America’s new favorite duo The Black Keys are at it again with another brand new music video. This time the single is “Gold On The Ceiling” from their newest project El Camino. They still haven’t made it available through Spotify yet, even though the rest of their entire past catalog is. They have most recently been in the news for dissing other artists like Lana Del Rey and Nickelback.  The video is directed by Reid Long.

As promised on his twitter account yesterday, Yelawolf sidekick and emerging hip-hop artist Rittz dropped a brand new song today. According to the site that premiered this, “it is the 1st official leak off of Rittz’ latest project White Jesus: Revival which will be available online March 8th, which also marks the 1 year anniversary of White Jesus.” Here is “Paradise“, produced by DJ Burn One and also features Nikkya. You can stream or download it here.

via http://bootlegkev.com/

Metallica has announced plans to curate and headline the inaugural Orion Music + More festival, to be held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, June 23 and June 24. It will feature headlining sets from the band each night, during which they will perform two of their most popular albums in their entirety: The Black Album and Ride the Lightning.  The other 22 acts on the line up, chosen  by Metallica, are Arctic Monkeys, Modest Mouse, Cage The Elephant, Fucked Up, Avenged Sevenfold,  The Gaslight Anthem, Best Coast, Hot Snakes, Titus Andronicus, Lucero, Roky Erickson, A Place to Bury Strangers,  Gary Clark Jr., The Sword, The Black Angels, and Liturgy.  Lou Reed isn’t on the bill, due to a previously scheduled show elsewhere. More bands will be announced soon.

Presale tickets for Met Club fan club members go on sale Wednesday (February  at 10:00 am ET and will remain on sale through Friday (February 10) at 10:00 pm ET. General admission tickets for the two-day festival will be priced at $125 and Ultra Passes (including front of  stage viewing area access, exclusive lounge access, and more) will be priced at $225.

Public tickets go on sale Saturday (February 11) at 10:00 am on the festival’s official site. Early bird tickets will be priced at $150 and advance tickets will be priced at $175. VIP passes and travel packages will be announced Saturday.

Pat Grossi, aka Active Child, is ready to have a good year.  The Deluxe version of his album You Are All I See is  now available.  Here is the newest single in music video form, “Hanging On“.  And below are brand new tour dates for the young electronic pop artist.

Apr 27 – Pomona, CA @ The Glass House *
Apr 28 – Phoenix, AZ @ The Crescent Ballroom *
Apr 29 – Tucson, AZ @ Club Congress *
Apr 30 – Santa Fe, NM @ Sol at Santa Fe Brewing Company *
May 02 – Norman, OK @ Opolis *
May 03 – Dallas, TX @ Sons of Hermann Hall *
May 04 – Austin, TX @ The Mohawk *
May 05 – Houston, TX @ Fitzgerald’s *
May 07 – Atlanta, GA @ The Earl *
May 08 – Carrboro, NC @ Cats Cradle *
May 09 – Washington, D.C. @ Black Cat *
May 10 – New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom *
May 11 – New York, NY @ Mercury Lounge *
May 12 – Boston, MA @ Brighton Music Hall *
May 14 – Montreal, QC @ Il Motore *
May 15 – Toronto, ON @ Lee’s Palace *
May 16 – Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall *
May 17 – St. Louis, MO @ Firebird *
May 18 – Lawrence, KS @ The Jackpot Saloon *
May 19 – Denver, CO @ Bluebird Theater *
May 20 – Fort Collins, CO @ Aggie Theatre *
May 22 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge *

* With Balam Acab

For an in-depth look to read about the making of  this, with rad diagrams, check this article out from Car And Driver.

This past weekend Bon Iver was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live performing the grammy-nominated “Holocene,” and Bon Iver Bon Iver closing track “Beth/Rest.” Check out the video below.

We are also happy to announce a new set of live dates on the west coast happening in April, including headlining performances at both weekends of the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, as well as the New Orleans Jazz Festival and the Sasquatch Music Festival in Washington state. All Tiny Creatures will open for Bon Iver on select dates.

TOUR DATES:

04/12 Las Vegas, NV- The Joint @ Hard Rock Hotel Las Vegas w/ All Tiny Creatures
04/14 Indio, CA- Coachella Music and Arts Festival
04/17 Davis, CA- Freeborn Hall @ UC Davis w/ All Tiny Creatures
04/19 San Francisco, CA- Bill Graham Civic Auditorium w/ All Tiny Creatures
04/21 Indio, CA- Coachella Music and Arts Festival
04/22 Santa Barbara, CA- Santa Barbara Bowl w/ All Tiny Creatures
04/23 Tucson, AZ- AVA Ampitheater
04/27 New Orleans, LA- New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival
05/27 George, WA- Sasquatch Music Festival

Few bands are still around today from the 90’s.  And even fewer, if any, have put out as many records or have had as much of an impact than Nine Inch Nails. As you probably already know, NIN has been sorta taking a break. Trent Reznor said in early 2009 “”I’ve been thinking for some time now it’s time to make NIN disappear for a while.”  Later, he additionally later said “isn’t done creating music under the moniker, but that Nine Inch Nails is done touring for the foreseeable future.”  Even more recently, in an interview with BBC Radio 1, Reznor has indicated that in 2012, he will be writing for the majority of the year with Nine Inch Nails “in mind”.  He stated, “I plan on spending a good portion of this coming year writing with that in mind. And we’ll see what happens with it.”

Let us know your favorite record by voting, and leaving comments below.

Previous polls can be found below:

Nirvana
A Tribe Called Quest
The Mars Volta
TV on the Radio
Radiohead
Brand New
Pink Floyd
The Roots
Deftones
Incubus
Led Zeppelin

Anyone that has ever been or considered going to experience a massive event like this knows what it feels like when looking over the line up. It can almost feel like reading a foreign language, seeing bands listed that you have never heard of. That’s where we come in to help. This can be used as a planning guide for deciding who to catch for those of you lucky enough to be able to attend. For everyone else, this is intended to be used as a primer for armchair quarterback music aficionados.

Humans

Robbie Slade + Peter Ricq are HUMANS who make electronic dance music while based in Vancouver BC. Their debut release followed with a sold-out Canadian tour. The boys have been playing a handful of festivals including SXSW, CMW, Shambhala and Big Time Out. This summer Slade + Ricq will continue to tour across Canada and into the US.  They recently toured supporting Chromeo, opening up for them.

Lately the two have been writing and recording, in anticipation for a new release in late summer and fall 2011.

So it’s not entirely true that opposites attract, but it is true that when two opposites get together, things become a lot less mundane. This is certainly what’s happened between Robbie Slade and Peter Ricq, the musicians behind Vancouver indie dance duo Humans. Their first single, “Avec Mes Mecs” brings together the big beats of Ricq’s past as a warehouse party promoter/performer and the melodic sensibility of Slade’s days as a firefighter-turned-folk musician.

The track, written after what Slade calls “many days of absolutely brilliant partying” following New Year’s Eve, is a celebration of being together. With the refrain, “who knew that all we had to do was party” serving as the clarion call for all those looking to come together in a mess of bodies and smiles, Humans capture the blind, full, captivating joy of letting everything go for awhile, and giving into the fun. After these debauched days, which Slade says were “about as tame as you can be spending three days drinking without clothes,” Ricq taught him how to use a 505 Arpeggiator and side by side the two wrote out their experience to the beat.

Both are most comfortable in a state of flux, leaving when the party reaches it’s peak, always trying to break into something new. “Avec Mes Mecs,” which translates into English as “with my friends,” or “with my bros,” is just one facet of Humans’ sound, which the two say is never going to be the same twice. “Just when you say ‘I think we found our sound,’ we find something else,” says Ricq. This state of flux is essential to Humans’ sound, as much as it changes it.

Always listening for new songs and styles and sounds, Slade and Ricq hope to one day expand from a duo to a full band, so they can expand Humans already expansive melodies and beats even further. The future is wide open, to say the least, for two guys who always know when it’s just the right time to leave the party, and when you should just keep it going for days.

For fans of: Chromeo, Diamond Rings, White Arrows

Big Scary

Big Scary are a boy/girl two-piece from Melbourne, Australia. Joanna chills at the kit, occasionally chiming in with some backing vocals, whilst lead singer Tom swaps between electric guitar and keys, in turn moulding the on-stage genres from grunge to pop to moody ballads. It’s this eclecticism that have allowed Big Scary to support bands from Midlake to Florence & The Machine, and would be just as comfortable with Led Zepellin too. Releasing a compilation of four seasonally-themed EPs titled “The Big Scary Four Seasons” in early 2011 (with track “Thinking About You” featuring on Grey’s Anatomy & “Autumn” synced to an AT&T commercial), Big Scary have recently released their debut album “Vacation” (through Inertia Aus/NZ;) which was nominated for Triple J Australian album of the year; and voted the 8th best album of 2011 by Triple J music director Richard Kingsmill. One of only 2 Australian bands & the only unsigned band to get on the list.. Not one to miss!

For fans of: Beach House, Matt & Kim, The National

U.S. Girls

Whilst at first glance the name may conjure ‘Volleyball teams and cheerleading squads’ as suggested by 20jazzfunkgreats, others read a military connotation – some kind of legendary all female American crack squad. Whatever the imagery, the first listen suggests a divergent story. In truth, U.S. Girls is the creative force of a lone American woman, Meghan Remy.  Calling both Chicago and  Philadelphia home, for the past four years she has pursued her minimalist aesthetic with a militant by-any-means-necessary attitude, merging experimental compositions tracked on borrowed four track recorders with her distinctive photocopy-art visual aesthetic to deliver starkly defined statement LP’s like ‘Introducing…’ & ‘Go Grey’ on Siltbreeze Records.

While Lo-Fi recording techniques have seen something of a renaissance in recent years, Remy’s favouring of this approach was born less of aesthetic choice and more of necessity. Even as she’s inevitably been lumped in with other DIY solo artists such as Inca Ore and Sally Strobelight, her influence has unwaveringly been declared to lie with oldies radio and the distinctly American songcraft of writers like Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen (whom she covered to startling effect on Introducing…). It’s in this light that her true vision is revealed. While her music has been said to evoke “particularly blunted Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry remixes of Cambodian Rocks covers of western pop tunes,” – (Artforum), more accurately she can be thought of as an unapologetically modern pop revisionist merging the audible artistic honesty of her beloved soul music with lyrical strains of static and tape hiss. Songs like ‘Bits & Pieces’ and ‘Red Ford Radio’ reimagine Billboard hit singles of the 60′s as bleakly rendered expressions of a primal American femininity.

With the arrival of a new decade the entity of U.S. Girls takes an unexpected turn. Contradicting her patriotic moniker Remy has spent the last 6 months in collaboration with Canadian artist Slim Twig whose combination of reverence for and divergence from classic pop tropes matches her own. With the same determination she once used to tour America solo via Greyhound, Remy relocated her recording to Toronto where the shroud of abstraction surrounding her songcraft has been somewhat lifted to reveal a consciously produced sound with her strikingly original voice now at the centre. Co-produced by Remy & Slim Twig, the new direction sees U.S. Girls take American pop head-on with a cover of Joe South’s ‘Untie Me’ while pursuing innovative future-music with the psychedelic ‘Pamela + GG.’

Fresh from playing a series of dates in the U.S. and back to recording for a full-length, the release of 12PALM01 marks the start of an exciting new future for U.S. Girls.

For fans of: Purling Hiss, True Widow, Talk Normal, Psychedelic Horseshit

Jack White, Beck, Bon Iver, Pretty Lights, Tenacious D, The Shins, Beirut, Girl Talk, The Roots, The Head & The Heart, Portlandia, Feist, Silversun Pickups, Metric, Explosions In The Sky, The Joy Formidable, Mogwai, Nero (DJ), M. Ward, John Reilly & Friends, Childish Gambino, St. Vincent, The Civil Wars, Jamey Johnson, Little Dragon, Tune-Yards, Wild Flag, Blind Pilot, Wolfgang Gartner, Beats Antique, Apparat, The Walkmen, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Mark Lanegan Band, Spiritualized, Blitzen Trapper, The Cave Singers, Shabazz Palaces, Fun., Grouplove, Tycho, SBTRKT, Strfkr, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Deer Tick, Imelda May, Alabama Shakes, Dum Dum Girls, The Helio Sequence, Kurt Vile, Cloud Cult, We Are Augustines, Ben Howard, Here We Go Magic, Zola Jesus, The War On Drugs, Shearwater, Cass McCombs, Active Child, Trampled By Turtles, Charles Bradley & His Extraordinaires, Araabmuzik, Star Slinger, L.A. Riots, Com Truise, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, I Break Horses, Walk The Moon, Dry The River, Allen Stone, Pickwick, Hey Marseilles, Gary Clark Jr., Purity Ring, Electric Guest, Yellow Ostrich, Nobody Beats The Drum, Coeur De Pirate, Lord Huron, Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside, Beat Connection, The Sheepdogs, Hey Rosetta!, Said The Whale, Howlin Rain, Gardens & Villa, Felix Cartal, Craft Spells, Vintage Trouble, Poor Moon, Black Whales, Gold Leaves, Greylag, Awesome Tapes From Africa, Thee Satisfaction, Dyme Def, Fresh Espresso, The Physics, Sol, Metal Chocolates, Grynch, Spac3man, Don’t Talk To The Cops, Scribes, Fatal Lucciauno, Fly Moon Royalty, Katie Kate

Comedy: Nick Kroll, John Mulaney, Todd Barry, Beardyman, Rob Delaney, Pete Holmes, Howard Kremer, and more.