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EDM.com Presents The Heat Check 007: Mersiv, Liquid Stranger, Yheti, Lab Group and More
In modern bass, dubstep and trap music, listeners and tastemakers are always chasing the next big track to blow crowds away at a festival stage. EDM.com Presents The Heat Check is a list of the most ear-catching, incendiary, and ‘fire’ tracks that emerge from the bass and freeform scene. “Floating Underwater Above the Clouds” – Mersiv Mersiv kicked off his debut album campaign by forging a new world through sound. The Colorado-producer unveiled his first single, “Floating Underwater Above the Clouds,” which is accompanied by this music video designed by Joseph Allen. The track represents the “Pretty” single off Pretty Dark Loud, showcasing the uplifting, scintillating side of his production style. “Snow Melt” – Liquid Stranger, LUZCID Liquid Stranger ann...
Return of the Mac: A Quarter-Century of the Macarena
Other than the mysterious sound the dinosaurs heard before being incinerated by an asteroid 66 million years ago, the greatest one-hit wonder of all time is arguably the quadruple-platinum Bayside Boys Remix of Los Del Río’s “Macarena.” On Aug. 3, 1996, “Macarena” mounted and held down the top spot on Billboard for three-and-a-half months straight. To this day, only Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day” and Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber’s “Despacito” have spent more time camped atop the charts. Billboard went on to name “Macarena” number eight on their All-Time Top 100, as well as its top Latin song of all time. In retrospect, there’s no clear reason why “Macarena” blew up like it did. It wasn’t a fantastic display of musicianship, it didn’t carry any...
25 Artists, 25 Albums, 25 Years of Vagrant Records
For much of the last quarter-century, Vagrant Records has been synonymous with the emo and alternative scenes. Much like how Epitaph Records and Fat Wreck Chords have become well-established homes for punk, Vagrant remains one of the most significant labels in the world thanks to a catalog featuring hundreds of beloved albums and dozens of all-time classics. Beginning with the launch of the Get Up Kids’ Something to Write Home About on Sept. 28, 1999, Vagrant went on a several-year run that included some of the biggest names of the 2000s, ranging from Saves the Day to Alkaline Trio, Dashboard Confessional to Rocket from the Crypt. But rather than hanging the past when artists left for to major labels, breaking up, or otherwise parting ways with Vagrant, the label adapted, expandi...
Journey to the Past: How Lollapalooza’s Unlikely Headliner Influenced Gen Z
When Neal Schon revealed in April that Journey was playing Lollapalooza, the collective world met it with an eyebrow raise, a shoulder shrug and everything in between (especially when you factor in that little pandemic thing that may or may not be shutting down the country again). It seemed like an odd match for one of the ’80s’ biggest jukebox heroes (and the Adult Contemporary radio pioneers) to be playing the granddaddy of what was the alternative scene. Yet, there we were on a sticky Chicago July afternoon, the ones out of town-ers hear about but never like to acknowledge ’til they’re in it, and the latest edition of the classic rockers’ lineup was set to close out the Bud Light Seltzer stage. Talk about strange bedfellows: Journey was competing against Post Malone on the other side of...
DCUP Shares Firsthand Success Story Behind Creation of “We No Speak Americano”
Creating an organic number one hit in the modern era has proven to be extremely unlikely, but 10 years ago Yolanda Be Cool and DCUP achieved the feat on a profound scale. In a new video uploaded by Sol State, a YouTube channel dedicated to revealing production secrets and untold stories from the world’s most impactful producers, DCUP gave his firsthand account of how “We No Speak Americano” went from humble beginnings to mainstream hit. “We were aiming for an underground club track,” DCUP recalls of their studio session. “On the last day one of the two Yolanda guys asked me ‘Is there anything different we can do in the last breakdown?'” That simple question led DCUP to go sample hunting, where he discovered a saxophone sound that w...
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EDM.com Playlist Picks: FISHER, Don Diablo, Clean Bandit and More [7/30/21]
The electronic music community is constantly evolving with new sounds every week, as artists become more innovative with their compositions. EDM.com’s weekly “Playlist Picks” series highlights the top releases in the genre, helping uncover the latest tracks that will soon dominate the dance music scene. Just Feels Tight – FISHER Tears For Later – Don Diablo & Galantis Drive (feat. Wes Nelson) – Clean Bandit & Topic Curses – BIJOU & Rick Hyde Recommended Articles The Original – Wolfgang Gartner Remedy (Pixel Terror Remix) – William Black Good Energy – Fabian Mazur Waiting (feat. Bianca) – KUURO Can’t Take It – GetGet These tracks can be accessed on the EDM.com Top Hits Playlist, Electronic Avenue Playl...
Ranking Every Christopher Nolan Movie From Worst to Best
This article originally ran in 2014 and has been updated. Welcome to Dissected, where we disassemble a band’s catalog, a director’s filmography, or some other critical pop-culture collection in the abstract. It’s exact science by way of a few beers. This time, we sort through the best and worst of Hollywood’s greatest hope for original blockbuster filmmaking. I saw Memento twice in theaters. The first was due to the great reviews it was getting early on and the fact that it starred the great Guy Pearce. The second was after walking out of Pearl Harbor about 10 minutes in — just after the dogfight scene, if I recall correctly — and into the theater next door to revisit the work of a young genius named Christopher Nolan. I thought to myself, I hope this guy sticks around. And he has. In just...
Lollapalooza 2021 Opens in Full Force as COVID Looms Large
In the history of Chicago concerts, there has likely never been as much riding on a live music event as on Lollapalooza 2021. It’s been less than two months since the city fully “reopened” for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic sent it spinning into lockdown, and like elsewhere in the country, the rise of the Delta variant has been cause for alarm due to its implications for public health and local economies. Chicagoans are rightly concerned about what a massive outbreak related to a festival with roughly 100,000 attendees per day could mean for the safety, health, and livelihoods of the people who live and work in the city (Chicago Tribune columnist Rex Huppke called Lollapalooza a “mistake waiting to happen”). And in the live music community in Chicago and beyond, which is just g...
Song of the Week: Silk Sonic’s Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak “Skate” Through With a Summertime Jam
Song of the Week breaks down and talks about the song we just can’t get out of our head each week. Find these songs and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist. For our favorite new songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, the dynamic duo Silk Sonic returns with a summery sophomore single. It feels like forever since March, when Anderson .Paak and Bruno Mars teamed up to create Silk Sonic and dropped the sultry debut smash “Leave The Door Open.” We’ve been long overdue for more music from the disco-drenched duo, but the result is worth the wait: Silk Sonic has finally returned with “Skate,” another flashy, ’70s jam. Impossibly more upbeat than “Leave The Door Open,” “Skate” is a euphoric groove with an absolutely unstoppable string section. Anticipa...
Every Song Ranked on Billie Eilish’s ‘Happier Than Ever’: Critic’s List
Below, Billboard ranks every track on Billie Eilish’s sophomore album. 16. “Not My Responsibility” This spoken-word track finds Eilish calmly cataloguing all the ways the public picks her apart, from her body to her clothes to her brazen personality, ultimately concluding that those opinions aren’t her responsibility. It’s a strong message, albeit a little belabored. 15. “OverHeated” “Overheated” serves as the followup to “Not My Responsibility,” with Eilish writing for Spotify that she took the latter’s production and constructed a beat around it to create the former. This song touches on similar themes as its counterpart, namely Eilish wondering about the ridiculous public upset over her body. “And everybody said it was a let down I was only built like everybody e...
Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield Trade “Songwriting Slump” Tips and Discuss Returning to the Stage
Katie Crutchfield was destined to be a Bright Eyes fan. The singer-songwriter, who performs poignant folk-rock as Waxahatchee, recalls the music of Conor Oberst as a crucial turning point in her upbringing as a self-proclaimed outcast in suburban Alabama: “I feel like Bright Eyes had one of the biggest impacts of any band at the time,” Crutchfield tells Consequence by phone from her Kansas City home. It’s serendipitous that nearly twenty years after she first became enamored with albums like Letting Off the Happiness, Fevers and Mirrors, and Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, Waxahatchee would be pegged to open for the Bright Eyes show, along with Lucy Dacus, at New York’s Forest Hills Stadium on July 31st. (The emo-folk titans played their first show tog...
Mining Metal: Dungeon Serpent, Hellish Form, Lantlos, Mesa, Midwife, Mordred, Night Crowned, Sallow Moth
As I write this introduction, I’ve just found out about the passing of Mike Howe, vocalist of the criminally underrated band Metal Church. He was 55 years old — too young. The last time I memorialized a musician in this column, it was Entombed vocalist L.G. Petrov. Howe’s story differs from Petrov’s in two critical ways. First, because Petrov’s passing was unfortunate but expected, whereas Howe’s was surprising. Second, while Petrov and Entombed had gone their separate ways, the band had achieved notoriety commensurate with their artistic output. In contrast, Howe had been an active member of Metal Church at the time of his death. Despite 40 years of existence, the band isn’t as well known as they deserve to be. Metal Church was one of the Seattle-area ’80s heavy metal bands that, alongsid...
