“It’s harder to make the glass than break the glass.” – RZA
It’s also much harder to make an album than it is to listen to it! Here are the new releases for the first week of December 2014:
Wu-Tang Clan | A Better Tomorrow
Earlier this year The Wu-Tang Clan announced they were releasing a one-of-a-kind album encased in lavish nickel and silver called Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. This record has apparently been made in secret over the course of 5 years. This album wouldn’t be made available to the public but would be put “on display” so to speak at museums and art galleries as a sort of audio art piece before being sold to the highest bidder. It was around that time that it was revealed in Forbes that it featured the vocals of Cher, of all people.
Details of this single-album-world-tour is still unknown (although RZA told Rolling Stone that it may be exhibited at Art Basel in Miami) but to pacify the rest of the non-musem-attending-non-millionaire masses, we’ve got this, A Better Tomorrow (pun only slightly intended).
Yo La Tengo | Extra Painful
This is technically a re-release, I know, but it’s a re-release that marks the 30th anniversary of Yo La Tengo as a band. But don’t worry, if you don’t nessesarily feel old after learning that Yo La Tengo have been around for 30 years, just wait for my post later on today that’ll tell you that Since U Been Gone celebrated it’s 10 birthday today… yeah.
Extra Painful features some of the band’s best work including what is considered their best song ‘I Heard You Looking’, a 7-minute instrumental jam that only Yo La Tengo could really pull off. Also included are a demo version of ‘Nowhere Near’ a stand alone single, ‘Shaker’, and the B-Side ‘For Shame of Doing Wrong’.
Owen | Other Peoples Songs
Striped-down, melodic, slow and intimate Mike Kinsella’s Other People’s Songs takes the work of Depeche Mode, Against Me!, and Lungfish, to name a few, and turns the sometimes brazen lyrics into something almost poetic.
Almost intentionally putting his own record under-the-radar Kinsella announced the album by quietly saying, “I recorded some covers of other people’s songs this year and Polyvinyl Records is releasing it on Dec. 2.”. It was a fitting low-key introduction to a low-key ablum that only clocks in at 30-minutes to complete the 8 cover songs.
