Calling All Neil Young Fans ~ You Better Start Saving Your Pocket Money ~ NY Archives Released June 2nd

Apparently two decades in the planning, the first volume of the Neil Young Archives are to be released by Reprise on June 2nd. The Archive comes in three formats; CD only (8 discs plus booklet), DVD (9 discs plus extra bonus early years disc for pre orders plus full colour 236 page hardbound book) or Blu-ray (ditto)

Click on the link on his website and there comes a message from the man himself in which he suggets you might prefer the Blu-ray edition.

Why? “It’s an old and funky virtual filing cabinet that spans my musical career, from the very beginning into the future”. The future? Yes, for it seems that once purchased, additional material (rare recordings, demos and photographs) can and will be added to your very own personal Neil Young filing cabinet. Naturally, the material will cover Buffalo Springfield, CSNY and Crazy Horse.

If pre ordering, as far as I understand, you will immediately be sent a (unavailable elsewhere) 7″ of his first band, the Hank Marvin & the Shadows influenced, The Squires, plus a Blu-ray preview of disc 0 (the early years). All discs in each format and the book are available individually.

This package is obviously pushing the bondaries on the career overview boxed set and I’m sure we can all think of many that we hope will follow suit. I’m sure the good people at Blu-ray have bunged Neil a fair bit of cash to act as a salesman for the product, but he does appear to have some integrity and my feeling is that this will be a package not only aimed at trawling in a lot of dough, but that it will actually be aimed at the fan. i.e. a genuine feast for genuine fans. Something I wouldn’t feel so confident about in the hands of the Stones, for example.

Two problems for me: a) I haven’t got $300 to spare and b) I’m not a Neil Young fan ~ but I sure wish I was. This sounds like it’s going to be the dog’s turnips and all NY fans had better start saving now.

Bang! This is How You Start a Career ~ Track One Side One of Roxy Music’s Debut

I have already written here about Roxy Music’s impact when they first sensationally landed on planet earth somewhere around 1972 when reviewing the excellent Proxy Music a few weeks ago. But it bears repeating ~ John Peel rated them as the band he thought the most original; the band whose roots could not be pinned down, who seemed to come from nowhere.

But, of course, all bands have to start somewhere and Roxy started with a song called Re-make/Re-model. This is the first in a series where I shall highlight those who have truly grasped the nettle. Some great bands never got the chance to make an album, many shabby ones have, but the point is, when you get the chance you have to take it. This is your chance to announce to the world how great you are. Give it the kitchen sink, all guns blazing; we want Krakatoa, Godzilla and the Charge of the Light Brigade. Track one, side one, should be your statement of intent, first impressions and all that.

Re-make/Re-model is not only still an exciting track, thirty-seven years on, it has the requisite frisson in spades; the promise that not only the next four minutes of your life are going to be put to good use, but that you are going to immediately want to hear it again with the realisation that you have just fallen in love with a new band. And what could possibly be better than that? (what? oh that. Yes, well if you consider him or her more important than music, then yes maybe).

It still sounds so damn left field and if that is not enough, without it/them we wouldn’t have had post-punk (Magazine, Banshees, PiL, Joy Division), Human League, Pulp, Radiohead, Portishead, Air, The Associates, Franz Ferdinand…

Released two months before their debut single Virginia Plain, this truly is the first howl of a brand new music.

Great Lost Singles ~ Parade by Torch & White

We’ve had this up our sleeve for a few weeks, but who’s counting days when this gem has been gathering dust for the past quarter of a century. With Pass the Dutchie at Number 1, having knocked the execrable Eye of the Tiger off the top spot, the second single by Roy White and Steve Torch entered the Hit Parade (the Top 75 I think it was back then). By the time that Culture Club knocked Musical Youth off the summit it had disappeared, having peaked at number 54.

It will not take long for you to realise the appeal of Parade to Pop Junkie. If you had told me this was a track from Scott’s Climate of Hunter I would have immediately dug out my copy, surprised that there is something so good within. (By the way, did anyone else think it was called Climate of the Hunter? I did for years and I was one of the 32 people who bought it. It is allegedly Virgin’s worst-selling album ever, which I’ve always found slightly unbelievable when you consider some of the tosh they put out. We can come back to that another day).

I digress, but it must be said that we are witness to the World’s Best Scott Walker karaoke (and that is not meant to be churlish - it is very high praise). We are not the first on the net to wonder what could have been for this pair who emerged from Liverpool’s Pink Military. A Peel session, several tv appearances (including The Tube), and a look melding several Bowie eras (Thin White Duke, Heroes & Let’s Dance), the climate should have been ideally suited to such an act, but like many others, something just didn’t click with Joe Public. Perhaps talent and great songs…?

Miracle sounds a little too Trevor Horn for my ears, but Heartbeat and Who’s Asking You are also worth checking out as is the excellent Blood and Alcohol by The Truemen, which is (as far as I can ascertain) the current aka of Roy White.

New Albums to Plug in Hoxton ~ The Masonics, Priscillas & Dirthole Live

It has been a quiet week, which has been quite welcome after the recent deaths and sombre anniversaries that we have noted here at Pop Junkie, but it was far from quiet at the Hoxton Bar & Grill last night which presented a rather splendid and diverse triple-bill of The Masonics, The Priscillas and The London Dirthole Company, all with new albums for sale.

I have to declare an interest right at the outset as some very close friends of mine were among the performers lest you doubt my objectivity. Then again, what is a blog other than a starting point for correspondence and discussion?

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Ultimate list of bands on Twitter - Billy Bragg, Coldplay, Yoko Ono and more

Here you go. The ultimate list of all your favourite bands on Twitter courtesy of an unwitting PR person.

I am off to folllow Billy Bragg.

If you are a real glutton for musical microblogging punishment check out MusicTwitters

** UPDATE - credit where it is due (thanks for the tip Andrew) - there’s an updated list as a Google doc here

1/24/2009 Beastie Boys http://twitter.com/beastieboys Rap/Rock No updates yet. Is this legit?

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1/24/2009 Billy Bragg www.twitter.com/billybragg

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1/24/2009 Bjork http://www.twitter.com/bjork Alternative http://www.bjork.com/ A lot of welcome and hi’s to followers. Not engaging.

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1/24/2009 Chris Clayton http://twitter.com/ChrisClayton Hip-Hop http://thyst.com

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1/24/2009 Coldplay http://www.twitter.com/coldplay Pop http://www.coldplay.com Just starting up. Updates looks to by PR or Management

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The roots of every heavy metal band name explained!

How do metal bands choose their monikers? No, not by smearing themselves with virgin’s blood and standing inside a chalk pentagon to wait for Satan to suggest one. Although funnily enough, that is how Keane did it…

No, there’s actually a fairly strict taxonomy of heavy metal band names, which is laid out marvellously in this chart. In brief, there are five basic categories: Death, Deadly Things, Religion, Animals, and Badass Misspellings. And under those are various subcategories - The Occult and Pleas For Help under Death, for example, or Biblical, Satanic and Pagan under Religion.

Every band name is covered, in short. Mastodon? They’re in the Animals–>Imaginary–>Extinct category. Sign Of The Beast? They’re in Religion–>Biblical–>Book Of Revelation. Sepultura? They’re under Badass Misspellings–>Foreign Sounding–>Actually Foreign. And so on. If you see yourself as the next metal gods, you HAVE to consult this chart first.

(via Duke Listens)

Britney Spears recruiting Web 2.0 guru

Kudos to Britney Spears (or her people) for launching a Twitter feed - she’s got more than 21,000 followers already, and that’s without actually tweeting much since Christmas. Admittedly, she may have been put off by the recent hack attack that saw someone break into her Twitter account and post a juvenile message about her down-belows (”razor-sharp teeth” apparently).

Anyway, Britney’s push into Web 2.0 seems set to continue this year, judging by a job ad looking for someone to work as her ‘2.0 Media Manager’. The job involves sorting Britney’s Twitter presence, but also MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, adding new content and “engaging with fans” (i.e. countering rumours that the star has gone batshit-mental in Hollywood again).

It’s a sign of how seriously big artists are now taking Twitter, Facebook and the rest, seeing them as an important direct channel of communication with their fans (not to mention a good way to plug whatever it is they’re promoting at the time).

Musebin is our new favourite Music 2.0 site

The greatest short album review of all-time is, of course, Charles Shaar Murray’s review of Lee Hazelwood’s ‘Poet, Fool or Bum’ in the NME in 1973. In full: “Bum.” An honourable second place goes to music blog Pitchfork’s review of Jet’s ‘Shine On’ - no text, just a YouTube video of a chimp urinating into its own mouth.

However, we’re getting very excited about a new website called Musebin, set up purely for people to post short, snappy reviews of albums. How short and snappy? 140 characters. It’s like Twitter, but purely for ranting (not at length) about music. Ace!

The site has just come out of private beta, so you can sign up here. There are already some reviews that put the professional critics to shame. Such as this verdict on Snow Patrol’s ‘A Hundred Million Suns’: “What happened to you, Snow Patrol? You went from great to good to horrid.”.

Or this on the new Animal Collective album: “Sounds like: naked electric people jumping around the wilderness, wildly gesticulating, like if Walt Whitman was driven mad by Socrates.” Or this: “Chinese Democracy: What a piece of fucking shit.” Or… Well, you get the point. Now get scribbling.

iTunes goes DRM free - too little too late?

So by now I am sure you have all heard that iTunes has finally stepped up in an attempt to be more competitive; not that they had much choice with Amazon’s attempt to undercut them with the recent launch of their store.

Yet for some reason, it seems as though there is a lot of excitement over the fact that Apple will finally be offering DRM-free music. Over here at Popjunkie, there seems to be a general consensus that this is, well, too little too late. Apple has done well over the past six years with the iTunes store and this format, currently holding about 75% of the digital music market. But, by failing to address the restrictive nature of DRM music, they essentially opened the door to competition. It will be interesting to see if they will maintain their market hold, now that they have jumped on the DRM-free bandwagon.

I should probably also point out in an attempt to differentiate themselves from Amazon, DRM-free music bought from the iTunes store, will be in the iTunes Plus format, a higher-quality 256 Kbps AAC encoding, and for the audiophile, you will have the option of upgrading your current library to the higher-quality, DRM-free format for 30 cents a song. So that would cost me about oh, $6,000. No thanks!

Too little too late guys.

Laura Scott

EMI wants to be Last.fm (kind of)

Major label EMI has relaunched its website in a Web 2.0 stylee. The revamped EMI.com now offers all manner of audio-streaming video-playing music-discovering social-networking goodness, based mainly around its own artists, of course.

You could interpret it as EMI trying to take on independent sites like Last.fm, Imeem and even MySpace. The label says that’s not the case though: “EMI.com is designed to be a learning lab. It will help us gain even more knowledge about consumers’ preferences and choices,” says the label’s Alex Haar.

“Those insights will be invaluable to our artists, helping them respond to fans in a more relevant way. This is the beginning of a longer term experiment. In the coming months, we will continue to add content and features to the site.”

Those new features will include embeddable widgets and the ability to buy tracks, apparently. Would you go to a record label’s site to discover new music, or do you prefer existing sites like those mentioned above? Post a comment with your views!

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