In Brief: Future Heart Drops Flaming Lips/Bon Iver Track From Upcoming Album

The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne on a
typical Tuesday Morning, 10am

Oklahoma City's golden children, The Flaming Lips, have plans to release their star studded double LP, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends, as a Record Store Day 2012. Boasting an almost unbelievably diverse cast of performers, Heady Fwends includes Bon Iver, Erykah Badu, Nick Cave, Yoko Ono, Neon Indian, Ke$ha, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Lightning Bolt, Biz Markie, New Fumes, Chris Martin of Coldplay, and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zero, among others.

The first of many tracks that will no doubt surface between now and Record Store Day, "Ashes In The Air" features Bon Iver joining the spaced-out, psychedelic, okie-indie-popsters. The Future Heart, whose aim is to chronicle their "enthusiasm for life, rock n’ roll, pop culture and The Flaming Lips," released the track earlier this evening to both the internet and Sirius XM DJ (and one of my many twitter nemesis), Jenny Eliscu. Eliscu premiered the song on her XM U program.

You can preview the track after the jump.

From the 'Net: Tim Tebow's Exciting Press Conference

Tim Tebow, the former Denver Broncos quarterback, has been in the news a lot recently. The football sensation that captured our nation with sheer jubilation, Tebow was recently ousted from the Mile-High City, who signed Peyton Manning. Manning had previously been under contract with the Indianapolis Colts, with whom he twice attended and once won the Superbowl. These, I imagine, are exciting times for football fans. Having been recently signed to the New York Jets (the Jets?),Tim Tebow himself is excited. So excited, in fact, at a recent press conference discussing his relationship with the aforementioned Jets of New York he managed to utter "excite" in a great deal of tenses and variations a total of 44 times. The video is below:

Review: "Beak & Claw" by s/s/s

Beak & Claw was released March 20,2012 by Anticon Records

Many of you may have been as shocked as I was when, a little over two weeks ago, the blogosphere lit up with news that Sufjan Stevens, the master composer who has brought us opuses like the timeless Illinois and and neoclassical symphony The BQE, was working on a hip-hop record. Beak & Claw is a four song EP which sees Stevens collaborating with Chicago's avant-garde rapper Serengeti and Denver's Son Lux, whose production style defies classification but lies somewhere between trip hop and ambient electronica. The first single "Museum Day", which was available to stream when the EP was announced, was exactly as out-there as one would expect. The song opens with Sufjan crooning some kind of bizarre, autotuned new age poetry ("Make it right, make it right, energy") and slows to a sparse drumbeat layered with spacey synthesizers and Serengeti drops some stream-of-consciousness rhymes before the song builds back up to its hooky chorus, the psychedelic insanity of which would make Wayne Coyne jealous.

Two Raleigh, NC Festivals Add New Venues

Photo courtesy of progressenergycenter.com

The burgeoning metropolis of Raleigh, NC is already gearing up for the 3rd Annual Hopscotch Music Festival this September (check out our extensive past coverage here). For those of you unfamiliar with the event, the aptly named Hopscotch Festival takes place across over a dozen different venues in downtown Raleigh, all within reasonable walking distance of each other, consisting of a large outdoor stage in City Plaza and an assortment of bars, clubs, and theaters of all shapes and sizes. Back in November, a mere two month after 2011's stellar weekend, the folks at Hopscotch announced that they would be adding the main gallery of Raleigh's Contemporary Art Museum as their fifteenth performance venue, indicating that the festival was continuing to build on the expansive growth that it made after between 2010 and 2011. It turns out that was only the beginning.