“We believe our song was re-recorded and used without permission of the White Stripes, our publishers, label or management…The White Stripes take strong insult and objection to the Air Force Reserve’s presenting this advertisement with the implication that we licensed one of our songs to encourage recruitment during a war that we do not support.”

— Jack White explains why, despite his permission, you might have heard a snippet of The White Stripes song “Fell in Love with a Girl” (or something that sounded really similar to it) on a Super Bowl commercial for U.S. Air Force Reserve. Jack goes on to note that while “The White Stripes support this nation’s military, at home and during times when our country needs and depends on them.. we simply don’t want to be a cog in the wheel of the current conflict.” As a result, “we plan to take strong action to stop the ad containing this music.” Well, this should be interesting.

Check out The White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl” below; U.S. Air Force Reserve’s ad can be found here.

As announced today (via Spin), all this hype will come to fruition on April 13th when MGMT offers the nine-track Congratulations. VanWyngarden, Goldwasser, and Kember recorded the album with bassist Matt Asti, drummer Will Berman, and bassist James Richardson (all of whom are members of MGMT’s live backing ensemble) as well Royal Trux frontwoman Jennifer Herrema in Upstate, NY, Brooklyn, and Malibu, CA.

“It’s definitely going to shock people,” Vanwyngarden told Spin of the new album’s sound. “We dropped any sort of irony that was on the first record, and Congratulations feels true to who we really are.”

He went on to note that the album’s nine tracks, which includes the incredibly titled track “Brian Eno”, are “sequenced to flow with sonic and thematic coherence.” Basically, we’ll be surfing, as that will be the “unifying influence” on the album, Vanwyngarden explains.

“There’s a surfing thread throughout the record,” he explained, citing specifically a song called “It’s Working.” “When you’re surfing, there’s a specific break you’re paddling to. And when the waves are really good you say, ‘It’s working.’ The song kind of has a surf-y vibe. It’s like surfing on ecstasy!”

Other tracks on the album include a 12-minute-long track titled “Siberian Breaks”, which features a theme about surfing in the Arctic Circle by Russia, and the “very nightmare-ish sounding”, Lady Gaga-inspired “Lady Dada’s Nightmare”. You really can’t make this stuff up.

Congratulations will be released on April 13th via Sony/Columbia. A U.S. tour in support of the album will be announced soon. So far, the band is confirmed to appear at Coachella and Bamboozle this Spring.

Congratulations Tracklist:
01. It’s Working
02. Song for Dan Treacy
03. Someone’s Missing
04. Flash Delirium
05. I Found a Whistle
06. Siberian Breaks
07. Brian Eno
08. Lady Dada’s Nightmare
09. Congratulations

MTV attempted to rationalize the decision in the following press release:

“It represents a new visually defined MTV, stimulating its past, present and future and embracing it’s diversity. Everything from Jersey Shore, to the VMAs to collaborations with the MoMA. The logo is part of MTV’s re-invention to connect with today’s millennial generation and bring them in as part of the channel.”

And so it has become…

As previously mentioned, the lineup announcement will work something like this. Unlike previous announcements, the 2010 bill will not be unveiled all at once, but rather throughout the day, with the goal being to “generate conversations about the lineup a few acts at a time.” Starting at 10 AM EST (barring any early leaks), bands will begin announcing their participation via various social media outlets and bonnaroo.com. It’s basically like one giant, procrastinating-inducing puzzle. Fortunately, just in case we don’t figure it out by then, Bonnaroo will end our agony by announcing the full lineup later tomorrow night.

Given all this, it only makes sense that we start an open thread, where you guys can chat, complain, and post any discoveries you find. We’ll of course keep track as well!

As a start, here are the acts we expect to appear on this year’s bill:

Aeroplane, Alberta Cross, The Avett Brothers, Blues Traveler, Caravan Palace, Dan Deacon, Dave Matthews Band, The Flaming Lips, The Gaslight Anthem, GWAR, Here We Go Magic, Jay-Z, Kings of Leon, Lord T & Eloise, Mayer Hawthrone, Miike Snow, Neil Young, Ryan Montbleau Band, Steve Martin with the Steep Canyon Rangers, Stevie Wonder, Thievery Corporation, Tinariwen, Wale, Zac Brown Band

The following acts are rumored, per other websites, updated bios on Bonnaroo.com, etc.:

311, The Black Keys, Broken Social Scene, Calexico, Deadmau5, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, Furthur, Galactic, Ingrid Michaelson, The Jayhawks, John Prine, Local Natives, Manchester Orchestra, Mew, My Morning Jacket, The National, Needtobreathre, Noah and The Whale, Paul Simon, Pavement, Phoenix, Regina Spektor, Robert Earl Keen, Roger Waters, Simon and Garfunkel, Tokyo Police Club, Yonder Mountain String Band

Now, buckle up kids! It’s going to be a long and wild ride!

After working with Beck and his most recent Record Club recording, Lidell kept the party going with recordings for his own solo-release, Compass, which sees the UK musician joined by the likes of Beck, Feist, and veteran drummer James Gadson. Recorded at the legendary Ocean Way Studios, the crew was joined in studio by Nikka Acosta, keyboardist Brian Lebarton, and Justin Stanley. I can only imagine what it would have been a fly on that wall, being blasted by awe-inspiring harmonies.

To continue shaping the recording, Wilco’s Pat Sansone and Gonzales sent Lidell their own individual parts, via the internet, for inclusion. Lidell brought the project back to New York to start making sense of the various recordings, and then sent the data to Feist’s ranch in the Niagara Escarpment to be produced by Grizzly Bear bassist Chris Taylor. Yep, it keeps getting better and better!

While the release contains input from several amazing minds, musically and lyrically Compass is a Jamie Lidell venture. Jamie says, “It’s been an emotional couple of years, so I tapped into what I wanted to say and started writing. There was a lot to draw on.”

So, after you close your mouth, wipe away that bead of drool and brace yourself, we must still wait three months for the May 18th Warp Records release of Compass. That said, you can take some of the edge off by check out the album’s title track below.

Check Out:

Here’s your Late Night Lobotomy.

Mon—The Bravery*
Tues—Ryan Bingham
Wed—The Editors
Fri—Dashboard Confessional

Tues—Regina Spektor
Wed—Yeasayer
Thurs—Kings of Convenience
Fri—Selena Gomez

Mon—Eric Hutchinson*
Tues—Matisyahu*
Wed—Incubus*

Mon—Josh Turner
Tues—Sade
Fri—The Soft Pack

Mon—TBA
Tues—TBA
Wed—TBA
Thurs—TBA
Fri—TBA

Mon—Patty Griffin

*twiddles thumbs*

Stay tuned, folks!

Next, I was hounded by the notion of originality. Almost everyone wants to be—or appear—unique to the world, and choosing more or less slow, ballad-esque melodies for a funeral theme is far from extraordinary. However, how original is it to be “one of those” who want their funeral to be a dance party because they’ve decided they don’t want to be “one of those” who want a sad, mournful goodbye? Soon enough I said, “Fuck all that,” and decided to go with my gut. If a song as beautiful and innocent as “Moonchild” was my first instinct, why fight it? Besides, it’s barely sappy or sad.

King Crimson, in my opinion one of the most overlooked groups of the late ’60s, made sweet, surreal progressive rock that peeked with curiosity, fear, and fascination at a world filled equally with charmed playgrounds and haunted houses. In short, then, after days of listening over and over to playlist upon playlist, I found that King Crimson’s entire debut album was nothing but exactly what I would imagine a recapitulation of my life to sound like. Strange? Oh, well. (I don’t think so.) Not to mention the song “Epitaph” is included in this one and, well, if that’s not a funeral song, then this world is simply inconceivable and unacceptable.

Either way, there are several deciding factors that sold me on In the Court of the Crimson King. I suppose I should begin with a brief explanation of my feelings on… the longest vacation we shall all ever take. In our wonderful, exquisite Western culture, we are conditioned to fear death. I, however, personally feel that we have nothing to fear, and therefore work on embracing my mortality rather than trying to avoid it.

A similar concept has been popularized in movies like The Fountain, where Mayan folklore along with Hugh Jackman’s mournful journey were coupled to portray death as the ultimate eternal life. (Spoiler alert!) If you’ve seen the movie, you may have stopped to think about what it means to become a tree in the afterlife. I’d hate to narrate the entire story, but I can quickly paraphrase. My understanding of it is that once we pass on, we come to inhabit every atom of the cosmos, hence the “eternal life”: If you become everything, you are everywhere; if you are everywhere, time will never pass you by.

And so, the song “Moonchild” immediately strikes a match in me because of its description of the ubiquitous girl “dancing in the shallows of a river”, “dreaming in the shadow/of a willow”, “sleeping on the steps of a fountain,” and so on and so forth. She’s everywhere. She inhabits every crevice of the earth, somewhat like a beautiful ghostly being, supernaturally engraved into the world. Call me a romantic, a dreamer, or what have you—I really dig this little girl. There’s something very nostalgic and full of poetry in the soft drone of the song and its light cymbals, and the lyrics are allusive to a lost spirit. At my funeral, I will be that spirit that was lost, and I can only hope that my survivors wish for me to find the “sunchild”.

The big closer on my decision to play this Crimson gem at my funeral definitely has to be “I Talk to the Wind”. It might be the most depressing song I’ve chosen so far, but like I said, my outlook is positive. The hook here can sound like a frustrating situation: “I talk to the wind/My words are all carried away/I talk to the wind/The wind does not hear”. However, I’d have to interpret it as a sort of weight lifted off my shoulders. In my mind, this sounds like the optimal farewell song, because it encompasses both a long, full journey and a freedom from all responsibility and upset.

The verse, “What do I see?/Much confusion/Disillusion/All around me”, when paired with, “You don’t possess me/…Can’t instruct me/Or conduct me” means a period of relief to me. It’s like finally, there has been a long time of disappointment, sadness, and thirst for rebellion, but now all there is is the freedom of immunity. Immunity from what, you ask? Listen to “Epitaph”, then, and experience the social dissatisfaction that drives even the best to disappointment and loss of motivation. (i.e. “The fate of all mankind I see/Is in the hands of fools”.)

On a more rocking note, “21^st Century Schizoid Man” relays the excitement, fear, and basically all other adrenaline-powered emotions I have felt up to this day in life. So why not incorporate it into my funeral program?—apparently it will be a lasting event. “…Schizoid Man” is much like me: messy, kinda long, loud at times, progressive, elegantly arranged, and pretty damn quirky. Thus it seems to be blatantly fitting for a memorial service dedicated to yours truly.

In the Court of the Crimson King: An emotionally sincere record with all the most human notes of affective episodes, including wonder, grief, liberation, and excitement. While one is never sure of what the future holds, the only day that is certain in our lives is the day in which they will end. As a being run intrinsically by music, I wish and hope those I love celebrate their goodbyes in the only way that seems pure and sufficient to me: by giving me some 44 minutes of crystal-clear Crimson.

Check Out:

Per Ear Candy, tickets for the event are free and can be picked up at Easy Street Records beginning Friday with a limit of two per person, or you can win tickets by listening to 107.7 The End. Tickets for the festival itself are currently onsale via Ticketmaster.com.

Due for release on May 4th (via Warp), the experimental hip-hop artist has pulled together a self-described seventeen-track “space opera” with an entirely new range of sounds. The spirit of his aunt, the famous Alice Coltrane, can be heard throughout the entire record, especially on the collaborations with jazz saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, bassist Thundercat, and harp prodigy Rebekah Raff. Other big names that will be heard on the album include Erykah Badu, Outkast string arranger Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, and Laura Darlington. Yorke’s guest vocal can be found about halfway through “And The World Laughs With You”.

With a guest list like that, it’s hard to go wrong!

Cosmogramma Tracklist:
01. Clock Catcher
02. Pickled!
03. Nose Art
04. Intro//A Cosmic Drama
05. Zodiac Shit
06. Computer Face//Pure Being
07. And The World Laughs With You ft. Thom Yorke
08. Arkestry
09. Mmmhmm ft.Thundercat
10. Do The Astral Plane
11. Satelllliiiiiteee
12. German Haircut
13. Recoiled
14. Dance Of The Pseudo Nymph
15. Drips//Auntie’s Harp
16. Table Tennis ft. Laura Darlington
17. Galaxy In Janaki

Just under a week before a shot tour, I was able to ask multi-instrumentalist John McEntire a few questions about their newest disc, their connections to the jazz world, and the difficulties of playing exactly what the fans want.

It’s All Around You and Beacons of Ancestorship are pretty different, would you say that’s true?

I think so, yeah.

Particularly it seems like there are more synths and samples in the forefront as the albums come.

Yeah, I mean, especially on the last one, on Beacons we made a conscious decision to try to get away from some of the signature sounds that we have, with mallet instruments and things. I think a necessary consequence of that was to use more keyboards and synths.

I’ve read that you guys write and record in a sort of piecemeal way. Could you describe that?

Well, I would say that generally what happens is that we all get together and bring in little fragments of ideas that we have developed individually, which can be anything from very, very simple things, like a rhythm or a small chord progression or something like that, anything from something that small up to practically finished songs, which happens occasionally. And then we just, either in the practice space or the studio, start to develop these ideas as a group. And it usually takes a while to get somewhere where we’re happy with. There’s a long process of trying things and throwing things away, coming back and trying again, eventually getting somewhere we feel like we’ve done justice to the original idea.

You guys all have a lot of other projects you work on. Does that make it confusing on which ideas to bring to what projects?

Not so much, you know. Occasionally there’s just like scheduling conflicts. But in most instances they can get worked out. I think it’s been good for everybody to have other outlets for what they want to do. It’s worked out well, to be pretty honest.

I’ve seen Jeff Parker and John Herndon playing in jazz and improvised music shows around Chicago. How do you think Tortoise fits into the jazz world?

Well, honestly, I don’t think it does at all. Other than the fact that Jeff and Johnny happen to be great jazz musicians. That’s about it.

But, would you say there’s been some jazz influence on your music?

No. Not at all. Personally, I don’t think so. I think that we get tagged with that because of some very superficial things, like, we use a vibraphone or that we don’t play three chord songs all the time. But, no. I mean, the things that I think of that I think kind of define jazz do not exist in what we do as a group.

On Beacons, there are a few songs that are more straightforward rock or punk based, particularly “Yinxianghechengqi.” Why did these songs come out at this point in your career?

I suppose…with every record, this is probably true about everybody, with every record that you make there’s kind of a pushback from the last record, to try to do something different. That was definitely the case with us on this one. As much as we all liked It’s All Around You, I think there was a feeling that it was a little too…In retrospect it was a little too…Soft, in a sense. There were a lot of things that were kind of mid tempo. While they were nice tunes, they didn’t really exude any…urgency. So, yeah. It was kind of a conscious decision, that was for us a little more aggressive.

There’s also some dubstep and hip-hop influence on the record, at least in what I hear.

I mean, I guess so, in a way. I don’t think it was super conscious. The stuff crept in. Maybe one of the tracks you’re referring to is “Penumbra”, the little short one with some samples and stuff. That was one Johnny came up with. That was a real obvious kind of Jay Dee type track. Not obvious, but, you know, it comes from that sensibility. The one you’re talking about with the dubstep, “Northern Something”, which is…I don’t know how that one came about, to be honest (laughs). I don’t think we were trying to reference that specifically. What happened was, we had the riff, the synth part or whatever. And we were like, okay, what should we do with this? How are we gonna make a beat work with it? That was the only thing we could do (starts beat-boxing the rhythm), and so it just stuck.

Where did the title Beacons of Ancestorship come from?

It’s quite a long story, actually. If you’re really interested, you might want to look it up online. Because, it’s actually really fascinating. I can give you an outline of it, though: It’s the title of a book.

I’m intrigued now. I’m going to have to go look it up.

Yeah. The author’s name is John Barton Wolgamot.

So…The upcoming tour is only nine days long. Are you guys avoiding longer tours now?

Well, somewhat, I guess. We’ve done a lot. Last year, on the back of the record. We have a few more coming up this year, too. It’s a situation where we’re doing more, shorter runs.

Did you enjoy playing a fan-picked set at last summer’s Pitchfork Festival?

No. Not at all.

Not at all?

No.

Any reason for that?

The most recent thing we played in that set was 12 years old. Especially when we have a new record out. Why are we playing this festival playing the golden oldies. It doesn’t make sense.

Was there any temptation to just throw in some of the new material?

There was. For sure. I don’t know. I felt like we had to stick with the rules.

Was there a contract that said you had to follow the vote?

No, we didn’t. We endured many discussions where we were like “We should just do whatever the fuck we want.” But everybody was like “Well, you know, we signed on to do this thing as such, so we should just stick with it.”

Did that reaction have any affect on what you’re going to play on this tour? Is it only going to be Beacons material?

No, no. We still do a bunch of back catalogue stuff. I think we’re playing about three quarters of the new record.