Music

Music

There are productions that are pulled out of the operatic closet over many decades, veritable warhorses some of which creak and groan like ancient equines bearing a load that they are no longer fit for. But tonight's revival of Sir Peter Hall's classic 1981 Festival production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream' with its fine young cast, was met with a roar of approval from the autumn season crowd and still felt as magical and dreamlike as ever.

Swift's twelfth album, The Life of a Showgirl, released 10 days ago, is unquestionably a commercial success. It broke streaming records on Spotify with more than 5 million pre-saves, as just one example. But that doesn't mean that everyone loves it. The reaction from music critics has been lukewarm and the reaction from fans is decidedly mixed, with some saying they adore the album and others saying they can't stand it.

In another reason why they should just form a dang band already, Hayley Williams and David Byrne have released another new collaboration in "Open The Door." The sentimental, sunshine-laden ballad is from the soundtrack to the new Netflix film The Twits (based on the beloved 1980 Roald Dahl children's novel). In the film, two kids and a "family of magical animals" team up to battle the "meanest, nastiest villains [who] pull a trick to take over their town." Check out the song below.

As well as taking his whiskey neat, his coffee black and his bed at three, Hozier has decided to take one of his companies private.

In a nail-biting extract from his book, the alliance's former secretary general Jens Stoltenberg recalled the rollercoaster ride of dealing with Donald Trump and how close the US president brought the organisation to the point of collapse.

Danny Hutton of Three Dog Night is due to receive diaspora award Irish-born US musician Danny Hutton is founder of a band that have sold 50 million records, released 21 consecutive Billboard Top 40 hits and helped launch the careers of Elton John, Randy ­Newman and Harry Nilsson.

Original Event Description:_4th Annual OMI MID AUTUMN FESTIVAL Saturday October 11th 10am-12pm Performances by SF Guzheng Music Society Crafting | Tea | Mooncake & More! Head Street at Brotherhood way (at the entrance of Head Brotherhood Mini Park in SF) WeAreOMI.org_ Text extracted from provided image: 4th Annual OMI MID AUTUMN FESTIVAL Saturday October 11th 10am-12pm Performances by SF Guzheng Music Society Crafting| Tea | Mooncake & More! Head Street at Brotherhood way (at the entrance of Head Brotherhood Mini Park in SF) WeAreOMI.org

Coincidentally, they both ended up performing the Halloween theme. Carptener's show was the composer's first in seven years. His new box set Halloween: The Complete Expanded Collection came out last week via Sacred Bones. Along with his Halloween theme and other soundtrack classics, he gave live debuts to Wake Up, Last Rites, Alive After Death, My Name Is Death, plus an unreleased number called Lord Of The Underground.

They dissolve a mass of fiddles, cellos, acoustic guitars, banjos, harmoniums, organs, and mutating shape note singing in a warm, radiant, brainwave-spiked singularity. "I Want to Die Easy," based on the revered Smithsonian Folkways recording that Sam Amidon's parents sang on, eases us into the continuum from traditional to turbulent: Conventional close harmonies, bathed in the silo's long reverb, open out into lush gospel stacks and start poking into tart modernist corners.

Brian Eno once said of the Velvet Underground that their first album sold only 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought one started a band. Joy Division's debut Unknown Pleasures sold only 20,000 copies in its initial period of release, but the T‑shirt emblazoned with its cover art - an image of radio waves emanating from a pulsar taken from an astronomy encyclopedia - has long since constituted a commercial-semiotic empire unto itself.

Hannah Frances's exhilarating sixth album is an unruly ecosystem: nature sprawls, resurfaced family trauma unearths unrevealed roots, an unexpected rupture creates fertile ground for new understandings to blossom. The deep steadiness of the Vermont songwriter's previous album, last year's Keeper of the Shepherd, is replaced by ramshackle clusters of kindling-snap drums, nervy woodwind, jabbing brass, all swarming together like a cloud of bees. Her awkwardly beautiful chord changes evoke ornate wood carvings; her tempos are always wayward.

"Prism drift" and "Sans sodalis" are built on spacious, ringing harmonics, not likely to move bodies, but to leave them stock-still and blissfully overwhelmed. These versions were later reworked into their more subdued partners, "Hypno" and "Sodalis (II)," for Moves in the Field, and their effect here is like seeing a familiar stage play shot in IMAX, with small, expressive gestures made grandly cinematic.

We hit it off immediately. Hanging out with [Def Leppard singer] Joe [Elliott] and the guys was like hanging with my own band, but with a different accent.

It's been two years since the start of the war in Gaza, and it's easy to feel helpless in the face of destruction and violence halfway around the world. A group of local bands presents a simple opportunity for you to engage: come to Mother Foucault's Bookshop, donate the cost of a concert ticket, and it will all go to Gaza Soup Kitchen, which provides clean drinking water, basic medical care, and vegetarian meals to Palestinians in need.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass -the annual free, three-day music festival at Golden Gate Park-each year presents a diverse range of music including its namesake bluegrass, but also a wide variety of American roots music like soul, rock, country, and folk. The festival's lineup extends to other genres as well, with recent years including acts in funk, world music, and indie blues, and this year's festival, for the big 25th anniversary, was no exception.

Bounding on stage just as the pubs are closing, a grinning Williams clearly relishes the intimate environment. I'm not doing all that stadium bravado and pointing, he vows, launching into a full, stripped-down run-through of his 1997 debut album, Life Thru a Lens, with lengthy between-song reminisces of the circumstances of its making. These are characteristically candid. His heart firmly on his brawny, tattooed arm, Williams recalls quitting Take That to find himself 300,000 in debt:

It has yet to be revealed if Young is just pulling his music from the Amazon Music streaming platform, or if he'll be removing his physical products from the store as well. Of course, this isn't the first time Young has pulled his music from a platform. It was back in 2022 when he demanded that his music be removed from Spotify over misinformation about vaccines spread on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

"I feel like my consciousness has naturally, without me even trying, gotten rid of any source of stress and anxiety," she told FKA twigs when the two artists spoke for Highsnobiety earlier this year. On "viscus," from the forthcoming deluxe edition of Oklou's debut album, choke enough, the French electronic pop star-in-the-making meets one of her direct influences in the ether.

People are sharing their frustration and concern for Billie Eilish after multiple videos showed her being violently pulled off a walkway at a Miami concert. The singer is currently on her Hit Me Hard and Soft tour, and on Thursday, she played the first of three shows at Miami's Kaseya Center. As seen in videos shared online, Billie was walking down a runway, greeting fans, when someone suddenly - and aggressively - pulled her into a barricade.

"I look down and she's watching 'KPop Demon Hunters.' I was like, 'I know exactly what she's thinking,'" he laughs. The patient thought Park was Jinu in the flesh. Leaning into the Jinu of it all, Park took off his medical hair net. "I kind of have like 'KPop idol' hair right now, and she just had the biggest smile on her face," he recalls.

Rare indeed is the headline-and-dek combo worth noticing, or caring about. In many publications these aren't even written by the same person who wrote the actual blog; at any rate they're many hundreds or thousands of words shorter than the blog itself. Caring about the headline and dek is to some extent like close-reading the movie poster inside the multiplex. Probably it's better to just go inside the theater and watch the movie.