Didn't see this posted. Might be an interesting album for OK Go fans.

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OK Go Channel “Purple Rain” On Funky January LP “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”

http://www.rollingstone.c...f-the-sky/

OK Go are promising fans a fresh, funkier sound on their new album Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, due January 12th, 2010. The band broke out with their unforgettable Grammy-winning viral video for 2006 hit “Here It Goes Again,” and as they told RS in February, they’ve spent the last few years embracing their inner Prince. “There’s a lot of Purple Rain on this record — an album I haven’t stopped listening to since I got it when I was 11,” singer-guitarist Damian Kulash said in a statement. “It’s not so much that we headed in a new direction. I think we’ve just expended the guitar-rock ideas from our teens and we’re starting to get at more root-level influences.”

The new record includes groovy cuts like “Skyscrapers,” “All Is Lost,” “White Knuckles” and the Paisley Park-indebted “WTF?” As for the album’s title, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky is taken from an 1876 book — Augustus James Pleasonton’s The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Color of the Sky — that advertised that all of life’s ills could be cured by blue light. Although Pleasonton’s theory was proven incorrect, the same spirit of experimentation pushed OK Go into new ground musically.

The band recorded Of the Blue Colour at the secluded Fredonia, New York studio of producer Dave Fridmann, whose credits include the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin and MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular. “We were there to work, and for weeks on end it snowed and we just lived in the bubble with our songs,” Kulash said, noting the band worked up more than 100 song ideas.

As Rolling Stone reported yesterday, “Shooting the Moon,” one of the songs from the Of the Blue Colour sessions, will end up on the soundtrack for the upcoming Twilight sequel New Moon. “Shooting the Moon” tells the tale of an astronaut involved in a conspiracy, and songs on Of the Blue Colour are equally imaginative — some deal with hope and heartbreak, while one track features a man who trades places with his reflection.

“I think it sounds more like us than anything else we’ve done,” Kulash said. “It’s more like the music that’s in the back of my head, just out of reach, that I’ve been trying to get to for so long.”


And...

OK Go to Preview Dancey, Prince-Inspired Summer LP on March Tour

http://www.rollingstone.c...arch-tour/

Starting March 6th, OK Go are hitting the road to preview songs from their next album, the follow-up to 2005’s Oh No. On this upcoming third full-length, the band is looking to some unlikely influences: Aretha Franklin, Al Green and Prince. “I was in a heavy classic-soul/Purple Rain phase — that’s why there’s not that many guitars on the album,” says frontman Damian Kulash of the LP, due out this summer. “Those songs make guitars feel redundant and sledgehammer-ish. If you need a loud, heavy guitar to make your song rock, there’s a problem with your song.”

Rather than become pigeonholed as power-popping treadmill rockers (thanks to their viral hit “Here It Goes Again”), the band traded their guitars for timpani, trombones and synthy strings to churn out orchestral, chamber-pop style tunes that Kulash says juxtapose club-ready beats and angsty lyrics. “It’s like Purple Rain through broken speakers,” he explains. “Maybe that’s a little unfair — obviously we’re not fucking geniuses — but it’s dancey and anthemic and expansive.”

Recorded with Flaming Lips’ producer Dave Fridmann, the tentatively titled Help Is On the Way focuses on metaphorical plotlines: “In the Glass” ponders the consequences of trading places with one’s reflection (”not a la ‘Man in the Mirror,’ ” Kulash says) and “Shooting the Moon” is written from the point of view of an astronaut who’s involved in a conspiracy and doesn’t know what to do. “The songs are sort of sad,” says Kulash. “But instead of it being, like, ‘This is what happened to me in real life,’ the emotions are spelled out in a more surreal way.”

The band will road-test the tracks when it launches that 13-date U.S. tour in March. Until then, they’re soaking in the scenery around Fridmann’s studio, a converted Amish barn in upstate New York. “It’s the middle of nowhere, but it’s not exactly idyllic,” says Kulash, whose car has been chased by hunting dogs. “When we got here, we thought, ‘Oh, we’ll be taking walks through the woods,’ and Dave was like, ‘Make sure you wear a bright orange jacket and take the air horn so people don’t shoot you.’ ”
[Edited 9/22/09 20:07pm]

That sounds interesting.. Looking forward to hear that album!

squirrelgrease said:

Nice -thanks for sharing. I met these guys long before they got popular and they really are big Prince fans. I remember telling the lead singer "man and I thought I was a big fan... until I met you!"

Very interested to hear the new CD