Daphne Carr

Adele's 'Skyfall,' with its heavy debt to Shirley Bassey, might not have been camp - in another century:

For better or worse the result is a tune infused with a camp sensibility, but perhaps that’s what must pervade any art associated with the Bond franchise in the 21st century.

Bio: Daphne Carr is a music journalist, critic, and scholar living in New York City. She is the Series Editor of Best Music Writing (Da Capo 2007-present), author of Nine Inch Nails Pretty Hate Machine (Continuum 2011), contributor to the books Out of the Vinyl Deeps: The Rock Writing of Ellen Willis; Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs, and Listen Again.

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Adele's 'Skyfall,' with its heavy debt to Shirley Bassey, might not have been camp - in another century

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For better or worse the result is a tune infused with a camp sensibility, but perhaps that’s what must pervade any art associated with the Bond franchise in the 21st century. More

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By Daphne Carr

on October 5th, 2012 11:16am

 
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Hear the crushing steel: Zola Jesus and J.G. Thirlwell perform at the Guggenheim

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TKTKT More

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By Daphne Carr

on May 11th, 2012 5:55pm

 
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It's 2012 and it's Nicki Minaj's world to make, but this album is not going to make it

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Nicki Minaj, the 29-year-old Queens rapper who dropped her second album, Roman Reloaded, today (sort of, it leaked last week) has sidestepped the 2000s strategy of playing the hyper-femme, fairytale pop star for something decidedly more '90s: the crazy bitch. Her innovation to this venerable pop tradition: becoming the gaze and making funny faces. And she may just be on her way to being an Acknowledged Great Musician (no modifier). More

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By Daphne Carr

on April 3rd, 2012 5:45pm

 
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The Ecstatic Music Festival takes risks, blends genres, and calls itself a bad name

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Judd Greenstein helps run the Ecstatic Music Festival, which aims to bring together artists from rock and classical backgrounds, is being presented for the second year by the Kaufman Center at Merkin Hall, just across the street from the Lincoln Center complex. The next concert is downtown legend Rhys Chatham and Brooklyn endurance-psych-rockers Oneida this Saturday. More

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By Daphne Carr

on March 15th, 2012 4:04pm

 
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What have I become, my sweetest friend: 'The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye'

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The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is a love story wrapped up in medical gauze. The documentary, by experimental filmmaker Marie Losier and on view through Thursday at the Chelsea Clearview Cinemas, tells the story of Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge and her husband, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, perhaps best known as a founding member of influential industrial band Throbbing Gristle and the later acid-house outfit Psychic TV. But the couple's later work is the focus of this film, and it is a story of transformation. More

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By Daphne Carr

on March 13th, 2012 5:41pm

 
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In the Bleecker Street basement of Le Poisson Rouge, singer-composer Julia Holter's star begins its ascent

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Holter plays as though draped in cool reference points, but the result veers between aching self-seriousness and corniness. The songs, even pop jams like “In the Same Room,” never quite get out of the syrup of tepid, unspecified longing. Such is the mysticism at the heart of Holter's music, less the question of how science and sound come together to make the world (as Björk has been investigating, brilliantly, these days) and more about self-aggrandizing accoutrementation. Trés L.A. More

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By Daphne Carr

on March 8th, 2012 8:50am

 
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Call your boyfriend, the Magnetic Fields are back to the dance floor

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The new Magnetic Fields album, Love at the Bottom of the Sea, reaches back a ways, stylistically, at points sounding like something the band might have produced before their magnum opus, 69 Love Songs. Although it is a willfully synth pop collection like their 1995 album Get Lost, the tinny production and hesitant vocals of that era are thankfully long gone, and although the band is back to the flat world of digital sounds, it is still one given depth and space in the hands of the band's longtime audio engineer Charles Newman. It is something of a pop progress report, and it passes with high marks. More

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By Daphne Carr

on March 7th, 2012 4:28pm

 
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Celebrating the life and work of Frank Tovey, whose band Fad Gadget set a course for contemporary pop

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Tovey was the man behind Fad Gadget, the first artist signed to Mute Records and an influential part of a scene that would eventually become fragmented into the three prongs of the early-'80s rock vanguard: post-punk, new wave, and industrial. More

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By Daphne Carr

on March 2nd, 2012 5:21pm

 
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Why the loved and hated 'now-noise' of Skrillex is really kind of punk

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Skrillex’s music is the worst nightmare of electronic music aesthetes because he doesn’t give a shit about the carefully enforced micro-genres, cultural hierarchies, and bro/nerd distinctions that characterize producers, D.J.s, clubs, and every other facet of contemporary dance music life. It’s a sound built from electronic music’s detritus: bad synths, corny Jamaican sound and lyric references, Romantic piano melodies, chipmunk vocals, and blow-this-shirt-to-shreds action-film sound effects. But brave as such a stance might sound, Skrillex is not doing it for art. As he’s often said, he’s doing it for fun. And for that reason, Skrillex is pretty punk. More

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By Daphne Carr

on February 3rd, 2012 5:27pm

 
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Sharon Van Etten's melancholy of influence

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How does the action of a body help us hear a voice? We look at someone on a stage and, however meaningless or programmatic the impulse, we expect a certain sound and gesture. Take a child who sings melismatically, with a deep growl, thrusting a hip and looking fierce: it’s unsettling, a depth of feeling we think children cannot have, and an eros they ought not to even know about. With Sharon Van Etten it’s the opposite. What we assume we will get when we see her on stage is some version of the incredibly tender, aching voice and shuffling indie arrangements that dominate her recorded work, and really shine on her heartbreaking new album, Tramp (out February 7). Instead, on the stage at Mercury Lounge, where she debuted the material from Tramp last night, the young Van Etten’s voice and stage presence was deadpan at best and self-loathing at worst. The album’s dominant mood, remorse, requires the kind of complex mix of emotions—pride, regret, adoration, acceptance—that Van Etten was either too anxious, inexperienced, or unwilling to convey. More

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By Daphne Carr

on January 19th, 2012 4:05pm