Video: Courtney Love announces Hole "reunion"

Oh Courtney, you crazy bitch. You know I love you, and yet you continue to screw me over. Apparently Courtney is re-editing her probably shitty solo album that's been brewing for around four years and calling it the fourth Hole album. Melissa Auf Der Maur's coming back to do some bass and backing vocals, and apparently that's enough to bring back the old name. Goddammit Billy Corgan, this is all your fault. Look, I'll follow "Live Through This" and "Celebrity Skin" to the ends of the earth and worship everything having anything to do with those albums, but Love has done nothing worth praising in the last 11 years, and at this point I can't imagine her releasing anything that won't fuck up Hole's near-perfect(at least in MY mind)discography.

Also, there's no Eric Erlandson, which officially makes this a 100% hollow, exploitative, Pumpkins-style non-reunion.

Here's a ten minute video where Courtney announces Hole's revival with new guitarrist Micko Larkin. She really is kind of amusing to listening to, especially when she gets to the bit about one-armed strippers towards the end. She also claims that Apocalyptica is coming in to overdub their cellos onto some of their tracks, and I'm not sure whether or not we should believe her yet.

Remixes: The Killers vs Muse

I found a video mashup of "When You Were Young" and "Starlight", and it's... not great. It's a perfect example of a "good failure". It's a great idea, but the audio levels are off and the samples aren't handled very well. So, if you know remix things, consider this an idea for a challenge to go out and make this collaboration work, because there's a lot of potential hiding in this video.

Music Videos: Elbow's "The Bones of You"

I doubted anything would top "Grounds For Divorce", but this single and video comes dangerously close.

New Music: The Verve

It's finally here. The Verve's long-awaited new album showed up yesterday, and it was worth the wait. The whole album is an enjoyable listen, but "Valium Skies", "Love Is Noise", and "Noise Epic" bring you right back to "Urban Hymns"-era greatness.

Live Music: New Killers

The new Killers single has surfaced in the form of a ton of live videos. It's called "Spaceman", and it sounds like it could be good in the right studio. Brandon always had great ideas and sounded fantastic in the studio (at least on Hot Fuss), but the bottom line is that his voice doesn't hold up well live AT ALL. But the song sounds like it's got a lot of potential behind it, so there's still hope for their new album "Day and Age".

Live Music: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

You know a show's good when it requires three police interventions. Rage Against the Machine's Lollapalooza set, by all accounts, was phenomenal, and this vid of their opener ("Testify") should be all the proof you need.

Live Music: The Distillers

Show of hands, who else misses The Distillers? Here's an old classic clip from a couple years ago of them playing "The Hunger" live at Reading.

"DON'T GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Old Music Videos: PJ Harvey

Since nothing I care about was released today, I'm going to dig into the archives of Youtube and pull up one of my all-time videos: the amazingly simple but completely badass video for PJ Harvey's "This Is Love". No effects or flashy edits to distract you from how fucking talented she is. The mp3 doesn't do the song justice; watching the artist herself do her thing with so much presence adds a hell of a lot to the song.

Live Music: The Black Angels

The Black Angels can only make one specific type of song (Dark, trippy, psych-rock), but they're so amazing at producing that one sound that it's completely forgivable. Here's them performing "Black Grease" a couple days ago in New Orleans.

Covers: PJ Harvey and Bjork's "Satisfaction"

PJ Harvey and Bjork covered Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" at something at some place and time. I don't really know anything about it, I just ran across it this morning. It starts and really slow and dumb and ridiculous, but it starts kicking ass at the 2.5 minute mark.

Covers: Hole does Velvet Underground

I was going through the Velvet Underground catalog during work today because my job is boring, and I ran across an old cover of Hole doing "Pale Blue Eyes". Is it ugly? Uh huh. Is it also raw, emotional, and completely genuine and real? Abso-fucking-lutely.

Live Music: ELBOW

It's capitalized because it's amazing. The audio quality isn't great, the camera is in a bad spot, and you can't see a whole lot, and you can still tell that this is an amazing performance. It's "Grounds For Divorce", a brilliantly raw blues-rock song in a style that these guys don't do nearly enough of, and they make the song a few thousand times more intense than the studio version at this show. Watching it makes you want to throw yourself at the stage on the screen as soon as he opens his mouth, and that only becomes more true as the guitars come out to attack you.

Live Music: The Black Keys

I was apathetic about "Attack and Release" at first, but I love that album more and more everyday. The latest song off A&R that I've fallen in love with is "I Got Mine", and here's a vid of them performing that song at their AMAZING show at the Astoria last week:

New Music: Foxboro Hot Tubs

Green Day is back, but you might not notice at first. As a brilliant ploy to hide from the backlash of long-time critics and the restrictive expectations of long-time fans, Green Day has released an album under a completely different style and name: Foxboro Hot Tubs. FHT is wild experimental ride through old school rock that won't seem fresh for very long but is a hell of a lot of fun for the here and now. Check out the stream:

Music Videos: New Steve Winwood

And now for our usual 3-sentence Friday post before we rush out to start the weekend... New Steve Winwood! He's back, and his video for "Dirty City" is pretty good. He sounds as good now as he did in his Blind Faith days, and it's nice to still have him around.

Remixes: Non-blasphemous mixes of Johnny Cash's "Hurt"

In my own opinion, Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt" is the most heartbreaking song ever recorded. So when I found out that there are tons of remixes of the song, I was both horrified and intrigued. What could you POSSIBLY do to that song? Apparently, a lot. There are plenty of people who will hate these before even listening to them, and you know you are, so just move along and come back tomorrow. DJ MP3 (seriously, that's the most creative name you could think of?) has done some interesting things with the song, including a fantastic instrumental overhaul of the song, and a full-scale remix that piles the instruments over the original. The latter isn't perfect, but viewed as a demo, it holds up really well.

New Music: The Black Keys

The new Black Keys album is out. It's nice. I don't really know what else to say about it. It's not a bad album at all; I actually didn't dislike any song on it. But at the same time, none of the songs sent me rushing to iTunes to put it on my iPod (except maybe "Psychotic Girl", which grows on me). I guess I just expected something more exciting with Danger Mouse producing. The album's on iMeem so you can decide for yourself.

Music Videos: Elbow

Welcome to the song that I'm currently obsessed with. "Grounds For Divorce" is the new single from Elbow and it's pure garage-soul paradise. The video adds a new layer of cool to the song, with the bar setting and cool flashes of special effects give this Black Keys-like song a Flogging Molly-type feel, an amazingly effective combination that no one thought possible.

Covers: David Cook isn't that fucking original

Last night on "American Idol", David Cook did a nice job of performing Chris Cornell's arrangement of "Billie Jean". Ryan Seacrest even introduced him by saying "Performing Chris Cornell's version of "Billie Jean"...", but the judges still went on and on raving about how brilliant, brave, and original it was, even though this idea has already been done before and was already proven to have worked. Chris Cornell put this cover on his last solo album, and several brilliant live performances of him doing the song have gone viral on Youtube. This performance from a cover in Sweden alone has 710,000+ hits. And yet, David still took credit for being the innovator behind the whole thing. By the way, David's version is completely soulless compared to Chris's live versions.

Playlists: Sansa Playground at South by Southwest

South by Southwest is finally here! Unfortunately, those of us stuck outside of Austin will have to settle for the camera phone videos of the shows that will inevitably surface in the next few weeks. Until those start to pop up, you can enjoy some of the iMeem playlists dedicated to the roster of talent playling at the show this year. Here's a playlist of artists playing at the Sansa Playground event, an eclectic set of music that ranges from indie electro to to indie rock to indie blues. Especially notable: "Please Please Man" by Von Bondies and "Lay Down the Law" by Switches.