All in Music Features

All Music Features

Music Features

On the racks: September 5, 2006

REMEMBER US?: The Rapture release Pieces of the People We Love stateside on September 12.

Remember the Rapture? Well, they’re still looking for that big Strokes-style breakthrough – a prize that’s gotta be seeming less and less attractive every day. Which may explain why Danger Mouse is listed among the producers on the new Pieces of the People We Love (Universal). The disc’s out in England this week, and the band will be back home in NYC on Tuesday, September 12 to celebrate its official US release.

On the other side of the underground spectrum, the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Boston animal collective Grizzly Bear are back and waving their freak folk flag with all kinds of bells and whistles – literally, bells and whistles – on their new Yellow House. It’s their first for Warp, an electronica label that offers folks like Grizzly Bear endless opportunities for remixing. Expect Yellow House: The Remixes in time for the holidays.

You gotta wonder what kind of lyrics Zach de la Rocha would be writing now if he were still raging against the machine. And where is Zach anyway? His former pals are soldiering with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell in Audioslave, a band who have a fairly unusual set up in which Interscope and Epic have agreed to share the fruits of the band’s successes. The new Revelations is an Epic release that finds Cornell offering up some dystopian imagery in the aptly named “Broken City.”

Am I the only one who’s more than a little creeped out by Bob Mould’s fascination with pro wrestling? Well, the title of his new project, Blowoff, apparently has something to do with the, ah, sport, which is even creepier. For better or worse, Mould, who’s recently been doing some electronic remixing under the fitting name LoudBomb, teams up with producer/remixer Richard Morel (a guy he met on the DJ/remix circuit) on Blowoff’s self-titled debut for Full Frequency Music, and the results are mixed. Don’t mean that in a bad way: the songs themselves sound like they started off as the kind of guitar-based fair Mould’s been churning out since his days in Hüsker Dü. But house grooves have been added and there’s a definite focus on beat science. Live, Mould and Morel both DJ and “perform” songs. Just as long as they don’t wrestle, it’s fine with me. . .