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      in Movies

      ‘The Beach Boys’ Review: How to Make Good Vibrations

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      This Disney documentary looks at the family ties and sweet harmonies that turned a California band into a popular treasure.The wholesome ocean-breeze look of the Beach Boys could make the group a punchline if it weren’t for their sweet sunshine sound. The origins of their intricate harmonies undergird “The Beach Boys,” a Disney documentary directed by Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny that notes obstacles in the band’s career but mostly tries to keep the good vibrations going.Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson grew up in a musical household in Hawthorne, Calif., and eventually pooled their ample talents with a cousin, Mike Love, and a friend, Al Jardine. As told through a patchwork of polite interviews and mostly mundane clips from performances, the rise of their music was fueled by four-part harmonies, surf culture and entrancing orchestration not unlike Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound.Brian, who hated touring, was the band’s homebody musical mastermind, and he could imbue their pop with an outsider’s moods, while the Wilsons’ father, Murry, put on the pressure as their manager. Snippets from “Pet Sounds,” their landmark 1966 album, never fail to rejuvenate the movie. But after a while, you get the sense of a band that stopped growing, though the movie traces a fruitful competitive streak with the Beatles.Any deviations from the film’s obligatory timeline tour are very welcome, like a mortifying studio recording of Murry holding forth, and it’s a treat to hear the esteem for Brian among the Wrecking Crew, the storied group of session musicians. And for the pop romantics among us, the Beach Boys can still cast a spell with those four little words: Wouldn’t it be nice?The Beach BoysRated PG-13 for drug material and brief lapses into unsunny language. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift Race for No. 1

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      The two pop music titans, locked in a close contest for the top of next week’s album chart, are stoking fans’ competitive spirit with a variety of digital tactics.A cold war between pop music titans — or at least their mobilizing fan bases and record labels — turned into a digital arms race this week as both Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish gunned for the No. 1 spot on next week’s Billboard album chart.Swift, 34, has occupied the top of the Billboard 200 for the past four weeks with her blockbuster new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” which has earned more than 3.6 million equivalent album sales so far (counting physical purchases, downloads and streams). But Eilish’s well-reviewed new album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” is challenging for No. 1 in its debut, as its 10 songs prove popular on streaming services like Spotify.If only it were that simple.Already, some impassioned followers of the two artists had been stoking a rivalry, dating back to comments Eilish made in March about “some of the biggest artists in the world” selling many vinyl versions of the same album, “which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money.”The tactic, which Eilish called “wasteful” and damaging to the environment, has been widespread but used especially broadly — and effectively — by Swift. (Even before those comments, Eilish’s brother and main collaborator, Finneas, had once been heard on a hot mic joking about being “sued by Taylor Swift” after performing with an artist who had criticized her work.)Eilish, 22, said later that she had not meant to single out any artist with her vinyl comments and added that she had participated in the practice, too. (Both artists’ work remains available in a variety of physical formats, though Eilish has stressed sustainability.)Still, when Swift pre-empted the release of Eilish’s album last week with three special digital editions of “Tortured Poets,” available for 24 hours and including previously unheard “first-draft phone memo” demos, many saw the move as pointed. Especially online, where pop fan allegiance can be a blood sport, the matchup became one to watch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Judge Blocks Attempt to Sell Graceland, at Least for Now

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      Elvis’s granddaughter, the actress Riley Keough, had filed a lawsuit seeking to stop what her lawyers said was a fraudulent auction of her family home.Graceland will not be sold at auction, at least for now.On Wednesday, a Tennessee judge deferred ruling on an apparent attempt to sell Graceland, Elvis Presley’s former home in Memphis, but kept a temporary injunction in place that would prevent the property from going to auction imminently.The bizarre case came into wide public view this week when a lawsuit surfaced that had been filed by Mr. Presley’s granddaughter, the actress Riley Keough. In it, Ms. Keough sued to prevent what her lawyers described as a fraudulent effort to auction the home by a company claiming that Lisa Marie Presley — Ms. Keough’s mother and Mr. Presley’s daughter — had borrowed $3.8 million and put Graceland up as collateral before she died in 2023.At Wednesday’s hearing at Chancery Court in Shelby County, Tenn., the judge, Chancellor JoeDae L. Jenkins, said he needed to continue the case, in part because no one showed up in person to represent the company seeking to sell Graceland and in part because he said lawyers for Ms. Keough needed to present additional evidence.“Graceland is a part of this community, well loved by this community and indeed around the world,” Chancellor Jenkins said during the hearing, which lasted roughly 10 minutes. Delaying the trial, he reasoned, would allow for “adequate discovery” to take place.The defendants included a company, Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC, which had scheduled a sale of Graceland for Thursday, according to court papers. The court said it had received a filing on Wednesday morning from a man named Gregory Naussany who had asked the court to continue the case.It was not clear when the next hearing would take place.Lawyers for Ms. Keough had argued that the company appeared to be a “false entity.” They also claimed that the company had presented fake documents purporting to show that Ms. Presley had borrowed the money and put Graceland up as collateral.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan Saw a Gap in Pop, and Filled It

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      Two pure pop songs, “Espresso” and “Good Luck, Babe!,” may give the aspiring stars behind them a boost from music’s middle class to the big time.The caffeinated drink of the summer isn’t cold brew or iced matcha — it’s “me espresso,” a weird and strangely brilliant neologism coined by the pop singer Sabrina Carpenter in her ascendant hit “Espresso.” The track — sugary sweet, fiendishly catchy and meme-ready — has been out for only a month and change, but it is already one of the defining songs of 2024.It’s also one of the defining songs of Carpenter’s career so far. Last year, I described her as a member of “pop’s middle class”: a group of internet-beloved artists creating music that makes winking reference to pop history, whose celebrity vastly outmatches their commercial success. Although she is a new star in the minds of many, Carpenter, 25, is by no means a fresh arrival: “Espresso” was released almost 10 years to the day after her debut EP, “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying.” Carpenter was 14 years old then; four more full-length albums have followed.Her career has been unusually slow-burning in the context of the well-oiled pop machine, and “Espresso” is a bullish breakthrough after a string of songs, including the Billboard-charting “Nonsense” and “Feather,” that had some radio and TikTok success but failed to permeate pop’s center. (“Espresso” reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and is still in the Top 10.)She’s not the only middle-class pop star having a brush with more tangible success. Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” has quickly become her first hit on the Billboard Hot 100. Roan, 26, loosely fits a similar mold: Her music is funny and oftentimes covertly acerbic, and on her 2023 debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” as Carpenter did with her 2022 breakthrough “Emails I Can’t Send,” Roan tried on a variety of styles that each seemed to pay tribute to a different era of pop, sometimes even a specific diva.Chappell Roan leveraged the spectacle of her live shows to make herself omnipresent on short-form video platforms over the past year. Scott Kowalchyk/CBS, via Getty ImagesRoan first signed to a major label at 17 and was dropped five years later, a setback that compelled her to move back to her Missouri hometown and work as a barista to fund her career. She has since signed to Amusement, an imprint of Universal Music Group started by the producer Daniel Nigro specifically to release Roan’s music. “Good Luck, Babe!,” a kiss-off to an ex with a queer twist, has been streamed over 106 million times on Spotify since its early April release; for context, that’s far more than any song on Beyoncé’s splashy “Cowboy Carter,” which arrived a week earlier, with the exception of its lead single, “Texas Hold ’Em.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Elvis Presley’s Granddaughter, Riley Keough, Sues to Block Graceland Sale

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      His granddaughter, the actress Riley Keough, claims that a company is fraudulently planning to auction off Elvis’s home in Memphis.Lawyers for the actress Riley Keough, the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, have sued to stop what they say is a fraudulent scheme to sell Graceland, the family’s cherished former home in Memphis.Court papers that Ms. Keough’s lawyers filed this month claim that a company planning to auction off Graceland is fraudulently claiming that her mother — Elvis’s daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, who died in 2023 — had borrowed money and put Graceland up as collateral. The papers say that the company, Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC, “appears to be a false entity” and that the documents it presented about the loan were also fake.“There is no foreclosure sale,” Elvis Presley Enterprises, which operates Graceland, said in a statement, in which it also said that the lawsuit had been filed to “stop the fraud.”Graceland, a popular tourist attraction, is a major source of income for Elvis Presley Enterprises and the family trust.A representative for Ms. Keough, who controls her family’s trust, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. A lawyer representing Ms. Keough in the case also did not respond.Months after Lisa Marie Presley died, Naussany Investments presented documents claiming that she had borrowed $3.8 million from the company and “gave a deed of trust encumbering Graceland as security,” according to court papers filed in Shelby County, Tenn. Copies of the documents were provided to The New York Times by Elvis Presley Enterprises.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Taylor Swift Beats Gunna on the Chart. Her Next Rival? Billie Eilish.

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      “The Tortured Poets Department” logs a fourth week at No. 1. Next week’s competition is a battle between two stars with multiple versions of their LPs for sale.Taylor Swift stays at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart for a fourth time, easily holding off a new release by the Atlanta rapper Gunna. But next week she may face a challenge from Billie Eilish — and its result could come down to fans’ appetites for buying multiple “versions” of the stars’ albums.“The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift’s latest studio album, holds atop the Billboard 200 with the equivalent of 260,000 sales in the United States, including 282 million streams and 41,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to Luminate, a data tracking service. Since its record-breaking opening last month, “Tortured Poets” has racked up about 3.6 million equivalent album sales.Gunna’s “One of Wun,” released only in digital form — though Gunna’s website also sold CDs and vinyl LPs that it said would be sent to fans later this year — starts at No. 2 with the equivalent of 91,000 sales, most from its 119 million streams.On Friday, Eilish released “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” her third LP, and the first since she won two Oscars and added two more Grammys to the seven she already had. The music industry is watching the album’s progress closely, in part to see if Eilish’s latest can end Swift’s dominance on the chart.Most of the 31 tracks on “Tortured Poets” have begun to trickle down the daily charts of the major streaming services, while Eilish’s new songs — there are only 10 — have opened strong. For next week’s chart, the key differentiator may be both women’s releases of multiple versions of their albums, on rainbows of vinyl or in digital editions with extra goodies to goose fans’ interest.Swift made “Tortured Poets” available in four variants across physical formats, each with an extra track; these were also sold in special editions from Swift’s website with autographs and collectibles like magnets and engraved bookmarks. Eilish, who has complained about artists’ excessive marketing of physical media — saying in a recent Billboard interview that it was “wasteful” to release “40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more” — put “Hit Me” out in eight colored vinyl variants, as well as other formats like a CD decorated with paint “splattered by Billie.” (Eilish defended her release plans by promoting an “eco-friendly” approach to manufacturing, saying her releases would use recycled materials.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      The (Very Brief) Return of Gastr del Sol

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      In the ’90s, the duo of Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs made quiet, intricate music amid a loud rock underground. A new compilation brought them back together.In late January 2016, Akinobu Oda — a Japanese restaurateur and concert promoter — taped a red-and-black handbill demanding “Don’t disturb!!!” to the window of his vegan dive in Tokyo. The reason? The American art-rock band Gastr del Sol was dining inside.It had been 18 years since the duo split. During the late 1990s, David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke enjoyed an intense and prolific partnership, working together in multiple groups and running the audacious label Dexter’s Cigar. But they hadn’t seen each other since 2002, communicating only through sporadic emails. In Tokyo, they were finally face to face.“Our breakup was hard, because what had started as a very easy collaboration wasn’t easy anymore,” Grubbs, 56, said during a recent video interview from his Brooklyn apartment, where he was surrounded on one side by rows of records and on the other by decorative plates and vases. “I wasn’t sure how it would be, but we were there for hours after the restaurant closed.”That summit became the first move in a long path to “We Have Dozens of Titles,” a three-LP boxed set due Friday that includes the first previously unheard music from Gastr del Sol in a quarter-century. It is the end of the vault, and there will be no reunion shows or sessions.Still, with its out-of-print obscurities and several unreleased live recordings, the compilation reaffirms just how unusual the music that Grubbs and O’Rourke made during their five-year run still is. Though their music began with two carefully intertwined acoustic guitars, it stretched to encompass orchestral fantasias, electronic abstraction and collage sensibilities imported from the avant-garde. Grubbs’s image-rich writing felt poetic and detached. In an era of plangent indie rock, they were the studied, intricate eccentrics.Jim O’Rourke said he craved artistic freedom outside of Gastr del Sol: “I didn’t like my life being constrained by one thing.”Manfred RahsWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      The Ragged Glory of Neil Young and Crazy Horse Live

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      Hear 11 songs from an electrifying New York set this week.Neil Young, seen here onstage in 2019, brought Crazy Horse to Forest Hills Stadium in Queens this week.Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,On Tuesday night, at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, I checked a major box on my musical bucket list: I got to see Neil Young live for the first time. And not just Young, but also Crazy Horse, his longtime, magnificently shambolic backing band who more or less helped invent both grunge and the modern jam band. Young’s first New York concert in over a decade was a magical, rain-dappled night, and I have tried to preserve the memory by creating a playlist of highlights from the set.There has always been something outside-of-time about the ironically named Young, a man who has in some sense sung and written like an old man since he was a teenager. (I mean that in the most affectionate way possible.) Perhaps for that reason, it is less jarring to see him onstage at age 78 than it is some other rock legends, and it helps that he has preserved that distinct, one-of-a-kind vocal tone along with his dexterity as a guitarist. The crowd was noticeably intergenerational, like the band onstage: Replacing Crazy Horse’s now-retired rhythm guitarist Poncho Sampedro was Willie Nelson’s 33-year-old son, Micah, who beautifully and steadily supported Young’s incandescent soloing.Fitting for a band that embraces improvisational spontaneity, Tuesday night’s stop on the Love Earth tour was actually more memorable for its technical difficulties and the way Young handled them. The trouble began at the end of a three-song stretch where Young played solo, accompanied by just his acoustic guitar and harmonica. During a rousing rendition of the 1978 ballad “Human Highway,” a P.A. seemed to blow out, cutting off Young’s amplification entirely. His vocal mic was still wonky when a tech handed him an electric guitar, so he proceeded to do one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen a 78-year-old do at a rock concert: raise his guitar to his mouth and communicate with the crowd through its pickup. “We’d like to thank everyone for being here tonight,” he said in a muffled warble. Rock ’n’ roll can never die, indeed.Relive Tuesday night’s show along with me — and celebrate Young’s recent return to Spotify — by listening to this playlist, culled entirely from songs played that night. I’ve mixed in some live tracks along with album versions, to better capture the ragged glory of Neil and the Horse. Come down from the misty mountain and press play.Shelter me from the powder and the finger,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More