David Meir Grossman

Cat Power reemerges, pretty triumphantly, at Terminal 5:

Cat Power’s spent a lifetime working around certain types of music, and Sun was a step into the unknown. Mistakes, like the vocal mix on “Human Being” and a few other tracks, are bound to happen. But the peaks she’s reaching are higher than ever before.

Bio: David Meir Grossman is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be found on Twitter at @davidmeirrobot.

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Cat Power reemerges, pretty triumphantly, at Terminal 5

Cat Power’s spent a lifetime working around certain types of music, and Sun was a step into the unknown. Mistakes, like the vocal mix on “Human Being” and a few other tracks, are bound to happen. But the peaks she’s reaching are higher than ever before. More

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on January 30th, 2013 3:00pm

 
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Brooklyn label Norton Records, back from the brink after Sandy

Norton remains a primarily regional, and a primarily in-person label, and they rely on the annual WFMU Record Fair (normally held in November) for a huge portion of their annual sales. “I think we’ll get seven or eight albums ready, books, a lot of repressings. So we were ready to go in with the guns blazing.” Instead Sandy not only wiped out a good deal of the label’s stock but also ended up canceling this year’s Record Fair, a double blow to the label. Norton had lost 175,000 records right off the bat, including a brand-new series of Rolling Stones cover singles that were supposed to have been their Record Fair feature. The 25,000 more records that weren’t a total loss were going to require serious measures to make saleable. Norton Records faced an aficionado's nightmare on an apocalyptic level. More

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on January 16th, 2013 2:55pm

 
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Louis C.K. and Chris Rock deliver laughs and raise funds for Staten Islanders

"When your guy [Borough President James P. Molinaro] said 'Fuck the Red Cross!’" he said. The sold-out audience marked its assent with raucous applause. "You hear him saying the Red Cross is dogshit, and then you see Chuck Schumer standing behind him, wanting to put his hand on his face, thinking 'I'm a Senator, I can't deal with this.' I love the people out here." More

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on November 19th, 2012 12:35pm

 
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A fond farewell from Glen Campbell at Carnegie Hall

For aficionados, there a few life stages that had to be touched upon, and he didn’t disappoint: his introspective collaborations with songwriter Jimmy Webb ("Galveston", the famed "Wichita Lineman"), the upbeat duets with Bobbie Gentry ("Try a Little Kindness"), that time he co-starred in True Grit with John Wayne (no song, but delightful bit of stage banter: "I couldn't act worth a patoot, but I saved that movie!"). More

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on October 15th, 2012 3:15pm

 
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Frank Ocean pours it out to a New York audience

Yet whatever his efforts to stymie his own categorization, Ocean writes music that at the very least owes a great debt to R&B, as his opening song last night, a Sade cover, attested. For Ocean the traditions of soul and R&B function more as a starting point or a pivot from which to push off into new territory, both musically and thematically. Ocean gives us introspective confusion amid a melange of electronic pulses, bursts of lush instrumentation, rock samples, and sparse, skeletal sonics. The characters Ocean portrays and narrates on his debut full-length, the recently released channel ORANGE, are pausing and looking at their lives, not completely sure of what they're seeing. And the mix of sounds makes us somewhat unsure of what we're hearing as well. More

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on July 27th, 2012 2:14pm

 
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Jack Black's 'fake' Tenacious D has real metal-band moment: A Comeback Album

For a fake band, Tenacious D's history is real enough: after getting discovered by David Cross and establishing a line of credit at the Bank of Indie with an HBO show canceled after just three episodes, the group (comprised of Black and partner Kyle Gass) shot into the mainstream with their self-titled 2006 masterpiece, poking fun at and worshipping the Id of '70s heavy metal. Then, like so many Alan Parsons Projects of yore, they overshot creatively, releasing the confusing flop film The Pick of Destiny. After that, silence. And with this year's new album, Rize of the Fenix, they complete the rock-drama-cycle with The Comeback. More

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on June 29th, 2012 10:18am

 
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What is the new protest music? On May Day in Union Square, a vague idea takes shape

The idea of an interactive concert on May Day had a wide-reaching appeal. Chuck Park, a 49-year-old union activist, came in all the way from Cleveland to play— “[the Guitarmy is] where I fit in,” he said. The chance to play with Morello “didn’t hurt,” 19-year-old Carlos Cabeza said, in making the decision to make May Day the first protest he'd ever attended. Yet the confusion that reigned during Morello’s time onstage was indicative of the tenor of this Occupy concert—a somewhat scattershot, not-quite-organized attempt to celebrate solidarity, and in doing so to please everybody. More

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on May 2nd, 2012 5:46pm

 
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At LPR, the country-not country sounds of Lambchop seem right for the moment

Whatever the lineup’s been, Lambchop and Wagner have always been about the in-betweens, exploiting sonic silences and relating to characters who aren't yet fully formed, even to themselves. Wagner has also been unusually open about his financial difficulties: he’s had trouble acquiring health care, and a recent cancer scare set him back $80,000 he couldn’t afford to lose. So the crowd laughed, albeit uncomfortably, when the band joked that the intended audience of the night was “hundreds of millions of YouTube viewers.” Were they in need of a viral hit? More

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on April 20th, 2012 2:55pm