So this is goodbye,
So this is farewell,
The fight’s final bell,
And I fall where I stand.
- Junior Boys
Goodbye? Not entirely. This has been an interesting year. I’ve gone from posting three days a week to trying to force myself to post two times a week to finally not posting at all last week. Am I done posting for good? No, I don’t think so.
I started this blog because I’m slightly obsessive about finding great music and I wanted to share my findings with friends. I figured that this was the easiest way to do it. I assumed that the words would always come with. I would like to think that they did, but lately the words just haven’t been coming.
I’ve decided that it’s time to focus on finding music that I can enjoy for a long time, rather than a month at a time. I’ve ignored some great music because it was “too old” for me to post here. At least, that’s how I justified it.
This isn’t goodbye. Far from it. Ok, it’s somewhat close to goodbye. I’m still going to be posting music, just not as often. It’s been a nice run…
Funny story. Apparently this jerk who writes a blog promised you a preview of this weekend’s Rock the Garden. It’s now Friday afternoon and you haven’t seen anything. What’s up?
My bad. You’re not going to be getting a writeup. Instead, you’re getting a link to my post from April about Rock the Garden. That’s the best I’m going to do.
On a side note, the AV Club has released their top albums of 2009 so far. While they start out by saying that it’s been a good year for music, they mostly stick to a small sampling of music, which leads me to believe that it in fact hasn’t been that great of a year.
And now, like the jerk I am, will end this post. I’ll try and post some pictures (and maybe a song, too!) on Monday.
You’re tired my love,
I feel the same.
- White Rabbits
I’m having writer’s block again, so this is going to be a random kind of post.
Apparently Bonnaroo was this weekend. I’ve never been big on the camping with people who have been out in the sun all day, so Bonnaroo has never really appealed to me. My bad, I guess…
Sidebar - a parachute holding an airboat just flew past my window. Now I’m confused. Is this bonnaroo coming to attack me?
Two of the bands from Rock the Garden played Bonnaroo this weekend - The Decemberists and Yeasayer. Solid Gold are apparently holed up in the cities getting ready for the show and Calexico are hanging out in the south. I’ll write about Rock the Garden later this week.
Switching topics again…
Dirty Projectors put out a new album called Bitte Orca on Tuesday last week and I was able to pick it up via eMusic on Friday. Work hasn’t been very conducive to listening to music lately - too many meetings. So far, my opinion of the album is that it has potential, but it’s going to take a dozen more listenings or so to really get into it. Do I have the stamina? Probably.
Did I mention that stereogum is streaming the entire album? That’s the entertaining thing about writing a blog, people. I can take the time to check if I’ve mentioned this before. But… I’m feeling lazy. What’s the worst thing that could happen - me doubling my outbound links? Yeah, like that’ll happen.
Today’s song comes from the aforementioned Dirty Projectors album. Check out Stillness is the Move.
Sorry, people. It’s been a rough week to get a post out. As far as news is concerned, the new album by Dirty Projectors is getting some big-time praise. I’ll be picking that one up tomorrow when my eMusic tracks refresh. It’s only 10 days until Rock The Garden, which should be pretty cool.
Wow, I think I’m going to stop while I’m ahead. Sorry, this is a really poor post. I’m starting to realize that the majority of my music listening and discovering is done at work. By discovering, I mean changing the album on my iPod, not actively surfing for music. I’ve been in meetings all week and just out of the loop in general.
I thought I’d try to combine a story about a weird electronic music convention with some weird music by DM Stith. I actually don’t find his music all that weird, but I assume that’s not going to be true for a lot of people.
Anyway, sorry for the short post - I’ll try and do better in the future. Check out Pity Dance byDM Stith. If you like it enough, more of his stuff is out on muxtape.
Well take it from me,
What else could you do?
Where do you get off,
And how can I get there, too?
- White Rabbits
On Monday, I got a note on facebook from eMusic (the only thing that I’m a “fan” of on facebook). They had just come to a deal with Sony, meaning they officially get to play with the big boys. Now, I was under the impression that this would be contrary to their business model being a pusher for indie hipsters like myself, but to each his own.
The move didn’t make much sense, but I thought I’d read the editorial to see what was up. It was a nicely written piece about how eMusic was proud to be introducing Sony’s back catalog in the future where they hoped to write articles showing links between classic artists and their contemporary counterparts.
The problem was that the article failed to mention something important. Included with the addition of the Sony back catalog (200,000 songs or so) we would be forced into a”slight” increase in prices. By slight, I mean I was only hit with a 75% increase in cost-per-track. But that’s neither here nor there.
So what happened? PEOPLE FREAKED OUT!!!
I should take a step back. In fact, I should take a couple of steps back. First of all, you’ll notice that I’m writing this a couple days after the fact. I didn’t want to come here and start giving the “eMusic has killed my blog” post that you might expect somebody who is overreacting to produce.
I should also explain that eMusic has been very kind to me these past years, allowing me to keep my grandfathered plan from 2005 - well after the point where I was no longer profitable. New and current members didn’t actually see that large of a price increase. I’m just special that way.
You see, eMusic has evolved from a site that allowed unlimited downloads for $5 a month to what it is today. And when I say unlimited, I mean unlimited in the sense that Montana has no speed limit on the interstate, but you can still get a reckless driving ticket for driving over 100 MPH. There are some classic members known as the 2000 club because of how many tracks they tried to download each month before being told to knock it off or be banned.
Back to the story at hand. In my opinion, eMusic really screwed the pooch here with the way they handled the situation.
There was no email sent to members stating that there would be a change coming. There was only a message on the front page of eMusic. I found out about it in the comments section of that article I was talking about
By presenting the change to me as “you had this many tracks for this price, now you get this many tracks for the same price” it made me feel like they were taking music away from me rather than charging me more for it.
Finally, they tried to rationalize the price increase with the addition of the Sony back catalog. Let me get this straight… eMusic, the bastion of the independent music movement is now raising my rates so that they money can go to a major label?
All of this left me reeling. Would I stay with eMusic or pay more to another site based on principle? How am I going to run this website (even with its reduced content) with so few downloads? I knew that I needed to take a step back and give myself time to digest all of this. Plus, I had just written a post on Monday and if I’m going to be short on music, I may as well stretch it out for good measure.
While the site’s message boards went up in flames, eMusic kept silent, deciding only to release a statement on Tuesday morning and let some of the editors try and calm the uprising that they had caused. They attempted to assure the crowd that Sony wasn’t getting all of the price increase. They were also looking to pay the indie labels more for their music.
So now there are thread upon thread of people arguing what a stupid mistake eMusic is making, how they’ve sold out, and most of all, people who don’t know how to calculate percentages. If your music used to cost $5 and it now costs $12.50, that’s a 150% increase, not a 250% increase.
I’ve decided to tough it out with eMusic. I feel like I owe it to them to see if they can pull this all together. The problem here is that when you decide cater to the lowest common denominator, like the major labels do, you can expect to get the lowest common denominator in return. I just hope eMusic is ready to deal with that.
Today’s song has quickly become my favorite off of the new Phoenix album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. It’s my favorite kind of pop song - something with a steady beat, slowly building with changing major/minor chord sequences, flowing toward an apex. It’s a great formula.
So if you love me even half as much as you love your old Martin…
- Devon Sproule
I’m sitting here trying to figure out the new album by Grizzly Bear. I have the feeling that they’re going to be like The Walkmen album from last year that I never quite got. I can see fans of My Morning Jacket enjoying this album. Give me a couple of weeks.
It’s been pretty awesome weather the past few days and I’ve been doing my best to enjoy it. I took the dog to the dog park on Saturday and decided that it was a good time to be antisocial and listen to the new Au Revoir Simone while watching the big dog run away from the little dogs. My dog is such a wuss.
Au Revoir Simone’s 2007 album, The Bird of Music was one of the two or three albums that made it my emusic save for later list (where music goes to die) only to be removed, then added later, then removed again. The samples weren’t good enough to warrant me wanting the album and well, that’s the unfortunate truth of online music. I’m really glad that lala has come along to help me out with that issue.
When I saw that Au Revoir Simone had put out an album on the same day as the new White Rabbits (which I love) I decided that I wasn’t going to skip out on them this time. I’m glad that I didn’t. They remind me a lot of Stars without necessarily being so bipolar. If Stars and Au Revoir Simone were rollercoasters at valley fair, Stars would be Wild Thing and Au Reviore Simone would be High Roller. How’s that for a Minnesota-only reference?
Well, that’s about all the time I’m willing to sit indoors right now. It’s taken me three times to spell all of the Revoir’s in this post. They started out at Reviore then changed to Revior, finally settling on the correct spelling (I hope). Check out Shadows.
Good news, people! The Cool Kids are giving away a new mix tape that can be found by clicking on the above fishing fish. I haven’t had time to pick it up yet, but hey… free is free. Am I right?
Bass in the track and the trunk will slap,
Seats lean back made the beat so phat,
it go boom, boom boom boom boom.
- The Grouch & Eligh
And I’m back. Hopefully everyone had a good weekend. I ran in a half marathon and broke a world record in the same weekend. What world record? I did my part by eating two of the 208,752 brats eaten over Memorial Day Weekend at Madison, Wisconsin’s “World’s Largest Brat Fest.”
Well, I’m pretty much out of emusic tracks until the middle of next month. I decided that I hadn’t picked up any good indie hip hop this year and went searching, but I’ll get to that later.
I’m not sure if anyone has seen anything about this, but it’s starting to become a bit of a big deal. Danger Mouse, the man who brought you The Grey Album, Sparklehorse, a band I ignored at lollapalooza, and weird film director David Lynch have teamed up to create Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse Present: Dark Night of the Soul.
Each track has a different lead singer, most of whom I would consider well known. The album comes with a 100+ page booklet of pictures taken by David Lynch that supposedly coincide with the music. One problem, though. There’s no music.
Right now, EMI is fighting the release of this album for unknown reasons. So instead of a CD with music on it coming with your book, you instead get a CD-R with the following statement on it:
“For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.”
The album is currently streaming on NPR’s “Exclusive First Listen.” and may be the only time you’ll ever “legally” hear the music. It’s apparently quite popular, so I haven’t been able to get it to actually stream.
Back to my lack of emusic tracks. I had no hip hop, so I decided to see what had been most popular on emusic this year. I came up with two albums that sounded good to me - The Grouch & Eligh’s Say G&E! and Mr. Lif’s I Heard It Today.
I like both albums with a slight nod to G & E. Mr. Lif tends to get a bit preachy for my tastes, but that is apparently his style. I was pleasantly surprised to find a track on Say G&E! featuring Slug of Atmosphere and it quickly became my favorite song on the album. Check out Boom (Feat. Slug).
But I feel alive and I feel it in me,
Up and up i keep on climbing,
Higher and higher and higher.
- Passion Pit
Apparently the 80’s are back with a passion. A Passion Pit maybe? This band has apparently been blowing up the blogs recently. Their debut album, Manners, dropped on Tuesday and I’ve been jumping between it and the new White Rabbits ever since, but you already knew that.
A lot of people are going to listen to Passion Pit and say that it’s not for them. I know not everyone likes dancey music and the lead singer’s voice doesn’t necessarily open them many doors with the general public. But if you do like indie dance rock, then this might just be for you. I know, great recommendation, right?
Lyrically, they’re similar to Saves The Day, a band I listened to a lot in college. Saves The Day was notorious for writing some pretty disturbing lyrics and singing them to poppy songs to get people who didn’t know any better to sing along. While Passion Pit doesn’t take it quite as far as Save The Day, there are definitely moments where you say, “What did they just sing?”
Taking a step back, where have all of these indie dance rock bands come from? I think it’s pretty easy to credit (blame?) Postal Service for most of these bands that we’re seeing today. They were the entry into indie music for a lot of people for good reason. I think of indie music as a ladder of accessibility. You start out with the first rung bands that are easy to listen to and slowly figure out that maybe some of the weirder stuff is pretty interesting as you climb.
But anyway, that’s about all the time I have today. Check out Little Secrets.
So imitate the action of the tiger
or imitate the action of the snail
Snap your teeth and smile a little wider
or leave behind a lovely silver trail
- Bishop Allen
Well, it’s taken a long time, but after listening to two of Tuesday’s releases, I think my faith has been restored in indie music - at least the stuff coming out in 2009. Yesterday, I picked up new albums from White Rabbits and Passion Pit.
The White Rabbits album was high on my list of anticipated for 2009 and I only heard about Passion Pit last week. Supposedly, there has been a lot of internet buzz surrounding Passion Pit, but I don’t really know how to use the internets to their full potential, thus the same header since I started the website over two years ago.
I had White Rabbits debut album as my #10 album of 2007. Add to that their producer - Britt Daniel of Spoon - and you can see why I was excited. I caught a single on the radio a couple of weeks ago and thought that Spoon had put out an EP. While there are some tracks on the album that could be mistaken for Spoon, I think they do a good job of still personalizing it and making it their own.
Switching gears, the Passion Pit album is fun, indie dance rock. I know, I know. We need another indie dance rock band like I need an eyebrow waxing. Wait… do I need an eyebrow waxing? I sure hope not. Right now, this album is making me happy. I’m slightly worried that Pheonix’s new album will overtake it pretty quickly, so I’m trying to ingest as much of it as I can before next Tuesday.
Today’s song is the opening track from the new White Rabbits album. Check out Percussion Gun.
And I’m back. Hopefully everyone had a good weekend. I ran in a half marathon and broke a world record in the same weekend. What world record? I did my part by eating two of the 208,752 brats eaten over Memorial Day Weekend at Madison, Wisconsin’s “World’s Largest Brat Fest.”
