Mixtape: Natural Self - Neon Hurtz

Bridging off his recently released Neon Hurts My Eyes LP, UK producer Natural Self released a bonus accompanying mixtape Neon Hertz. In the mix, he included a few of his own originals, along with tracks from Colin Stetson, Thom Yorke, Beak>, Portishead, Bjork, and plenty more.

The entire mixtape is free to stream and/or download below. Check out the full tracklist here, courtesy of Potholes In My Blog.

New Atoms For Peace - Judge Jury and Executioner

As we look into the future of 2013, there's already a lengthy list of important releases headed our way. Among the ranks of Phoenix, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Arcade Fire, and (maybe) Daft Punk, Thom Yorke's well-known side project Atoms For Piece has scheduled an album release for late February.

The single "Judge Jury and Executioner" this morning on Zane Lowe's BBC 1 Radio Show, which also features a nice little visualizer video to go with it. Check it out below, and grab Amok February 25 and 26 (U.S.) via XL Recordings.

Friday Bears: New Modeselektor - This (ft. Thom Yorke)

Here's the newest video from Modeselektor and frequent collaborator Thom Yorke, for "This." The single comes from Modeselektor's 2011 album Monkeytown. Check it out below.
 

Wednesday Bears: Burial, Four Tet, and Thom Yorke's 12"

While I may not be paying too much attention to the 14,000 e-mails I get about SXSW (I can't be the only writer not there), I did catch Burial and Four Tet's collaboration with Thom Yorke. The two tracks on the trio's 12" are already well-sold out, but you can listen to them both here, via Gorilla vs. Bear.

Burial, Four Tet, and Thom Yorke - Ego



Burial, Four Tet, and Thom Yorke - Mirror

The King of Limbs, an introspection

In what some could consider shocking news, Pitchfork gave their long-awaited review of Radiohead's new album The King of Limbs today, handing out the lowest rating of any of the band's studio albums (not counting Pablo Honey): a 7.9.

In relative terms, Pitchfork's next lowest rating for a Radiohead album was Amnesiac with a 9.0. Obviously, the fine line where The King of Limbs falls is somewhat of a mystery to this point. Fanfare from the album has been everywhere from sorely disappointing, to splendidly crafted and underrated. Yet, from most viable sources and variable discussions, there's a safe consensus to say that it's no one's preferred Radiohead work.

So, what is it then that deviates where The King of Limbs acclimates itself in the Radiohead catalog? Four years after the release of In Rainbows, an album that seemed underwhelming by some at the time of its release, but has aged remarkably, what possible directions the band would take moving forward seemed unrefined. What has inevitably become, to the disappointment of many, is a downsizing of their work.

Hail to the Thief was a massive sprawl of sounds and complicated ideas often found to be too broad and reveling, making the band that was known for continually manipulating its own creative apex sound like they were trying just a bit too hard. But if In Rainbows was a down-sizing from Hail to the Thief, than The King of Limbs is the band's sordid attempt to minimize anything and everything that made the group seem so impossibly large.

For some, the album is a reversion to the early-2000s sound of the band where the anthemic guitars of the late-90s ceased to be a mechanism of genial comfort and the group learned to expand boundaries they had previously not traversed. In hindsight, that thought may be implausible; there's little to no way to quantify the new album.

The severe intricacy of the eight tracks is often deceiving, but that's largely an inept excuse for a lack of sheer emotionality that innately touches the average Radiohead listener. That very same emotionality that fans experienced with most of the group's previous albums isn't totally absent this time around, but in the same regard isn't anywhere near that of, say, In Rainbows. Much of Thom Yorke's vocal work is muddled behind modifiers and looping rhythms, perhaps hindering the band's most brilliant asset as well.

But despite its honest contractions, The King of Limbs is still an encapsulating collection of songs, especially for the album's latter half. It's unfortunate, however, that the waning moments of the album's final song, "Separator," remind us of Radiohead's best, as Yorke's swirling wails of "Wake me up/wake me up" fill in the vacuum of silence that make many of us wonder when/if The King of Limbs Pt. II will be released.

So is disappointment surely justified, if that's the consensus? Possibly. Again, this is Radiohead. The fact that they made something that was almost universally penned as lacking astonishing exception is something of a frenetic anomaly, considering the group's unparalleled consistency and pace of altering directions. Anything less than stellar can be considered a disappointment.

To give the album the benefit of the doubt, the full impact of the work cannot be honestly contested until either a second half comes out (only a rumor), or a year or two pass. That's the value of a Radiohead album, in reality - too difficult to accurately quantify without repetitively analyzing every microcosm of significance. It's a lengthy process, but one that usually entails work worth the unquestioned merit.

Friday Bears: New Radiohead video - Lotus Flower

One day before the butt-fucking hugely anticipated release of The King of Limbs, Radiohead (via the band's Twitter) released the video version of "Lotus Flower," which has been, up to this point, the first song heard from the album itself.

The video is a mostly contained black and white shot of Thom just kinda dancing the insanies out. The song itself? Well, for one, watching the video is completely distracting - just putting that out there. I'll be able to tell you more once the full album is out.

Radiohead - Lotus Flower

Tuesday Bears: Return of the Bear .... Coachella Lineup Announced

Sorry for the overwhelming delay - with the computer going to Hell and moving around, I had to delay Bears and Bullets for the numbing two weeks. Thankfully, everything has been put back an order and I'm ready to return to the daily routine.

Indio, California's annual Coachella festival lineup has been announced, with with top-heavy oft-rumored acts Jay-Z, Pavement, Muse, Thom Yorke (solo), and Gorillaz headlining among others. The new poster (seen above) lists Yorke next to "????," which would incline to be special guests? A new backing band? We'll see.

Full Lineup:

FRIDAY APRIL 16: Jay-Z, LCD Soundsystem, Them Crooked Vultures, Vampire Weekend, Deadmau5, Public Image Limited, The Specials, Grizzly Bear, Passion Pit, Echo and the Bunnymen, Benny Benassi, Fever Ray, Grace Jones, She & Him, Erol Alkan, The Avett Brothers, Calle 13, The Whitest Boy Alive, The Cribs, La Roux, Yeasayer, Lucero, DJ Lance Rock, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Proxy, Ra Ra Riot, Deer Tick, Wolfgang Gartner, Aeroplane, Iglu & Hartly, Sleigh Bells, P.O.S., Baroness, Hockey, Little Dragon, White Rabbits, Wale, Kate Miller-Heidke, As Tall as Lions, Jets Overhead, Alana Grace, Pablo Hassan.

SATURDAY, APRIL 17: Muse, Faith No More, Tiësto, MGMT, David Guetta, The Dead Weather, Hot Chip, Devo, Coheed and Cambria, Kaskade, 2Many DJ's, Major Lazer, Dirty Projectors, Gossip, Z-Trip, The xx, John Waters, Les Claypool, The Raveonettes, Mew, Sia, Camera Obscura, Tokyo Police Club, Porcupine Tree, Old Crow Medicine Show, Aterciopalados, Bassnectar, Frightened Rabbit, Dirty South, Flying Lotus, Corinne Bailey Rae, Pretty Lights, Shooter Jennings, RX Bandits, The Almighty Defenders, Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros, Craze & Klever, Zoe, The Temper Trap, Portugal. The Man, Band of Skulls, Girls, Beach House, Steel Train, Frank Turner.

SUNDAY, APRIL 18: Gorillaz, Pavement, Thom Yorke????, Phoenix, Orbital, Spoon, Sly and the Family Stone, De La Soul, Julian Casablancas, Plastikman, Gary Numan, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Sunny Day Real Estate, Yo La Tengo, MUTEMATH, Deerhunter, Infected Mushroom, Club 75, Matt & Kim, The Big Pink, Gil Scott-Heron, King Khan and the Shrines, Florence and the Machine, Yann Tiersen, Little Boots, Miike Snow, Talvin Singh, Ceu, B.o.B., Babasonicos, Owen Pallett, The Glitch Mob, Mayer Hawthorne, Local Natives, Rusko, The Middle East, Hadouken!, The Soft Pack, Kevin Devine, Paparazzi, Delphic, One EskimO.

Ticket's for the April 16-18 event officially go on sale Friday, January 22. For more details, head over to the Coachella Website.

Monday Bears: New Moon soundtrack is good, self-confliction

Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series is unmistakably the most popular fad (hopefully) coming out of teenage female (or for that matter all female) culture these days. The books and movies are harrowingly stupid and vapid, which some how makes complete sense to why teenagers are obsessing over it. We all know this and we all know I'm not one to ever write about Twilight, but the soundtrack for the upcoming sequel New Moon is, well, good.

The film features original works ranging from Grizzly Bear to Thom Yorke to Muse, confusing me and other music fans dearly. While it is exciting to hear new music from the likes of Yorke, only hearing through means of terribly constructing and culturally flattening films like New Moon seems like the worst way. Still, for those who value the music for what it is and not what it is attached to, ignoring new work from these artists may be worse than actually seeing the film. Maybe.

The Summit Entertainment produced New Moon is set for release November 20 with the soundtrack scheduled for release next Tuesday, October 20. And if you're wondering if the music will catch on with the kids. Yes, it will. Sigh.

Death Cab for Cutie - Meet Me on the Equinox - MP3

Thom Yorke - Hearing Damage - MP3

Grizzly Bear - Slow Life - MP3

MP3's Courtesy of Pop Tarts Suck Toasted

Friday Bears: New Thom Yorke Video - All For the Best (Mark Mulcahy Cover)

A couple month's ago Thom Yorke premiered his cover of Mark Mulcahy's (former frontman for Miracle Legion and Polaris) single "All for the Best" for Mulcahy's tribute album Ciao My Shining Star: The Songs of Mark Mulcahy.

Today Rolling Stone premiered Melinda Tupling directed video of the cover, which, not surprisingly, doesn't actually feature the Radiohead frontman. Check out the video here.

Ciao My Shining Star is scheduled for release September 29 also features covers from Michael Stipe, The National, and Frank Black among others.

Bonus!: On September 21 Yorke will release his “FeelingPulledApartByHorses”/”The Hollow Earth” along with Yorke's contribution to the New Moon soundtrack (announced tomorrow)