Music News

Weekly Round-Up: 24th January

Friday 24th January, 2014 3:30PM

Today, we are in the eye of this year's festival storm. Big Day Out returned to Auckland last Friday and the new location, Western Springs, was - apart from the atrocious and unforgivable lines *rage* - a total success. Reminisce - or read about what you missed out on - with our review of the 2014 Big Day Out over here, and scroll through Sean Aickin's excellent photos here. If you have FOMO from checking out that content, Laneway Festival is taking place next Monday and tickets are still available (just). We had an insightful - and very honest - chat to Cat Power about her troubled past last week, and recommend having a read of conversations with some of the Laneway acts we're most looking forward to, including Savages, Kurt Vile, Youth Lagoon and Parquet Courts.

There have been a few international tour announcements this week, although nothing compared to the plethora from the week before. The saxophonist for the Rolling Stones and The Beatles, Bobby Keys, is heading to New Zealand with his band The Suffering Bastards in April, Melbourne hardcore punk band Clowns have announced a North Island tour around their appearance at Camp a Low Hum, Eagles of Death Metal and Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats will play in Wellington on the back of Auckland's Westfest and Soundwave Festival (Australia) and Canadian producer Kaytranada is heading to New Zealand for the first time this March.

Sun O))) capped off what has been an excellent week in album release news by making a new 12" available to stream and announcing a split release with Norwegian black-metallers Ulver. The Black Lips shared a very Black Lips-y (read: filthy) video for their first single off of their forthcoming album, due out in March, while another Atlanta-based band, The Coathangers, shared a new single ahead of the release of their album Suck My Shirt. Mark Oliver Everett has shared a teaser for his seventeenth (!) studio album as The Eels, called The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett, to be released this April, while the Vivian Girls will not release another album ever again because they have broken up. Neil Young announced that he will release a low-fi album called A Letter Home around the same time that his music streaming service, Pono, launches (during South by Southwest), while the streaming service collaboratively created by Dr. Dre, Trent Reznor, Jimmy Lovine and Ian Rogers, called Beats Music, launched this week.

In 'Because it's Friday' news, Justin Bieber was arrested for ~~being an idiot~~ DUI and drag racing, and Seth Rogen managed to get 40, 000 retweets in an hour by saying what everybody was thinking. Read the full story - and check out the hilarious 'photo of Bieber getting arrested' #somanylols - over here. Noel Gallagher did a very Noel Gallagher-y thing and opined about how he hates his music videos...

...the "I was fucking drunk in this video" being the high point. Arcade Fire covered INXS during their Melbourne show, and let's finish with this pretty cool performance of '25 Bucks' by Danny Brown (who is playing Laneway Festival on Monday) and Megan James from Purity Ring (who produced the track) on Jimmy Kimmel.