MUSIC NEWS - Labrinth On Tour, New Flo Rida Single

It's Monday again, which means more music...

Labrinth Announces UK Tour
On Tuesday the hip-hop artist Labrinth announced dates for a tour of the UK in October with his hit show "Electronic Earth". The tour will visit Bristol, Bournemouth, London, Norwich, Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle.
For the full story, including tour dates, click here.

Flo Rida Releases New Single "Whistle"
On Wednesday, Atlantic Records announced that Flo Rida's new single "Whistle" had been released, two weeks earlier than scheduled, "due to popular demand". If you were one of the people "demanding" this song, feel ashamed. It's boring. Yawn.

Yellow Submarine On Blu-ray
In March, Apple Corps Ltd. announced that the Beatles film Yellow Submarine had been digitally restored and would be released on Blu-ray and DVD. Since Monday, the classic rock film has been available to buy.

Trailer For New Muse Album and Tour Announced
Move over Flo Rida, this is real music news! For a long time now, hints have circulated about an upcoming Muse album. But a trailer released on Wednesday made it official; a new Muse album, titled The 2nd Law will be released September this year. The album follows a three year wait after The Resistance, which was released in 2009. Judging by the trailer, it appears that the new album will revolve around the theme of depleting energy resources and, like The Resistance, will continue the use of orchestral sound with synthesized overdrive of Origins of Symmetry.

Following this trailer, Muse announced on Friday a UK and Europe tour later this year. For tour dates and tickets, click here.

The Killers Album Trailer

The boys from Teignmouth weren't the only ones to release an album trailer this week, The Killers put this teaser out on the net on Friday. The music sounds alot like the rest of The Killer's work, so I'm hoping we'll see a return to the standard of Hot Fuss, and not another disappointment like Day and Age.

Virtual Elvis Presley

The classic rock 'n' roll singer is to be resurrected using a virtual likeness created by Digital Domain Media Group. The likeness will be used at live shows, on TV and online.

For more on this story, click here. 

Trombone Shorty Featured On Upcoming Zac Brown Band Album

Trombone Shorty, as well as Orleans Avenue's Dan Oestreicher and Tim McFatter are featured on the upcoming album by Zac Brown Band, Uncaged. They are performing on the track "Overnight". The album will be released on the 10th July.

For more on this story, click here.

That's all the news for this week. If you've got anything to say on the above stories, or if there's anything we've missed, let us know in the comments.

Tom :)

THE CRUNCH - Unknown Musicians

To be successful in the music industry today requires minimal skill and maximum luck. This has created a very commercial environment; music is written to please the masses, and not to push boundaries and celebrate talent. As a result of this, alot of exciting and promising musicians are left at the back to support cobwebs and eventually fade away, when they should be the fresh headliners that everyone aspires to be like.
So, today in this edition of The Crunch, I'm going to share with you my three favourite unknowns; the artists that should be respected, but haven't hit the big time because of commercialism.

Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews
Trombone Shorty is a native of the jazz capital New Orleans, but he is no traditional standard-churner. Shorty takes the best bits of funk and jazz, and blends them in an exciting way with modern hip-hop and pop music. He has released seven studio records to date, but only made the big time in 2010 with the album Backatown, which was nominated for a Grammy. Shorty followed this success up the next year with the album For True, which featured guest musicians Kid Rock, Ledisi and Jeff Beck.
Suggested listening? It has to be "Do To Me" from For True.

To visit Trombone Shorty's website, click here.

Seth Lakeman
While being a very big name on the British folk scene, it can hardly be said that Seth Lakeman is getting all the credit he deserves. The singer/songwriter/guitarist/violinist started out very much grounded in traditional folk music, but has more recently incorporated elements of rock into his work that add a new grit to his celtic sound. So far he has released six records, my favourite of which is Poor Man's Heaven from 2008. For this album, Lakeman worked around a coastal theme, reinventing Cornish and Devonshire legends in a "rock-shanty" style.
Suggested listening? I'm going to go with the opening track from this album, "The Hurlers".

To visit Seth Lakeman's website, click here.

Jamie N Commons
And finally, the least famous of them all. I first heard of Jamie N Commons by reading a very short article on him in Q magazine, which highlighted a number of rising stars. To pin a genre on him, he is a blues artist, but his music is a lot more complex than what this style is normally associated with. Commons is yet to release an album, but his recent singles are very exciting and show a lot of promise.
Suggested listening? It's a tough choice, but I'm going with his most recent single, "Devil In Me".

To visit Jamie N Common's website, click here.

And that's this weeks Crunch, and your Crash Hub fill for this week. Be sure to pay us a visit again on Monday when I'll have music news from the last week and a review of the soundtrack from Harry Potter 7 part 1.
Tom :)