Pop Loser

Vice’s track-by-track review of the new Radiohead album is just the best thing on the internet today. It’s so good I had trouble deciding which bit to quote. The album itself wishes it could be half as good as this review. [via]

A clear marker that the Oxford quintet have been keeping pace with the most cutting-edge music of the 20th Century, this is a gloopy, ethereal noisespace that sounds like Burial jamming with M. Ward in a nightbus at the bottom of the Thames on a mixing desk made of ennui and marmalade.

(Source: readability.com)

I’m sick of people using Radiohead as an example of changing the music industry. It’s an argument I’ve had a lot of times. Now we can just use Arcade Fire as the key example. I’m totally okay with that.

Sasha Frere-Jones asks “What do record labels do now?” in the New Yorker.

Well-known acts like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have taken widely publicized steps to conduct business outside the major-label system, sometimes in experimental ways, such as leaving tracks from upcoming albums on U.S.B. drives in bathrooms to be discovered by fans. But both bands had spent more than a decade on major labels, building their audiences with the marketing power of large corporations behind them. In the U.S., Arcade Fire has only ever worked with Merge Records, an independent label from North Carolina, which was started by the musicians Mac McCaughan and Laura Balance, in 1989. The band often records its albums in its own studios, to exacting and personal specifications, and retains ownership of the music, which it licenses to Merge. Its previous two albums have gone gold, or close to it, and “The Suburbs” is expected to do the same, or better.