Sunday, November 11, 2012

Green Day's "Dos" Out Next Week

                                                                                                                                                        Photo Credit: greenday.com
The second installation to Green Day's trilogy of new albums, "Dos" will be released on Nov 13. 

Featuring 13 tracks that Rolling Stone magazine says rock hard and fast, "Dos" is the follow-up to "Uno" which was released in September. The album can be streamed here for a limited time.

I haven't heard it yet to see if it differs drastically from "Uno" which was reminiscent of band's earlier work unlike the epic sound and political nature of American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown.

Following "Dos," Green Day will release the final album in the trilogy, "Tre" on Dec 11, 2012.

As previously reported, the release date for "Tre" was brought forward from January 2013 previously after the band cancelled their remaining shows for this year and postponed its planned shows for early 2012 as frontman Billie Joe Armstrong continues his rehabilitation for substance abuse.

Friday, November 9, 2012

Listen to Soundgarden's King Animal

                                                               Photo Credit: Soundgardenworld.com
It's the week for online streaming. Besides the Deftones, Soundgarden has made their new album, King Animal, available for streaming in its entirety here . The first track of the album is aptly titled, Been Away Too Long.

King Animal is the Seattle quartet's first studio album in 16 years following the band's breakup a year after the release of 1996' Down On The Upside.

Post-breakup, several band members, most notably frontman, Chris Cornell, and drummer, Matt Cameron, were involved in several projects. Cornell released a solo album and formed the supergroup, Audioslave, with Tom Morello, Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk of Rage Against the Machine (RAGM).

Cameron, on the hand, joined fellow Seattle grunge rockers, Pearl Jam, on the latter's Yield tour and subsequently became a full-time member of the band (and still is).

Other members, lead guitarist Kim Thayil and bassist, Ben Shepard, were also involved in several projects although none of those projects achieved as much fame as Audioslave or Cameron's work in Pearl Jam.

Nonetheless, after years of dismissing away rumours of a reunion, the band got back together in 2010 and released a new compilation album, Telephantasm: A Retrospective later that year.

Earlier this year, Soundgarden released Live To Rise on the soundtrack for the Avengers. King Animal, which is set to be released on Nov 13 (same day as Koi No Yokan by the Deftones), will be the band's seventh studio album.

I haven't checked the details yet but Soundgarden will soon embark on a tour (they are currently playing a handful of shows in the US) in support of King Animal.

What won't happen, much to my dismay, will be a co-headlining tour with Pearl Jam, where Cameron would handle the drums for both bands.

                 King Animal Album Cover (Photo Credit: Soundgardenworld.com)

Listen to Deftones' Koi No Yokan Online (Updated)

                                                                                                                                                      Photo Credit: Reprise Records
The Deftones' seventh studio album, Koi No Yokan, is available for streaming in its entirety here . The album is slated to be released on Nov 13. According to an interview between the band's frontman, Chino Moreno, and Rolling Stone, the new album will defer from its previous effort, Diamond Eyes.

"Diamond Eyes was capturing lightning in a bottle. We had just come together, had a lot of constraints in terms of time, so we're just banging things out. This time, we had a little more chance to experiment and just play," said Moreno.

Update: I've just listened to it and it sounds awesome. Definitely different from Diamond Eyes, this sounds like Deftones at their best again. I'm usually not a fan of streaming new albums online as I believe they take away the novelty of purchasing a new record.

But in the age of iTunes, it probably makes a lot of sense (marketing-wise) to allow fans to preview your album online and then direct them to the iTunes store to purchase their favourite tracks. And after one listen, I'll say that, contrary to popular belief, the album format is far from dead. This is an album that needs to be heard in its entirety.

I, for one, can't wait for Nov 13.