Unknowingly, for the rest of the night I had subscribed to a different electronic-music subculture that has traded its neon for leather and glowsticks for holding up the horns in the air. I felt as if I’d been welcomed into a strange family whose members will wrap their arm around a complete stranger to jump with them non-stop for two hours. And hell, I liked it. To the unknowing observer, the crowd at London’s O2 Brixton Academy may have been attending some sort of strange religious gathering, a good deal of the audience sporting home-made cross shirts or even cross tattoos. Sometimes they didn’t even clap during a break, instead they opted to cross their arms in the air.

However, saying I’d walked into some weird religious ceremony wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate. It seemed the crowd had been waiting to see Justice long enough to warrant considering the audience were waiting for their messiah to return. When a melody would kick in on any of the tracks, the audience turned crunchy electronic sounds into chants and wails as if they were in some strange industrial choir.

Barring my cultural-anthropologist approach to identifying how homogenous and dedicated this crowd was, let’s move onto music. Listen, I know some people didn’t like Audio, Video, Disco, me included. And I know it’s not justification to say a live-show validates an album, but at least this live show gives the album some context. It became apparent that Justice may have built the album around a combination of different influences but also built it around the idea of meshing the new music with the heavier sounds from Cross. The “Imperial March”-stomp of “Genesis” opened the show, and its sister song “Horsepower” blended perfectly with it. The screechy prog guitars over the booming orchestration blended, as it would continue to for the rest of the night. In fact, the only song that didn’t get the treatment of being combined with another was “Audio Video Disco” which closed the set in all its untouched glory.

Also, if the rumors of Justice not actually live-DJing their set are still floating around the internet, let’s dispel those. Not only did the two members seem completely engaged in fiddling with knobs, MPC’s, and other things I can’t name, but they even had breaks where they’d play pianos or synthesizers. However, I was a tad disappointed by the lack of pressing play and smoking a cigarette exhibited by Gaspard and Xavier.

As expected, the lighting rig was great. Simple when it needed to be just the cross, and seizure inducing balls-to-the-wall strobe sessions during powerhouses like “Phantom Pt. 2.” And, LED ridden Marshall-Stacks? Awesome.

All in all, great crowd, great production, and one of the greatest and most original live electronic acts around made for a very sensory overloading and engaging two-hour set. I’d always been under the impression that Justice were the DJ’s for the indie kids (other than Daft Punk); however, if groups of 6000+ people keep seeing them nightly at their shows, hopefully that’ll change.

Sir Paul McCartney was honored as the 2012 MusiCares Person of the Year in Los Angeles Friday night. The ceremony featured a number of live performances, including covers of “Jet” by Foo Fighters, “Blackbird” by Alicia Keys, “Hey Jude” by Katy Perry, “We Can Work It Out” by Coldplay, and “I Saw You Standing There” by Neil Young & Crazy Horse, which marked the reunited outfit’s first performance in eight years.

In addition, Sir Paul performed two tracks from his new LP Kisses on the Bottom, “My Valentine” and “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter”, as well as past classics like “Junior’s Farm”, “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five”, “Golden Slumbers”, “Carry the Weight”, and “The End”.

Check out a few highlights below (via The Telegraph).

The band members are lead vocalist and guitarist Chris Lynch, vocalist and bassist Shane McKillop, Levi Hayden on drums, and Adam Rasmussen and Dusty Ineman on synths, percussions, piano, and background vocals. With an oath to always play all parts of their songs live, the sincerity and talent they each possess is only too apparent when performing. They have reincarnated the love and prevail of the live show, that magic that makes seeing a band live like a reawakening, a new understanding, of the album’s original intoxication.

“Black Hills” and “Orange Blossom” were performance highlights, with “Black Hills” creating all of the magnetism of the original. With Ineman’s shakers aloft and rhythmic, each member nodding to the captive beat, Lynch wailed the lyrics longingly into the microphone. Members of the crowd stood paralytic, hypnotized. “Orange Blossom” was an illustrative ending to the set, its live mix elaborately executed and packing far more funk and punch than the album. The song’s chorus, which features flute accompaniments along with the infamous “pheromones take me home” lyric line, made this a subtle, yet sexually charged, rendition.

Though Consequence of Sound writer Austin Trunick deemed the band’s debut effort as “a real snoozer” back in June 2011, Garden & Villa’s live performance translated their laid-back, melancholic sound into a resonating and invigorating experience. Understanding the band’s sound as something more akin to Beach House and even The Beatles, rather than as “forced abstract” or misguided indie, thus reveals the spirit and direction with which they’ve composed their music.

Personally, when I first heard Gardens & Villa’s album in November 2011, I predicted then that they would be one of the biggest bands of 2012 because their sound typifies the future of indie music. Last year’s chillwave was shallow, but Garden & Villa’s “flute folk” exhibits a whole new level of depth and complicated imagery. It is their flute solos, with that touch of mysticism and tribalism, of surfer rock and stoned sunsets, that gave soul to their show on Thursday, and I predict that they will be equally as charismatic at this year’s big festivals.

Legendary singer Whitney Houston has died, according to the Associated Press. She was 48.

Houston’s cause of death is currently unknown, however, the singer had a long history with drug and alcohol abuse. According to TMZ, Houston was found dead at the Beverly Hilton hotel.

A six-time Grammy winner, Houston sold more than 55 million albums in the U.S. and her 1987 album Whitney became the first album by a female artist to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 albums chart. Her most recent LP, I Look to You, was released in August 2009.

In addition to her music career, Houston was an Emmy Award winning actress.

Tonight, The Kills commemorate the 10th anniversary of their musical partnership, as well as the final scheduled date of their Blood Pressures tour with a special performance at New York City’s Terminal 5. The concert will also be streaming live at MTV Hive starting at 10:30 pm ET. Update: A replay of the performance is streaming below.

As previously reported, The Kills will release their next single, “The Last Goodbye”, on Valentine’s Day. The four-track effort also includes covers of The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes”, Patsy Cline’s “Crazy”, and Marilyn Monroe’s “One Silver Dollar”. It will be available digitally and on CD, and a limited edition 10″ vinyl via Domino.

By the time the Cranberries released their debut album, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?, in spring ‘93, they had already been together for three years, been the subject of a minor bidding war among UK labels, and gotten screwed over by their manager/producer, Pearse Gilmore. After tensions began to rise within the band during the construction of their first full length, news came to bear that Gilmore had set up a back-door deal with the band’s label, Island Records. Rather than break up, the band cut off all ties with Gilmore and moved back to Dublin, hiring Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis as their manager. As Gilmore had also been working with the band in the studio, a new producer was needed, which was found in Stephen Street. Street’s work in the ’80s with bands like the Psychedelic Furs and the Smiths helped shape the sound of UK pop, and his work in the early ’90s with Blur would help forge the foundations of Britpop.

Although Street had been heavily involved with Blur at the time he began working with the Cranberries, the sound of the Cranberries’ debut bears little to no resemblance to the newly evolved sounds of Blur or the emerging Britpop. Rather than bombard the listener with outright guitar, Street and guitarist Noel Hogan weave the tinny jangle of his guitar lines subtly with O’Riordan’s voice (often layered two or three times on top of itself) and emerge with a delicate balance between exquisite balladry and luscious pop. Throughout Everybody Else… there is an ebb and flow of heartbreak and joy, ebullience and melancholy, expressed through both O’Riordan’s vocals and Hogan’s understated guitar.

“I Still Do” opens the album in a rather subdued fashion, tending to build slowly over the opening minute, with O’Riordan’s ghostlike voice rising from the building tension. Despite the outwardly aggressiveness in parts, the underlying dreaminess of the song lends itself as the perfect long form introduction to the opening cascade that begins the album’s second track and first single, “Dreams”. The Cranberries’ first single is a wonderful pop song that has moments akin to the Sundays, until O’Riordan’s voice breaks free from its grounding. As soon as she soars with a series of “la’s and la-da’s”, her following lyrics “impossible to ignore” could not be more prophetic.

“Dreams” isn’t the only uptempo island in a sea of sad ballads. Tracks like “Wanted”, with its pace setting hi-hats, and “Waltzing Back”, one of the more Celtic influenced songs on Everybody Else…, all proceed at a steady pace and perhaps even provide hints of future efforts. Released as a promotional single in the US, “Still Can’t” (also called “Still Can’t Recognize the Way I Feel”) is perhaps the most Smiths-like song on the album, and not just because of the jangly guitars. With its chorus and O’Riordan’s strained vibrato, “Still Can’t” sounds as if it could have been found on the Smiths’ cutting room floor. The similarities to Morrissey during this song are eerie.

Also released as a promotional single to the US market, “Sunday” is one of those songs that begins entirely differently than it ends. Introduced with a soft guitar and a minor string section, “Sunday” begins as what could be a sad, heartbreaking ballad. O’Riordan’s voice, initially buried in strings, doesn’t do anything to alter the assumption. After a slight break, the rhythm section comes alive, Hogan’s guitar begins to strum on top rather than lost in the background, and O’Riordan’s voice, no longer the ghostlike waif, bounces with the lyrical refrain, “You mystify me”. “Sunday” is perhaps the perfect blend of both styles exhibited on Everybody Else…, beautifully blending the sublimely ethereal with straight-up pop rock. Despite its initial promotional release in America, the label sought to scrap its promotion in lieu of re-releasing the band’s first two UK singles, “Dreams” and “Linger”.

“Linger” is perhaps the best known song by the Cranberries (next to “Zombie” from their follow-up album No Need To Argue, which was also produced by Street). With its wonderfully enunciated r’s and O’Riordan’s brogue dialect enhancing the titular word (and its rhyming counterparts), the vocalist’s singing often overshadowed the song’s true elegance. In a manner similar to “Sunday”, “Linger” begins with a haunting dream pop-like passage cresting with the entrance of a gorgeous string section. It is this orchestral section throughout the song that elevates “Linger” above all the other tracks on the Cranberries’ debut. All the elegance sought on “Sunday” is found in perfect synchronicity on “Linger”.

On its initial release, “Linger”, much like first single “Dreams”, barely made a notch in the UK charts; however, as the band began to tour the US opening for groups such as the The and Suede, MTV began to take notice. After the song was put into rotation on the channel, “Linger” began to climb the mainstream charts in the US, eventually peaking in the Top Ten.  Both “Linger” and “Dreams” were re-released in the UK following the new found success in the United States. The success of the Cranberries’ debut album, which crested somewhere around eight million sold, was ultimately eclipsed by their follow-up No Need to Argue, but it is here on Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? that O’Riordan’s and Hogan’s songwriting, matched with Street’s production, best captured the Cranberries’ lilting romanticism and pop elegance.

Though technically Childish Gambino‘s new video for “Heartbeat”, mastermind Donald Glover prefers to describe director Kyle Newacheck’s visuals as a “reflection” of how he was feeling when he recorded the song. “I thought the best way to convey the feeling that’s in the song was to be confused ourselves,” Glove told MTV, adding, ”I wouldn’t say it’s so much a video as much as it is just a mood.” Whatever the case, having just got home from a midnight screening of Drive, I’m now really itching to buy a Scorpion jacket and driving gloves.

Glover’s top album Camp is out now via Glassnote.

Support came in the form of Matana Roberts, a longtime collaborator of the band and fellow Constellation Records signee on jazz saxophone. A far cry from the usual guitar/drums/bass setup that graces the Troubadour’s stage, Ms. Roberts had no issue getting the crowd acclimated to her vibrant free-jazz impressions on solo saxophone. Between improvising off of entries in a little red journal she kept beside her onstage, she kept things lively with her winning charisma, engaging the audience with anecdotes on everything from family ghost stories and her time in a John Coltrane tribute quartet to musing on the surprising lack of graffiti on the streets of nearby Santa Monica.

Menuck took the stage shortly thereafter, guitar slung over his shoulder as he stepped out in front of the upside down portrait of Canadian PM Stephen Harper. His band, made up mostly of his Godspeed compatriots, proved a formidable force. Thierry Amar – who switched between electric and upright bass – served as the band’s anchor for the night along with David Payant on drums, while the lovely duo of Sophie Trudeau and Jessica Moss on violin and backing vocals lent the music more than its fair share of dramatic flourishes. Trudeau and Moss often matched Amar with their own lithe variations on his tight basslines. Comparisons to Godspeed are inevitable; their shared pedigree aside, the music of both acts bears the same deeply hopeful but decidedly bleak nature, though Mt. Zion’s performances make for considerably more lighthearted fare with all the vocal harmonies and Menuck’s cheery banter between guitar retuning.

Even though no song Thee Silver Mt. Zion performed Wednesday night came even close to clocking in at less than five minutes in length, the audience was decidedly patient throughout, foot-tapping, singing along, and headbanging at all the right points. The best moments of the night came at those headbang-worthy moments when the band came in all together, singing and thrashing about in unison (each of the five had a microphone of their own), as on the dizzying climaxes of “There Is a Light” and fan favorite “Blindblindblind”. At night’s end, Menuck – who was the last to leave the stage – thanked the rapturous audience and promised that he’d be back in town soon, to which someone hollered back, “with Godspeed?” Already most of the way offstage, he turned to flash the suddenly very hushed crowd a knowing smile before stepping upstairs and out of sight. Maybe some questions are better left unanswered.

Photography by Holly Brown.

– Austin, Texas

– New England (specifically in or around Boston)

– Pacific Northwest (e.g. Seattle, Portland)

– Midwest (e.g. Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma)

– South Florida

– United Kingdom

If you’re a qualified writer and live in one of these areas, please send an email with your resume and samples of your work. If you’ve got game, then we’re game, too.

If you’ve been at a loss for words while listening to Bruce Springsteen‘s latest single, “We Take Care of Our Own”, then you’ll want to watch its new video. In it, the song’s lyrics wash over sharp black and white shots of The Boss walking in what appears to be a meat packing plant. It’s sort of like those old Disney videos, only there’s no bouncing ball. Also, the ending slightly apes the Jeff Daniels TBS classic Pleasantville, specifically when Springsteen holds his hands up to the dawning light, naturally restoring all of life’s rich colors. Cynicism aside, it’s a classic Bruce video. Watch it below.

Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball cuts loose March 6th via Columbia.