radiohead, frontman Thom Yorke said the band has sworn off making full-length LPs and instead was just going to release songs and EPs whenever they felt.  Well, apparantly, whenever they felt like it has meant two new songs in the past two weeks. 

After the band released a song in tribute of the late-World War I veteran Harry Patch about a week or so ago, “These Are My Twisted Words” hit the Internet late last night after it was posted to a torrent site. It sounds enough like them (the vocals and guitar lines sound very Radiohead), Pitchfork says of the song, yet ”we haven’t received any confirmation that it actually is.”

Max Tannone (DJ Minty Fresh) had such success mashing up Radiohead and Jay-Z that he’s back for another round in The Encore. This time around he’s only dropped five songs, but if you enjoyed the strange collaboration the first time around, and god did we ever, a second helping for the second half of the year will do you well.  It’s a free download so there ya go.  Five new tunes to get the day started.

Are overdubs going to be the remix/mashup of 2K9?  It’s doubtful because so many of the ones on the site are just terrible.  The creators are taking various elements of the songs and simply laying them on top of one another.  Sometimes you get lucky though, like this overdub between Radiohead’s “15 Step” and jazz maestro Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.”

It’s an amazing synergy between the two.   The textures blend nicely between the saxophone and piano of “Take 5″ with the vocals, the snapping rhythms of the drums, bassline, and other noises from “15 Step.”

Radiohead & Dave Brubeck – “Five Step”

I could take or leave the Grammy’s.  Actually leave them. But Radiohead with USC’s Marching Band?  That’s a total keeper.

And if you care about the winners and that sort of thing.

A little bit ago, Radiohead released a video for “House of Cards” featuring a 3D image of Thom Yorke’s head. The video was shot using 3D plotting techniques about the shapes and relative distances of objects. The video was created entirely with visualizations of that data. No cameras or lights were used at all. The band released the data used in the video, possibly in hopes that people would recreate the video or do some cool things with it.

Someone went through the data bit by bit and reproduced it painstakingly with Legos. Brick. By. Brick. And then animated it with time lapse photography. Obviously there is a bit of fakery involved here, along with digitally rendered Legos, but otherwise this is a cool bit of ephemera.

Oddly, it looks like the Talking Heads album cover for Remain in the Light. We didn’t stop there though, we’ve rounded up the best Radiohead-Lego mashups for you. MORE »

Seems Thom Yorke, Johnny Greenwood and company have debuted a few new songs whilst on tour in Europe, including one named “Super Collider” and a cover of Portishead’s “The Rip.”  Hypeful has the Mp3s if you want to add them to your collection.  Thanks to Lucas for the heads up.

“Super Collider” was played at both Dublin shows and was only previously soundchecked.

Radiohead – “Super Collider”

Radiohead – “The Rip (Portishead cover)”

(Thanks Lucas!)

Back during the hoopla of Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want craze for In Rainbows the band posted several tracks that made up their song “Nude.” They held a contest for people to remix the song and some of the entries were pretty worthwhile. The problem was the song was in 6/8 time with only about 60 bpm (beats per minute).

The contest wasn’t really fair because most of the submissions clocked in at the standard 4/4 time with layers of the original song thrown in. It wasn’t so much a remix as it was a paste and cut job.

James Houston didn’t get his submission in on time for the contest, but he did create something truly spectacular. Something that works as a recreation of the song on one level and on another level pays homage to Radiohead’s infatuation with technology and computers.

Using obsolete technology like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum for the guitars, HP Scanjet 4c for bass, an array of harddrives for vocals and FX, and Epson LX-86 dot matrix printer as drums, Houston has created a song which is horrible. As he notes, “I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there. It doesn’t sound great, as it’s not supposed to.”

Yet, at about the 1:45 mark of the song, when all the instruments coalesce it does sound like something wonderfully strange. A song created in the past with the future in mind.

Also, here is the Radiohead version for comparison’s sake. This was filmed during their Scotch Mist performance.

Could Radiohead have signalled the future zero price point of business?  I know, I know, they actually wanted you to pay something for In Rainbows and most folks did.  However, this was the first time the mainstream took note that something could possibly cost nothing.

Wired examines why $0.00 is the future of business.   It’s a very long article, but a fascinating read, for anyone who is interesting in this sort of thing.  Because of the egalitarian nature of the internet, it’s forced companies to find new ways to market themselves and stand out from the crowded field.

But until recently, practically everything “free” was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You’d get one thing free if you bought another, or you’d get a product free only if you paid for a service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It’s as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)

You know this freaky land of free as the Web. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2007 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal.

The NYC multiday festival, that actually takes place in NJ, will be headlined by Radiohead.

The festival is being put on by AEG Live and Goldenvoice, the folks behind Coachella.  The music festival takes place 8/8-8/10 at Liberty State Park.

BTW: Johnny Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood is amazing.  Just thought you should know, if you didn’t already.

So by all accounts the Bosstones simply rocked the Middle East and their fans for a good five night stand. I didn’t get a chance to go, seeing as tickets sold out in seven minutes, and I don’t live in Boston anymore and thinking about not being there only really makes me kinda sad.

But fans of The Mighty Mighty Bosstones speak as if this was something that needed to happen, something that was cathartic, an Christmas present you secretly hope for but don’t think you’ll get but then there it is underneath the tree and all in the world is alright.

[CRED]
There are lots of great photos up on Flikr from their run at the Middle East and even some great ones of their NYE show in Providence, R.I. I thought there would be more video of the event, but it’s not great quality and with everyone being so cognizant of YouTube and video these days you wouldn’t think that would be the case. I guess I’d rather have people going to the show who just wanna rock out and enjoy it and aren’t so concerned with getting video.

But here’s a sampling of some of the best I could find.

Cowboy Coffee 12/30

Never Lose My Wallet 12/30

Dr. D 12/30

Simmer Down/Rascal King 12/30

You can almost see the sweat and excitement and joy just emanating from the audience and the band. Can it get much better? Here’s an account from Missmp who was on hand:

So. The Bosstones. I don’t even know what to say! Everyone danced. Everyone sang along. Everyone threw their hands up at the right times–even my husband when they covered Rudie Can’t Fail! (Which was hysterical, because the girl in front of me was clearly there with her scally-capped boyfriend, and she knew the Bosstones songs but looked mighty confused when everyone was singing along to Rudie. Her boyfriend finally went, “It’s an old Clash song!” which nearly made Jay pass out. Sacrilege!)

And that pretty much sums up my feelings on the Mighty Mighty Bosstones: they’re the embodiment of everything I love about my home city–loyalty, attitude, self-deprecation, idealism, work ethic, and a gruff exterior masking a marshmallowy center. All that, plus a beat you can dance, scream, mosh, and drink to. What’s not to love?

Not exactly an in depth review but if you want the ins-and-outs you can by all means head over here or here for an actual review of the show.

On a personal note, it’s good to be back. I spent yesterday working on some changes for the site and we have a few more to come, but it was mighty difficult to just put the baby down for almost two weeks and not stop by and check in on her once. I hope you missed us, I hope you’re excited for year number 2.

It’s amazing being away and realizing we missed so many good things to share with you, but then we almost feel like we didn’t miss that much either, ya know? If you’re lucky maybe I’ll tell you about my flight home from Boston to Portland. Let’s just say one lucky flight attendant got a vomit present from yours truly. Good times, good times.

Unrelatedly, did anyone spend their NYE with Radiohead? We didn’t but we did enjoy watching the program Scotch Mist the next day.

We’ll be back tonight to clean out the closet on movie reviews we watched over the break and then we’ll be back to our regular scheduled programming.