Vertigo World Tour

U2 Opens Vertigo World Tour Last Night

and you can download the show now

This didn't take very long to show up:

U2: San Diego, March 28, 2005 (Bit Torrent, registration required)

If the above link is not working, you can also download the show from Easy Tree.

What is this?

U2 Vertigo Stage

It's a picture of the stage for U2's Vertigo tour. Interesting...

First Impressions... Four Tet, Everything Ecstatic

On Everything Ecstatic, Four Tet mostly abandons his patented folktronica ethos for a darker, less human sound. It's a bold move and it works.

"I'd gone as far as I could with that," Keiran Hebden, aka Four Tet said recently. "The whole folktronica thing was kinda making me crazy." Indeed, the new album is heavier, faster, more rhythmic and loose than its predecessor, 2003's Rounds. Yet Everything Ecstatic still glistens with organic sounds that could only be Four Tet. It's another outstanding album from Four Tet.

Everything Ecstatic counterpoints the fragile beauty of its predecessor with deeper and more forceful tones. The penultimate and epic (nearly eight minutes in length) "Sleep, Eat Food, Have Visions" best illustrates where Four Tet's sound now resides. The track opens with a muffled beat, glitchy beeps and eerie, "In Search of" synths that remind me most of Boards of Canada or early Aphex Twin. From there it progressively dissolves into a chaotic stew of noise, driven by hammering and overlapped beats. It sounds unlike anything Hebden has done before.

My current favorite tracks

"Sun, Drums and Soil"

"High Fives

"Sleep, Eat Food, Have Visions.

A frenetically busy day here, so time will only permit a handful of short items. Maybe later I'll have more time to comment at length about the new Stephen Malkmus album that I listened to repeatedly over the weekend. I also played the new Four Tet, Caribou and Goldmund records several times so I hope to have a spare moment to talk them as well. Barely leaving your apartment all weekend allows for plenty of listening time. On to the shorts:

Continuing our (perhaps just my) Bloc Party fixation, it looks like Kele and the gang will be on The Late Show With David Letterman on Wednesday, April 6. BP are also on the cover of the April issue of the Fader magazine.

This almost sounds like divine intervention: Brooklyn Vegan reports that Webster Hall was evacuated Saturday evening during a New Found Glory performance. Seems there were fears the building was in danger of collapsing. Now if only it would be condemned so all the shows could be moved to better venues.

Pitchfork interviews Dungen.

Central Village and Tale of Two Cities recap the actions of some very over-zealous and self-important doormen at the Flaming Lips FDNY benefit last Thursday night. Central Village posts a message from Lips drummer Kliph Scurlock who was accosted while trying to re-enter the hall after a smoke. Tale of Two Cities posts an open letter to the door guy from a "mad white hipster".

From the One Louder inbox.

Watch the new Gorillaz video, "Feel Good Inc."

Go behind the scenes of the making of Doves' Some Cities.