Popped calf muscle

Whether it’s coming out of Nashville, New York, L.A., or points in between, there’s no shortage of fresh tunes, especially from artists who have yet to become household names. Rolling Stone Country selects some of the best new music releases from country and Americana artists. (Check out last week’s best songs.) Tiera featuring Breland, “Miles” Singer-songwriter Tiera flexes her melodic and vocal muscles on the easygoing new single “Miles,” a duet with the shapeshifting singer Breland, of “My Truck” fame. Rather than trunk-rattling country-trap, it’s blissful folk-pop about falling in love set to a swaying R&B chord progression. Stick around for the mid-song breakdown and its sublime vocal interplay between Tiera, Breland, and their backing choir. Parker Millsap, “Vulnerable” The Oklahoma singer-songwriter dives headfirst into trippy, otherworldly sounds on his upcoming album Be Here Instead , out April 9th. Listen to “Vulnerable” for proof, a shimmering dreamlike … [Read more...] about RS Country Music Picks for Week of February 15th

When Dylan Baldi started releasing music in the early 2010s, he was a teenage recording machine from suburban Cleveland, cranking out tune-happy, noise-caked, supremely lo-fi power-pop. At first he obscured his identity, early-Pavement-style, and rode his music blog hype towards a kind of instant success that might’ve taken a basement savant of a different era years to accrue. A decade down the road, he’s an indie-rock grand old man of sorts, with a series of great releases to his name (the best one is still 2012’s Steve Albini-produced Attack On Memory , which combined the catchiness of Superchunk with the sonic muscle of the Jesus Lizard). Last year, Cloud Nothings put out a quarantine quickie, The Blackhole Understands , via Bandcamp , and they just celebrated their 10th anniversary with a reissue of their 2011 debut, Turning On . Now Cloud Nothings are back again with the fine new album The Shadow I Remember , due out at the end of this month. They just released … [Read more...] about Song You Need to Know: Cloud Nothings, ‘Nothing Without You’

A glob of stray semen is slathered on as impromptu hair gel. A high school flutist describes all the graphic details of her “one time at band camp.” A slobbering frat boy climbs a ladder for a close look at disrobing co-eds — a glimpse so revelatory that he plummets backward without batting an eye. Raunch-comedy history is littered with off-color climaxes, and the genre hasn’t blown its load quite yet. Barely Legal: 30 Nearly Pornographic Films From full-blown sex romps to softcore substitutes spruced up with gags, Hollywood’s history of “raunch” is a vast spectrum of blue. The new raunch-com Sex Tape, which opens today,may be a paler shade, but it’s a shade nonetheless: a Cameron Diaz side-boob shot here, a Jason Segel bare bum shot there, the requisite flinging of bodily fluids and several dozen F-bombs to ensure an R rating. Long gone are the days when industry censors cracked down on excessive amounts of kissing (!) and the nudie-cutie sexploitation era of men like … [Read more...] about Sex, Drugs, Shock and LOL: A Quick and Dirty History of the Raunch-Com

When John McLaughlin looked through his archives in preparation for an upcoming tour celebrating his pioneering Seventies jazz-rock outfit the Mahavishnu Orchestra , he was shocked by how out-there his old tunes still seemed. “I was into my yoga, my meditation, no drugs, but I wrote some weird music in those days, man,” says the British guitar virtuoso with a laugh. Now 75, McLaughlin was not yet 30 when he formed the Orchestra, the band that would make him a legend among fellow guitarists and devotees of boundary-pushing musical hybrids. Their explosive sound drew as much on Indian music and psychedelic rock as on his earlier experiences playing electrified jazz with Miles Davis and drummer Tony Williams. The teachings of McLaughlin’s then–spiritual guru Sri Chinmoy – who gave him the moniker “Mahavishnu,” a combination of “maha,” meaning great, and the name of the Hindu deity Vishnu – helped inspire the band’s ecstatic intensity. Their performances matched the high-prog … [Read more...] about John McLaughlin on His Final U.S. Tour, Revisiting Mahavishnu Orchestra

Ever since superhero movies started pulling in big numbers at the box office , a vast majority of them have been rated PG-13, which makes sense because the studio can then cater to the widest possible audiences, including the all-important teenage demographic. Last month, a paradigm shift of sorts occurred, with the massive success of 20th Century Fox's R-rated superhero movie Deadpool , which has already made more than $600 million worldwide. Last week, we reported that the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice will get an R-rated "Ultimate Edition" on home video later this year, and now Entertainment Weekly got more details on this age-restrictive cut, from director Zack Snyder . We reported earlier today that Jena Malone 's mystery character was cut from the theatrical version, but the director did say her scenes will be included in the R-rated Ultimate Edition. He also shot down rumors that she's playing Robin or Batgirl, but he did reveal a few actors who … [Read more...] about Batman v Superman R-Rated Ultimate Edition Details Revealed