David Bowie’s Reality Tour travelled the world in 2003 and 2004. A DVD was shot in Dublin over the course of November 22nd and 23rd 2003. This dvd has been available since October of 2004. But since Bowie is now pretty much retired after suffering a heart attack during the Reality Tour (his final tour to date) they just recently released a CD version as well as digital versions.
You can preview the tracks using the handy Amazon widget:
This newly released audio only version includes 3 additional songs: Fall Dogs Bomb The Moon, Breaking Glass, and China Girl. I personally attended The Reality Tour when it hit NYC and can tell you that it was a great show. The set is both a compilation of greatest hits with a bunch of new songs from the new Reality album. Reality unfortunately wasn’t a huge hit. I still defend it though as it has some pretty good songs on it. But even if you skip over those you still have a live show featuring tons of great classic material for a pretty good price.
Tegan & Sara returned to New York City after a triumphant start to their Sainthood tour last October with 2 sold out Town Hall shows. This time was very different. They’ve embarked on the North American leg of the tour and did not include a New York date. Instead on January 27th the following appeared on their website:
we’ve decided, quite spontaneously, to offer an opportunity for some of you to spend an intimate night with us at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. perhaps it’s worth noting that my use of the word intimate only applies to the small-ish size of the venue and the stripped down nature of the material we will be performing. i wouldn’t call it an acoustic performance so much as a night of reinterpretations of the well worn and well loved album versions you’ve come to love.
With that small bit of info and the onsale date a couple of days later and the fact that the show would be February 15th we were left to fend for ourselves. It wasn’t until the tickets went onsale that we learned they’d be $75. That is a lot more than Tegan & Sara shows usually cost, and a lot more than Music Hall of Williamsburg shows usually cost. In fact I know quite a few people who didn’t buy tickets because of this price.
For those of you non-New Yorkers reading this, The Music Hall of Williamsburg is a very popular venue located in Brooklyn. It is also very small. It’s capacity is about 550, and was formerly a great venue called Northsix (it’s on North 6th Street). So shows there tend to be small and sell out very fast.
Anyway obviously I bought a ticket and let me now guide you through my evening with my favorite two Canadian twins.
It’s been a while since I’ve done an album review. Truth is I can get very stuck into a few bands and just get lost listening to their stuff for an extended period and there isn’t much incentive for me to find something new. But I kept hearing about Ke$ha (from this point forward I’m not using the dollar sign) and some people liked her and some people loved her and others hated her, but I couldn’t figure out what any of it was about so I decided I’d take a chance and listen to her album Animal.
You can preview tracks as well as buy the album on or Amazon using this handy widget:
This post is going to be a little different than our first installment in the Great Concerts series. The last was about the legendary David Bowie and was literally a historic concert. This one is more personally historic, although there’s a lot of history behind this one as well. Let’s begin.
The year is 1999. Hole has released their 3rd album Celebrity Skin() and commenced an ill-fated co-headlining tour with Marilyn Manson that fell apart. Hole hadn’t toured in years and the album alone was a long time in the making, but the fans still wanted to see the band (even with new drummer Samantha Maloney replacing Patty Schmel). So for once the band did the right thing and went back out on the road alone. This would be the final Hole tour (except no one knew it yet). They sold out 2 shows at NYC’s famed Roseland Ballroom, appearing on David Letterman right across the street in the process(the appearance would air on the 20th, but was taped earlier in the week).
It Might Get Loud is a documentary from director Davis Guggenheim profiling 3 of the greatest living Rock guitarists – The Edge, Jack White, and Jimmy Page. It takes the form of cutting between a sitdown with the 3 musicians all talking to each other and the musicians each showing off important places in their musical career while giving essentially a mini biography of their life with the guitar. It goes into many of their biggest hits and how they came up with them but also delves deep into their personalities and differing styles.
Now I’m a drummer, but like everyone else I appreciate the guitar and as a fan of music I really love conversations about it, especially the behind the scenes sort of reason why kind of stuff. Also as a drummer there was actually some really interesting stuff in here, as the musicians talk they talk about their various bands and there’s obviously conversations about the rest of the band members. For me a big highlight was seeing inside Headley Grange where Zeppelin recorded most of IV, and having Jimmy Page explain how they recorded the drums for When The Levee Breaks. It was sort of funny because I was actually talking about that just a few weeks ago with my own band.
This post is the beginning of a new series here at Media Decay that will be almost like a recommendation area for concerts. Basically it’s writeups of some particularly special concerts I’ve either attended or heard. One feature of these is that I’m going to do my best to include at least some audio from the shows in these posts, although if a show is available commercially this will be more complex. I hope you enjoy the first installment of this series and come back for more. It should be monthly. Click a song title to stream that song.
The first installment is all about David Bowie. A consummate showman and the definition of rock star, I’ve managed to see him live twice before he retired from music (if you didn’t know Bowie is retired from music due to his heart being fucked). The very first time I got to see him was this show, perhaps the best concert I have ever experienced (and I’ve been to a lot of concerts).
The date was January 9th 1997. The place NYC’s legendary Madison Square Garden where many years before Bowie had already put on one of the greatest shows of all time that would be released as the movie Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars. This show was to celebrate the legendary rocker turning 50 (his actual birthday was the 8th). As a way to celebrate this milestone he decided that he wanted to share the stage with acts that he’d influenced and who had influenced him in return. We’ll get to who exactly that was in a minute.
This series of posts are all about cool holiday gifts, for you or the people you care about. We’ll be including tons of cool stuff in the categories we cover on the site. Since this is our first year we’re going to not limit ourselves to just stuff that came out over the past few months, we’re going to include a bunch of other awesome stuff as well. Think of this as your definitive source for the coolest gifts for the coolest people you know. Our first post is all about music related goodies.
The Pixies started their 3 day, 4 show, 95% sold out NYC run tonight at the Hammerstein Ballroom. If you didn’t know this is the Doolittle Tour. For the anniversary of Doolittle the band is doing a tour and playing the entire album plus b-sides. Very cool. Anyway I’d seen The Pixies once in 2005 and was incredibly impressed. They really brought it. And tonight was no exception.
Today is that day that Lady Gaga releases her second recording, The Fame Monster which is the followup to the wildly successful The Fame. Once again it’s a combination of Gaga’s contagious hooks, catchy lyrics, and cutting edge, yet retro dance beats.
For her second effort she takes on the personal monsters that have surrounded her during her rise to the top over the last year. It shows a much deeper and thoughtful look at life than the party atmosphere presented on her first recording, some perhaps the consequences of the life spoken of in The Fame. The songs reflect a new maturity indicating that Gaga may be around for many years to come.
That is Garfunkel & Oates aka songwriter/actresses Riki Lindhome (blonde one)and Kate Micucci (brunette). They’re a comedy-folk duo who have released the album “Music Songs”. And this is a post about how awesome they are. Below the cut I’m gonna have a ton of YouTube videos so you’ve been warned. It’s so worth it though you will laugh for hours.
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