This Week's Singles: 05/07/10
Are you ready for some brilliant? Good.»
Are you ready for some brilliant? Good.»
Arriving at the fag-end of a summer teeming with gruelling festival weekends, Bestival has enough gusto and idiosyncrasy to more than stand up for itself.»
This week's content in the form of a Spotify playlist.»
V Festival - or the Virgin Media Festival to give it its correct title - may be the least favoured of its kind as far as music connoisseurs are concerned. A quick flick through the line-up doesn't exactly set pulses racing, as bland non-entities like The Script and Paolo Nutini rub shoulders with has-beens whose sell-by date expired over a decade ago (Ocean Colour Scene, Happy Mondays). However, cast all snobbery to one side for two days and delve a little deeper into the mixing pot and there are actually several gems to be found along with moments of real inspiration here. »
A tirade concerning a wonked-up, pretentious concept called Unity of Vision? On a Tuesday? Oh, go on then. »
The music industry appears to be back from its long Christmas holiday because there are loads of singles around this week. Most of them are very good indeed. So let's talk about the clever mix of Lily Allen's 'The Fear', a not-so-clever Britney-Diplo 'Circus', Bloc Party's new lyrical atrocity, try-hard mental-lady pop from Ida Maria and the sunny majesty of Sky Larkin...»
Here are the most read news stories published every month this year on DiS. Among the stories featured: Arcade Fire vs ambition, Lily vs America, The Horrors vs Elvis, Everyone vs Bring Me The Horizon, and more»
A celebration of pop in all its vague and polymorphous glory.»
Deep into the bloated innards of the festival season and DiS is headed in a north easterly direction to Norway – again - this time for the arrestingly-titled Øya Festival in Oslo...»
DiS heads to Barcelona for the second time this year - following Primavera at the end of May - for Summercase. What we find: a drunk Lily Allen, a chilled-out Chemical Brothers, and some dodgy scotch...»
So the Mercury nominations for this year aren’t so bad, a couple of proper WTF examples aside (The View? Really? Come on…). However good this year’s nominations generally are, though, we at DiS got the old grey matter burning away to compile an alternative list of twelve that could have made the cut...»
It serves them right to suffer. While some of us sat scratching our arses from the comfort of our living rooms, occasionally pushing the red button to keep Jo Whiley at bay, some idiots actually went to Glastonbury. But we're not bitter. No. It would have been nice to have an invite, but that's all history now. Here, DiS’s Ben Patashnik, Joshua Cole and Georgina Terry attempt to fashion coherent narratives from their weekends of mud-soaked madness…»
Social networking does not make million-selling acts... so what is really happening?
Is it still the traditional media hype model? Is it all virtual word of mouth? Does it feel like you're bashing your head against a million bands trying to stampede through a stage door towards a mirage of an audience of 80 million people who are busy talking to each other in lolz 'n rofls?»