Listen To/New Music Video: Surfer Blood

Surfer Blood‘s first album Astro Coast is full-fledged guitar rock with an album’s worth of catchy, generally radiant songs that intermingle power-pop circa Weezer, Big Star and Dinosaur Jr. with sporadic doses of Afro-pop ala Paul Simon’s Graceland. Over the course of an entire album lead singer John Paul Pitts’ distant-sounding voice can feel weak at times yet Astro Coast never wavers in its momentum, largely due to the irresistible interplay of guitar riffs and a clean, no-frills production style. Overall Astro Coast is a stellar debut album built from a time-honored tradition of big riffs and lasting melodies, one Surfer Blood will surely continue to explore as they win over both frat boy bro hams and twee hipsters alike.

Astro Coast is out now via Kanine Records.

Watch John Paul Pitts strip down to his tighty whiteys in Surfer Blood’s video for “Swim”

Look for Surfer Blood in a city or town near you:

posted by: Harold Johns III

Watch: The Proposition

Set against the harsh and unforgiving landscape of the 188o’s Australian outback, The Proposition is a visually stunning tale of loyalty, revenge and the quest for justice in a lawless land. Director John Hillcoat (The Road), working from a screenplay by  musician Nick Cave (Birthday Party, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) has made an anti-hero western so raw and uncompromising, so filled with unnerving character studies and grisly suffering, it would’ve made Sergio Leone jealous.

Guy Pearce, Ray Winestone and John Hurt all turn in incredible performances, while Danny Huston is utterly brilliant as the  poetic psychopath Arthur Burns, who the indigenous Australians simply refer to as “The Dog Man” because of his vicious behavior.

Running time: 104 minutes
2006, First Look Pictures

Photo Flash: Haitians Jostle With UN Peacekeepers For Food

Jostle: UN peacekeepers struggle to control the thousands of desperately hungry Haitians outside the wrecked presidential palace in Port-au-Prince

“Thousands of hungry Haitians spilled into the streets defeating barbed wire and a tiny contingent of blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers distributing food.

“The chaotic scene unfolded outside the wrecked presidential palace in Port-au-Prince where aid agencies struggled to control 4000-strong mass of desperate Haitians, two weeks after the devastating earthquake struck.

“Security forces fired pepper spray into the air in an effort to disperse the thousands of men, women and children jostling for food.” (source: the Daily Mail)

Read the rest of the article here

posted by: Brent Carter

Free Music: Caribou “Odessa”

Dan Snaith, the musician behind Caribou,has said this of his new album Swim, out April 20, 2010 on Merge Records: “I got excited by the idea of making dance music that’s liquid in the way it flows back and forth, the sounds slosh around in pitch, timbre, pan…dance music that sounds like it’s made out of water rather than made out of metallic stuff like most dance music does.”

“Odessa,” the bubbly first single from Swim, not only displays Snaith’s considerable technical prowess as producer/songwriter but also proves he’s well on his way to reaching his watery musical goal.

Download “Odessa” here (email required)

posted by: Harold Johns III

Rest in Peace: Howard Zinn

“Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as A People’s History of the United States, inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. He was 87.

“His daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, said he suffered a heart attack.

“As he wrote in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (1994), ‘From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than “objectivity”; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.’” (source: Boston Globe)

“Born in New York in 1922, Professor Zinn was the son of Jewish immigrants who as a child lived in a rundown area in Brooklyn and responded strongly to the novels of Charles Dickens. At age 17, urged on by some young Communists in his neighborhood, he attended a political rally in Times Square.

“‘Suddenly, I heard the sirens sound, and I looked around and saw the policemen on horses galloping into the crowd and beating people,’ he told The A.P. ‘I couldn’t believe that.’

“‘And then I was hit. I turned around and I was knocked unconscious. I woke up sometime later in a doorway, with Times Square quiet again, eerie, dreamlike, as if nothing had transpired. I was ferociously indignant.’

“War continued his education. Eager to help wipe out the Nazis, he joined the Army Air Corps in 1943 and even persuaded the local draft board to let him mail his own induction notice. He flew missions throughout Europe, receiving an Air Medal, but he found himself questioning what it all meant. Back home, he gathered his medals and papers, put them in a folder and wrote on top: ‘Never again.’

“He attended New York University and Columbia University, where he received a doctorate in history. In 1956, he was offered the chairmanship of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, an all-black women’s school in segregated Atlanta.

“During the civil rights movement, Professor Zinn encouraged his students to request books from the segregated public libraries and helped coordinate sit-ins at downtown cafeterias. He also published several articles, including a rare attack on the Kennedy administration, accusing it of being too slow to protect blacks.

“He was loved by students — among them a young Alice Walker, who later wrote The Color Purple — but not by administrators. In 1963, Spelman fired him for ‘insubordination.’ (Professor Zinn was a critic of the school’s non-participation in the civil rights movement.) His years at Boston University were marked by opposition to the Vietnam War and by feuds with the school’s president, John Silber.

“Professor Zinn retired in 1988, spending his last day of class on the picket line with students in support of an on-campus nurses’ strike. Over the years, he continued to lecture at schools and to appear at rallies and on picket lines.” (source: New York Times)

One of Professor Zinn’s last public writings was a brief essay, published last week in The Nation, about the first year of the Obama administration.

“I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president–which means, in our time, a dangerous president–unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction,” Zinn wrote.

Learn more about Howard Zinn here

posted by: Brent Carter