The Arcade Fire has announced the start of their 2010 tour supporting the release of their third album The Suburbs. Its first single, also named “The Suburbs,” was reviewed here on Audiosuede by Daniel a few weeks ago. The tour starts today in Canada, with stops in Chicago at Lollapalooza and New York’s Madison Square Garden in August. Spoon will open for three of the United States stops in Atlanta, Philadelphia and New York. That’s pretty amazing that Arcade Fire have gotten so big that SPOON is opening for THEM. WOW! One dollar from every ticket sale for this tour will go towards Partners in Health, who help impoverished countries get access to medical care. They most recently helped the Haitian community after the 2010 earthquake, a community in which Arcade Fire has strong ties to.
-Felicia
Isis, a band that probably either you know of but don’t care about, once cared about but not anymore, or don’t know, but probably have heard of at least one of their innumerable number of associated side-acts, is no more. Known for their mixture of atmospheric sheen and mathy metal riffs and pioneered by Aaron Turner, who founded the label Hydra Head Records, many think Isis haven’t done anything new or interesting since 2002’s Oceanic. I don’t feel like I have the authority to judge, being more a fan of the atmospheric side of the band rather than the metal aspect, but I know that the members have shown so much prolific potential throughout the decade in other bands/projects such as Windmills by the Ocean, Red Sparowes, and MGR that officially discontinuing the Isis brand may indeed be a good thing. Hopefully the guys will branch out even more and find something new to say under a different name. Read the band’s appropriately bloated and pretentious goodbye letter on their blog here.
-Chris Polley
Nielsen Soundscan is reporting that in the week of May 24-30 4,984,000 albums were sold in the United States. This number represents the single lowest weekly total since Soundscan began keeping track in 1994, and is down almost 1 million copies from the same week last year. Worse yet, the company has said, though hard data doesn’t exist to prove this definitively, this total could be the lowest the industry has seen since the 1970s. All in all, the news should not be especially surprising, in that the industry has been floundering rapidly over the past few years. Still, the numbers are worrisome, as labels and distributors continue to scramble to figure out a way to solve the slumping sales crisis. Though I would like to offer this thought: The 1970s were a time when large labels split and became fractured into smaller distributors and independent operations much like we see today. It’s possible this latest downturn will lead to a boom like the industry saw in the 1980s and early Aughts….or technology and downloading will prevent the sale of music forever and music will become an artform that is literally worth no money to anyone, thus devaluing it and preventing artists from sustaining lives and careers as musicians.
-Christian Hagen
I’ll admit I’m of the nostalgic sort, so maybe I get excited easily by things that don’t really mean all that much. But the video that’s been circling the web of Paul McCartney, performing at the White House ceremony where he was honored with the George Gershwin Award for Popular Song, leading an all-star sing-along of “Hey Jude” with the likes of Jack White, Elvis Costello, Jerry Seinfeld (?), Dave Grohl, and oh yeah THE PRESIDENT AND FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED STATES, makes me a little warm inside. If you listen really closely when the instruments cut out and all you hear is singing, you may be able make out Barack Obama’s voice, hanging out in a lower, almost talk-sing register (though that could just be Faith Hill…HEY-OH!). It’s enough to melt any Beatles fan’s heart a little more than it already is…melted.
-Christian Hagen