In this week’s NME magazine (January 21), there's a special report on the Stop Online Piracy Act – aka SOPA – the bill currently undergoing debate in Washington DC that could threaten the way you interact with music online. The feature lays the issue bare and explains what it will mean for you, from the threat to MP3 blogs and YouTube creativity, to how it could stifle our most inventive new artists.
From today, you'll notice that NME.COM/reviews looks Slightly Different. Don't worry, I haven't gone nuts and replaced the album reviews with tweets. I've just made some changes that hopefully make the section more of a filter, and a useful guide, rather than merely a roll-call of what's new out on a given week.
There's some 39 million blogs on Tumblr right now, and let's face it, the majority of them seem to consist of photographs of fit people kissing. However, if you sift through the barrage of cupcakes and soft-porn, sometimes a combination of the two, you will find some gems. Here's ten of our favourites.
The Union Jacks, Euphoria, Cosy, Sandking, Rose Motel. First things first, an admission: I’ve been in my fair share of badly named bands (although, in my defence, The Union Jacks only consisted of me, my sister and my dad, and I was about ten). I’m well aware of how hard it is to find a decent and original name and I never came up with anything better myself. I’d like to think that if I did, though, it wouldn’t be as bad as The Cast Of Cheers.
No, not dirty in that sense. Robert Burden has an unusual hobby. An East End bus driver by trade, in his downtime he likes to draw, mostly portraits of musicians. But he doesn't use charcoal or pastels or anything boring like that. Robert's medium of choice? Dirt. Specifically the dirt that collects on vans.
And he's really quite good at it. Look. Here's Bob Dylan:
How do you rate The Thing of bands? A chameleonic, shape-shifting force in rock and dance music that have never released two albums the same? It’s like ranking nine entirely different bands. From entirely different planets. In entirely different dimensions. And all on different drugs.
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