At the end of every Vanderbilt academic year, on the verge of finals, anticipation starts to boil over for the annual Rites of Spring music festival. Recent years have seen EDM juggernauts, hip hop stars, and stadium rock bands alike take their shot at Alumni Lawn glory. So what has The Music Group brought us this year? We asked WRVU DJs for their favorite tracks from this year’s Rites artists, and here’s what they had to say.
As the school years comes to an end and finals begin to ramp up, it’s natural to think about everything other than academic responsibilities at hand. Naturally, it’s a time to dwell on memories, friendships, and, of course, our time here at WRVU. For me, this last blog post has got me thinking. While it’s incredibly sad I’ll be missing all my WRVU goings on for the next eight months, I’m beyond amazed at all the new stuff that’s been released in 2015.
As an ode to WRVU and this semester, I’ll be highlighting my ten favorite tunes of the semester, starting from the bottom (because Drake). If you happen to like electronica, check out some of the dopest of beats from early 2015 below.
WRVU is hosting its final giveaway this semester to give two lucky people a general admission ticket to CounterPoint Festival happening May 22-24 in Georgia! We will be announcing one…
On March 31st, Godspeed You! Black Emperor finally released their much-awaited followup to 2012’s ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, and, after having a few weeks to digest the band’s first album of completely new material since their reforming in 2010, I’ve made up my mind about Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress: it is sweet indeed.
With summer rapidly approaching and the semester nearing its end, we are all being confronted with the fruits of our labor. Some of us have already lined up jobs and internships, and have been working on that final paper all semester long. Some of us have procrastinated on all of those things and are currently freaking out. And above it all we have those second semester seniors with jobs lined up who honestly could not care less about their remaining educational obligations. No matter which category you fall into, however, we have a song to match your mood.
Last Sunday I hosted a phone interview with Neat—a lo-fi, punk band from Southern Louisiana. Neat’s unrelenting fuzzy sound and rich guitar harmonies bring us back to a time when…
When my mom found out Stevie Wonder was coming to Nashville, she wanted me to go so badly that she helped me pay for the tickets. Not that I wouldn’t have tried to go anyways. Stevie is 64 years old, so who knows how long he’ll be touring? And word was that he would be playing his seminal 1976 album Songs in the Key of Life in full.
From the moment I found my seat at Bridgestone Arena I knew the show was going to be an extravagant production. On the stage sat two drum kits, two percussion arrays, seats for a ten-piece string ensemble and six-piece brass section, risers for a horde of backing vocalists, several keyboards and guitars waiting to be played, and of course Stevie’s setup front and center: his signature Hohner Clavinet and a Yamaha electric grand piano.
There’s been a lot of talk about grunge since Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994. According to mass media and popular modernized sentiment, the grunge scene put Seattle on the map and revitalized rock music. Bands like Nirvana, those based in the Northwest and perpetuating this innovative sound, are said to have unleashed a new form of culture – grunge – that still carries remnants today.
“Deep house” is kind of a catchall term for laid-back, slower-paced house music using live-sounding instruments. The genre is a contrast to electronic dance music characterized by manipulation, distortion, and “bass”, and features jazz solos, string loops, tropical drums, alongside other sounds plausibly produced by physical objects. This list is about some of the memorable instruments that pop up in deep house tracks, and also serves as a countdown of my personal favorite tracks related to the genre.
Instrument Featured: Piano
In the middle of Omar S’ modest 2013 album Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself comes the unexpectedly fun piano jam-out “The Shit Baby”. For the uninitiated deep house fan this track is a great place to start: it starts with hi-hat/hand-clap triplets and a standard background bass kick, before someone hops on the keys for an impromptu crowd-pleaser.
RIYL: “Plastic Dreams”, pre-programmed keyboard beats + mad keys playin’ skills
Every year, tens of thousands of music fanatics the world over gather on “the farm” in Manchester, Tennessee for Bonnaroo. Also, it has become tradition to see which sets have left the greatest mark on the festival-goers. Showmanship, the timing of the show, and the size of the artist’s existing fanbase serve as key factors in determining which artists leave Tennessee with the most positive response. In 2014, most of the news and opinions arose from Elton John’s closing set, Kanye’s polarizing rants, and Ukranian group DakhaBrakha’s outlandish stylings. Let’s take a look at which artists are poised to leave their mark on this year’s fest.
This is rap gone Technicolor, if you’re not a fan of Autotune (maybe you’re Jay-Z) you may want to look the other way. Chicago bop duo Lil Trav and Lil Ceno have another stack of elastic high-energy tracks that paint rap in a melodic bloom of colorful effects anchored by bouncy beats.
Coming off some infectious tracks, (“Remy Rick”, “Fiesta”, “Young Heavy”, and “Round N Round”) Sicko Mobb carry on in the latest progression of Autotuned rap-singing melodic rap. Their weird, catchy sound is reminiscent of the hazed out hedonism anthems of Future and pretty boy ego trips of Soulja Boy, though while Future has been chasing around demons and inverting the melody of Autotune to soundtrack his own self-torturing abandonment, Sicko Mobb are flourishing in the elasticity of rap-singing.
“TIDAL for all.” That’s the slogan for Jay Z’s new high-fidelity music streaming service, Tidal. But with a $19.99 a month service fee, it probably isn’t for everyone, especially those…
Since the dawn of the digital age, the music industry has succumb to a new form of shoplifting – online piracy. While pirating music is not a new concept along with the Internet, downloading music without paying for it is occurring at a much greater magnitude than the pre-internet days. As an Economics major, I wonder how much this phenomenon affects the music industry. So I ask the question: Should you really be torrenting?
It’s hard to believe it, but 2015 is already a fourth of the way done. It was not a light musical quarter by any means: in the past month we’ve seen high-profile releases from Sufjan Stevens, Kendrick Lamar, Death Grips, and many more. But what tracks stood out above the rest? We asked our staff to tell us a little bit about their pick for favorite song of 2015 so far. Read on for their selections, and be sure to check them all out in the Spotify playlist at the end.
“Feel the Lightning” by Dan Deacon makes you do just that — feel an electrifying force pass your entire body. It is the perfect mixture of upbeat and hypnotic, catchy but complex, and successfully maintains the typical “Dan Deacon vibe” of collectively bizarre, yet intriguing electronic music.
–Julia Anderson
Summer is just around the corner, and that means that thousands of music fans will be attending the music festivals taking place all across the country. But with tickets to these festivals typically costing $200 or more and lots of artists playing multiple festivals, it can be hard to decide which festival you should go to. Here’s my recap of who is playing which festivals so you can decide where to spend your hard-earned cash.
Even though I like to pretend I’m a music aficionado, let’s face it: I seriously have no idea what’s going on when it comes to titling remixes. Sure, I have every song in my iTunes library labeled to a tee. I take care to list who’s featured on a track, who produced it, what label it’s on (if any), and most importantly, what the artist labeled the track. As a result of this OCD tendency combined with my love for all things electronica, my music catalog is brimming with words like “refix,” “original mix,” and “flip.” Despite this need for classifying these songs with various descriptors, I have no clue what most of these words actually mean. I’m sure many of you guys are in the same boat. So, after a few days of digging on Reddit and a few Google searches, let’s see if it’s possible to clear up some of this jargon.
One of the primary differences between tracks is length. Each different length has a different name. In a sense, every song in its purest form is an original mix, but some songs come in multiple versions. Although it seems intuitive, it’s still helpful to clarify that original mix denotes the first complete mix by the original artist. Simply put, it’s a song by an artist with no other changes; it can be of any length. If an artist prefers the track to be longer, he or she will produce an extended mix. In the extended mix, the track usually includes a longer intro and outro and is longer than the original mix. This type of mix is how the original artist imagines a song without time constraints — usually too long for radio. The last type of mix in this temporal category is the radio edit. In the radio edit, expletives are taken out and the length of the track is cut between 3 and 5 minutes in length (but usually closest to the three minute mark). Intros and outros that may bore radio listeners and take up valuable advertisement time are cut down.
I’m a guitarist. Like most guitarists, I have a favorite model of guitar: the Fender Jazzmaster. First, just a little history about the guitar. Fender first released the Jazzmaster in the late 1950s as a mode of reaching out to jazz musicians. However, most jazz musicians ended up still using the other brands due to the Jazzmaster’s innate ability to produce feedback, something that jazz doesn’t really call for. But the model gained a huge following among surf rock bands of the 1960s, the first place where the instrument came to prominence. Still, with a warm tone and a lack of sustain, most 70s rock guitarists favored the mighty Gibson Les Paul, while Fender purists went back to the Stratocaster. That left Jazzmasters as pawn shop guitars, cheap yet high quality. So, many notable bands have picked Jazzmasters up since the 1950s, and many guitarists use primarily Jazzmasters. Below are some of my favorite songs recorded using the model.
Just last week, pop star Taylor Swift bought up two new websites: TaylorSwift.porn and TaylorSwift.adult. I doubt it will surprise many of you to hear that neither of these sites will be utilized for their implied purpose. Instead, this is another instance of “domain squatting”, where an individual purchases a domain name either with the intent to profit off of a large amount of ads placed on a legitimate-sounding domain, or in this instance to prevent others from having the domain title. With Swift’s high degree of visibility, it was probably a good PR move. Not all celebrities have been that lucky, however.
After months of anticipation, Death Grips’ second half of their final two-part album, The Powers that B, is finally available to the public. Entitled Jenny Death, this album was uploaded to YouTube months after the first half of the album, N***** on the Moon, was released for free (reviewed here by WRVU DJ Brett Tregoning). After their break-up announcement via napkin last summer, fans have been on edge to listen to what could potentially be the final installment in their discography. As always with the painstakingly unpredictable group, things have not always been very transparent with the band. However, the band always delivers on their album promises, and this time the wait was worth it.
Sufjan Stevens has never been afraid to bear his heart to an audience. Even at his most thematic and theatrical–2005’s masterpiece Illinois–he wasn’t shy about including a line like “I cried myself to sleep last night” as the centerpiece of a song before asking the listener to question “are you writing from the heart?” But while Illinois buried its confessional nature amidst richly arranged baroque pop playgrounds, Carrie & Lowell is a thoroughly intimate affair; all you’ll find here are fluttering guitars, double-tracked vocals delivered with a whisper, and haunting synthesizer elegies bookending the album’s brisk tracks. It is an album that is simple and anguished to its very core.
I was recently curious as to why I know so many people who enjoy sad music. It seems especially in times of grief or extreme sadness, like after a rough break-up, everyone wants to listen to a stranger wail about lost love.