MAGAZINE: August / September Issue Of Rip It Up In Stores Now

The brand new issue of Rip It Up is out now with a red hot exclusive feature on the Chili Peppers as they release their 10th studio album.

Plus there's stories on Kasabian, Opeth, I Am Giant, DJ Shadow, Cut Off Your Hands, Cults, Hollie Smith & Mara TK. Also look for our winter movie specials on Cowboys & Aliens, Priest, One Day and Hanna.

Subscribe to Rip It Up now and get a free CD & be in to win a limited edition Hanna movie pack.

RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS
When guitarist John Frusciante publicly announced his departure from the band in December 2009, it could have meant the end for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Seen as the creative force of the band, the killer guitar riffs of hits like ‘Give It Away’ and ‘Californication’ came from the mercurial guitarist. He was the talent that had shaped the sound of their biggest hits since their breakthrough album Blood Sugar Sex Magik in 1991.

He’d quit before, in 1992, while the Chili Peppers were on tour in Japan, because he was uncomfortable with fame and had slipped into a deep depression after developing a serious heroin addiction. But Flea couldn’t handle the band without him and declared that 1995’s One Hot Minute, the album recorded with Dave Navarro in Frusciante’s place, “didn’t feel like a Chilis album to me.” So, he tracked Frusciante down to an East LA apartment, imploring him to rejoin the band in 1998.
Read the full exclusive feature on the Red Hot Chili Peppers by Jamie Wynn and Des Sampson in the latest issue of Rip It Up out now.

KASABIAN
“I really think I need to find a fucking hobby - something to occupy my time when I’m not doing music - otherwise I just end up drinking alcohol and getting pissed all the time,” announces Kasabian’s vocalist Tom Meighan unexpectedly.

“It’s weird that when you’ve got a lot of time and freedom you often get into a rut and just end up doing nothing, isn’t it? At least that’s what I seem to do,” he adds laughing. “I dunno, maybe I should take up drawing or painting, because I enjoy those - or perhaps it’d be better, and safer, for me to just be on the road, all the time.”

Fortuitously, with the unveiling of Kasabian’s fourth album, Velociraptor, that’s where Meighan and his bandmates Sergio Pizzorno (guitar/keyboards), Chris Edwards (bass) and Ian Matthews (drums) are set to find themselves, for the foreseeable future, as they tackle a barrage of festivals before embarking on their own year-long, headline tour. “It’s good to be back with a new album and doing some shows again. I really missed it and missed being on the road,” acknowledges Meighan. “I’m just buzzing.”
Read the full feature on Kasabian by Des Sampson in the latest issue of Rip It Up out now.

OPETH
Swedish progressive metallers Opeth are on the cusp of releasing their newest album, the almighty Heritage, and vocalist/guitarist Mikael Åkerfeldt is one happy man.

Having just woken up at home in Stockholm, he’s keen to spread the word that this isn’t an album that will disappoint, and he’s incredibly proud of it. The band are midway through the festival circuit, and I ask if they’ve been unleashing any tracks from Heritage to their eager fans, to which he replies, “We love doing the summer festivals and do them whether we have a new album or not, and we did think about playing a new song until we realised that YouTube would just fuck it all up for us. I don’t want people to base the new album on some shitty sounding clip, recorded on a cellphone, that would make up their mind before they’d even heard the whole thing.”

The outspoken Åkerfeldt says you can call him old fashioned, but he likes to present anything new from Opeth, “in the environment that it deserves to be presented in, and in its entirety.”
Read the full feature on Opeth by Halene Ravlich in the latest issue of Rip It Up out now.

I AM GIANT
When ex-Blindspott drummer Shelton Woolright moved to a dark, grey London back in 2007, he knew things were going to be hard. If he’d known how hard however, he might have thought twice about what he’d done. Not only was he facing a period of dark days, shifting rocks and sleeping on floors, but back in New Zealand his former bandmates were about to reform the band he’d helped create whilst still a teenager behind his back, eventually suing him in an attempt to get him out of the picture.

Fastforward to 2011 however, and things are looking mighty rosy for him and his new band I Am Giant; he can now look back at the last few years as just “fucking hard work,” culminating in a brand spanking new album to be proud of and - when it came to his legal woes - a settlement in his favour.
Read the full feature on I Am Giant by Halene Ravlich in the latest issue of Rip It Up out now.

DJ SHADOW
With his third album The Outsider (2006), DJ Shadow deliberately set out to alienate some of the more outspoken members of his audience. Now, with his forthcoming fourth opus The Less You Know, The Better, the San Francisco based turntablist/producer is taking a more measured approach.

"With my last record I really wanted to push at least some of my fanbase against a wall and go, ‘ok, you keep going on about how much you like my music and yet you complain about this and that. This is what I’m about so are you in or out?’” he admits with a laugh when I meet him at a London café.

“So, the soft bits were overly soft and the hard bits were ultra hard. I didn’t want to shave off any of the edges to accommodate anybody’s sensibilities. I like the fact that on the same album that you have Keak Da Sneak and other hardcore Bay Area rappers, you also have softer artists like Christina Carter. I thought it was interesting how there was something for everybody to love and something for everybody to hate. It was enthralling and exhilarating making a record like that, but at the same time I knew that it served a certain purpose.”
Read the full feature on DJ Shadow by Stephen Jewell in the latest issue of Rip It Up out now.

CUT OFF YOUR HANDS
On their sophomore album Hollow, Cut Off Your Hands went back to basics on multiple fronts to create the album they wanted to, in the way they wanted to.

Nick Johnston sounds tired. Sitting in the office of Cut Off Your Hand’s New Zealand management at a circular plastic table under halogen lighting, with a questionable coffee in hand, the frontman is recounting the state of the band at the end of 2009 when, following brutal touring commitments and a couple of line-up alterations, they first tried to write the follow up to their critically acclaimed debut album You and I.

“I’d written a whole bunch of songs that were completely demoed and just needed to be recorded with the guys," Johnston explains. "We were playing them live, and we did this tour of Australia at the end of 2009 with Midnight Juggernauts. We had some good friends of ours over there who I asked for their honest opinion and they were like, ‘yeah, maybe not so much.’ We just decided to have a break from it all, because at that stage we were half a new band and tired of it all. We’d been touring since 2007 nonstop and we just needed to put it all on hold for a bit. There was probably a good year where we didn’t think we would do another one.”
Read the full feature on Cut Off Your Hands by Courtney Sanders in the latest issue of Rip It Up out now.

CULTS
Cults’ Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin are strolling through the streets of New York after seeing 4AD band tUnE-YarDs play. It’s late at night and the city sounds remarkably quiet, though navigating what traffic and pedestrians there are on foot isn’t an ideal way to conduct an interview.

Maybe it’s the buzz from being at the gig, elation from releasing their debut album or that they’re just really happy to be taking a call from New Zealand, but the couple manage to be buoyant and chatty, especially Oblivion, who speaks first. “It was really cool,” he enthuses about the tUnE-YarDs show. “Super exciting.”

He could easily be referring to any number of highlights Cults has experienced since bounding onto the music scene a year and a half ago. After growing up in San Diego, Oblivion and Follin moved to the Big Apple to study film at New York University. Instead of completing their degrees, the couple decided to focus on making music. And, within a remarkably short timespan, it became a career. “All my teachers are really happy for me,” says Oblivion. “They all wish they could’ve done the same thing when they were 21.”
Read the full feature on Cults by Barney McDonald in the latest issue of Rip It Up out now.

HOLLIE SMITH & MARA TK
Just prior to departing for a recon trip in Europe, Hollie Smith breaks cover to speak about her new collaborative record Band Of Brothers Vol.1, and the creative realisations associated with it.

A tattooed warrior woman with a voice that seems to enchant and infuriate with equal abandon, since the early 2000s Aucklander Hollie Smith’s musical presence has been indelibly marked on the regional creative culture of New Zealand. A soul singer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter - between her own series of divisive solo recordings, and collaborations with a spectrum of artists that includes Don McGlashan, Concord Dawn, Fat Freddy’s Drop, Bulletproof and Trinity Roots - Smith’s impact has been longstanding, and in certain cases iconic.

By now, whether you’re a fan or not, chances are you know the back story. Teenage Celtic music recordings, acclaimed live (and recorded) performances with Trinity Roots and countless other members of the local musical mafia, an international record deal with Manhattan Records (which didn’t play out as expected), gold and platinum record and single sales and - with the 2010 release of her sophomore album Humour And The Misfortune Of Others - what some call a miraculous reinvention. Close to a year and a half on from the last time I spoke with her, on a sunny Auckland afternoon in July, I headed up to the EMI offices to speak with her about her newest offering, Band Of Brothers Vol: 1.
Read the full feature on Cults by Martyn Pepperell in the latest issue of Rip It Up out now.