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Friday night at ATP was inaugurated by The Scientists playing their first stateside show ever. The long-running Australian group are best remembered for a fertile period in the 1980s which produced the classic Blood Red River mini LP, which they played in its entirety. The band comes from the Australian rock tradition of swaggering, wild-haired men who play swampy blues-inflected rock that's rough around the edges. Cited as a defining influence by artists like Jon Spencer and Warren Ellis, The Scientists' set the stage for an evening of music that was to be all about man's relationship to his axe, at times even using a bottle of Jameson’s to grind notes from it.

In the late eighties and early nineties, the smart money on a band breaking out of the Seattle grunge scene was on Mudhoney, not Nirvana. Over 20 years later, the band is still doling out their brand of rhythmically propulsive anthems punctuated by explosive guitar pyrotechnics. Part of ATP's Don't Look Back series of bands performing classic albums, Mudhoney performed the Superfuzz Bigmuff mini LP and contemporaneous classic singles like “Touch Me I'm Sick.” Playing to a packed house with maniacally enthused fans – Prefix photographer Tim Bugbee reports that he was standing in front of a young lady who lapsed into intermittent spasms of ecstasy throughout the set – Mudhoney whet the audience's appetite for the evening's biggest draw, Iggy & The Stooges; Mark Arm mentioned that being in the sweet spot of a Scientists/Stooges sandwich was pretty surreal.

Rushing to the stage with the house lights still, Iggy and the current Stooges incarnation which features guitarist James Williamson for the first time burst into the title track off Raw Power, which they were set to play in its entirety. Williamson's distinctive guitar sound pierced like a guttural howl through the Stardust Ballroom, and the near capacity crowd went absolutely nuts, a steady stream of stage divers and crowd surfers responding to Iggy's posturing and come-ons. The antics reached a peak on “Shake Appeal,” when Iggy invited a troupe of audience members on-stage to dance, and specifically requested “spazzers.” After the close of the proper set, the band – including bassist Mike Watt who had blown out his knee at a show in France weeks prior and was on crutches – rushed back to the stage and performed two classics in quick succession (“Fun House” and “No Fun”), with the mid-set blasts of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and a punishing version of “1970” highlighting the essential contributions of saxophonist Steve Mackay. Iggy executed a farewell stage dive, circling most of the crowd before breaking into a final dance and waving goodbye, leaving the audience in a daze.

But the heaviest was yet to come, with Sleep taking the stage promptly at 11:00 PM to a rapturous reception. The cult group disbanded in 1994, and had only reformed once since to play a previous ATP event in the UK in 2009. It was immediately clear that for many in the audience, Sleep's appearance marked realization of years of empty hopes, with one dazzled fan remarking “I never thought I'd see this. It's blowing my fucking mind.” Such a pithy summation was entirely accurate, as the group held the dedicated audience in a hypnotic trance throughout their set, which pushed past the two hour mark. Earlier in the day, bassist Al Cisneros had remarked that for him each show is an event, and that he was aware of US fans' desire to see Sleep perform live. The band performed their Holy Mountain LP in its entirety as advertised, but that was merely the beginning as the band worked their way through a career-spanning set that included a beguiling cover of Ozzy Osbourne's “Over The Mountain.” As the crowd filtered out just past one in the morning, you could still hear Sleep's massive sound echoing through the Stardust ballroom.

Filed under: Concerts and Tours

Busy morning for Kanye West's Twitter account. Late last night he dropped the latest of his weekly Friday Twitter releases, "Devil In A New Dress," which sounds like old-school, Late Registration-era Kanye. Then, for the next three or so hours, he, uh, went kind of crazy. Over the course of dozens of tweets he apologized to Taylor Swift for the publicity stunt he pulled last year, mentions that he's written a song he'd like for her to perform, said that he had become George W. Bush overnight and tries to get all Marshall McLuhan on us with some commentary on the state of contemporary media.

There's no real way to explain the weird levels of self-deprecation and feigned humility he offers, so you should probably read it yourself. At one point he blames "the media" for trying to demonize him, comments on the state of race in America and remarks that he "accept[s] the idea (ideal) that perception is reality."

"I'm ready to get out of my own way. The ego is overdone... it's like hoodies," he tweets. Which goes along nicely with the "Devil In A New Dress" line, "it's hard to be humble when you're stunting on the Jumbotron."

Lastly, this: "Also on blogs if I can get a click through back to my blog ita be dope. Put it on the inside of the post so you still get the extra click." I gotcha Kanye.

Filed under: Concerts and Tours, News

Filed under: Free MP3 Download of the Day

About a month ago, there was this whole to-do regarding Arcade Fire, Terry Gilliam, and Madison Square Garden. The band played the venue in support of their latest album The Suburbs and Gilliam turned into moving pictures or something. Single tracks have been available at Arcade Fire's Vevo page, but now you can listen to the whole 95-minute thing from start to finish, for a limited time. It's gonna be disappearing come noon Eastern time tomorrow, so get a move on, because damn that ending one-two punch of "Sprawl II" and "Wake Up" sounds fantastic. Take a look above before it disappears. [Pitchfork]

Over the course of his career, Sage Francis has migrated from one of underground hip-hop's most mainstream sounding rappers to someone who sounds as integrated with the indie rock world as other one-time experimental rappers WHY? and Doseone. Check Li(f)e track "Love the Lie" as an example, where Francis takes a track sent to him by Sparklehorse's late bandleader Mark Linkous and applies his own intensely focused touch to it. The robots-in-love accompanying video is just heartbreaking enough to fit the song's grandiose guitars and Sage's penchant for dramatic storytelling. [24Bit]

Belle & Sebastian have always done their own thing, regardless of who is or isn't doing it. That's probably why their comeback-- in the form of new album Belle and Sebastian Write About Love-- doesn't seem as calculated or as possibly disappointing as announced in recent years (I'm looking at you, Pavement). The video above is a half-hour documentary-style program that features Belle & Sebastian playing two of the group's new songs, "I Want the World to Stop" and "I Didn't See it Coming." Tonally, this is nothing too out of the ordinary for the group, but damn if they don't sound as great as they ever have. [Pitchfork]

I'm not gonna lie, Oleena is a pretty last name, the kind entirely appropriate for the kind of gentle, beautiful music Charlotte Oleena makes under her music-making, name-sharing moniker Sea Oleena. "Island Cottage," from her Bandcamp-released self-titled album, sails a simple, circuitous guitar figure through the genteel waters of Charlotte's voice, simple handclaps, ringing piano notes and a haze of synth strings to meditative effect. An incredibly gorgeous song from this Montreal-based artist. Download the song here. [Pitchfork]

CSLSX are apparently a Philadelphia-based collective featuring a guy called Harvey Culture. They're not quite iamamiwhoami on the secret identity scale, but it's still a thing trying to find any real information on the group. For now, all we can throw at you is "We Ought To Be Together," a jam that sounds like chillwave got rid of the lo-fi haze and turned up the heat a few degrees, but still maintained its effortless relaxation. Check out "We Ought To Be Together" either below at this link, and catch a few of their other tracks at their Soundcloud. [Pitchfork]

Ever listen to Bristol dubstep producer Joker and think, man if only this dude was more sad? Well, fellow Brit Jakwob has got you covered. His take on dubstep is just as intensely danceable as his contemporaries, but he injects songs like "Here With Me" with more than laser beam synths and wobbly bass lines. Dude throws in sentimental pianos and yearning chord changes to throw his beats into stark contrast. "Here With Me" will be featured on an upcoming Jakwob single, due Sept. 13. Grab that track here, and check out his remixes of the likes of Robyn and These New Puritans over at his MySpace. [Fader]