Music Report

In industry news, Radiohead is now offering their new album “In Rainbows” for pre-order. If you choose to download the album as your delivery method, you can determine how much you’d like to pay. Just as simple as that: instead of a given price, there is a box where you offer what you think a fair price is. Downloads begin October 10th.
http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/index3.html

Ray Mendez favorite Sigur Ros will be performing at the French Institute’s Florence Gould Hall (55 E 59th St.) on Saturday, October 6th. The event is described as: Following a special screening of “Heima,” a film of a summer concert tour of Sigur Ros through Iceland, the band will talk with John Seabrook and perform. The event is part of the New Yorker Festival. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpQ6m2Qf918&eurl

Recently, well regarded Sigur Ros track Flugufrelsarinn got covered by what some might call an unlikely group. Kronos Quartet, the 30-year veterans of the string scene (2 violins, 1 viola, & a cello), decided to offer their take on the composition. It is available on their MySpace page and they might even play it at one of their 3 shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater during the Next Wave Festival October 3, 5, 6. Kronos Quartet is notable for their work playing the music of Philip Glass for the film Dracula and Clint Mansell’s music for the score to Requiem for a Dream.
http://www.myspace.com/kronosquartet

The prolific They Might Be Giants will be playing Columbia University on October 14th. Although I have TMBG shows are rumored to be a gas. Worst case scenario, I would think they’d play Istanbul (Not Constantinople) and Particle Man and you’d get your money’s worth. They Might Be Giants was experimenting with alternate release methods before anyone when they put new songs on an answering machine and allowed fans to call in and listen. Some of those songs are aggregated on the Dial-A-Song album. More recently, TMBG has gone the Gorillaz route by creating alter egos Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh aka the Mesopotamians on their new album The Else. The concept really comes to life in the video linked below.
http://www.amazon.com/Dial-Song-Years-Might-Giants/dp/B00006IZOC
http://www.stereogum.com/archives/video/new-they-might-be-giants-video-mesopotamians.html

One night prior on 10/13, one of the best pure rock acts out there, Queens of the Stone Age, will be blasting through what is now called the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden

In updates from past Reports, The Cool Kids are playing Chicago with The Go! Team on 10/13, after which they will open for MIA in New York on 10/18.
Former mentionees, Feist, are also noteworthy this week as Kanye West samples them in a bonus track he produced on the new Twista album. That being said, critics are right on when they call the production a “lazy sample ‘n’ paste job,” and Twista’s style tends to get old really fast. If that weren’t evidence enough that Feist has already jumped, they appeared this week on the blog of Caitlin Bergmann favorite Perez Hilton.
http://www.stereogum.com/archives/kanye-samples-feist-on-twistas-well-its-time.html?utm_source=bb&utm_medium=mc
http://perezhilton.com/?p=6547