Sunny day,
Sweeping the clouds away.
- Sesame Street

I’ll explain the quote later. Are you ready to learn the lingo of love at lollapalooza’s day two? I’m sure you are.

Must See Band of the Day (Famous Band): Close call. On one hand, I know that Wilco will put on a great show. One the other hand, I’d like to see what kind of energy that Rage Against the Machine brings. More than likely, it will be a game-time decision. I’m saying 75% chance of Wilco right now.

Must See Band of the Day (non-headliner): I’m going with Broken Social Scene. It will be interesting to see how many of the regular members show up. From what I hear, some members with solo projects are playing near Chicago and don’t have a concert on Saturday. Possibilities? Probably not.

Who’s My Opener (early show of the day): This would be Margot & The Nuclear So And So’s. Typically, large groups make festival shows more fun due to the fact that not everybody needs to be playing on every song. Margot has eight members. I’m expecting good music and a show.

Biggest Conflict of the Day: This is my biggest conflict of lollapalooza – Broken Social Scene vs. Battles. Complicated tempo’ed art rock vs. equally complicated prog rock (isn’t all prog rock complicated?). If only the stages weren’t half a mile away from each other.

Ok, onto explaining the above lyrics. The interesting part about Saturday is that while there are two headliners, there is also a DJ set going on at the same time. DJ Momjeans (aka Danny Masterson) aka Hyde from That 70’s Show. He doesn’t have any music on his myspace page, just the Sesame Street theme song.

I decided to ignore Pitchfork’s review of The Black Kids‘ new album Partie Traumatic and picked it up this week. It’s good, but not great. I’d like to say that it’s a little overproduced and too smoothed out. Check out the opening track, Hit The Heartbrakes.

I know what you’re thinking. “Hey, I’m not going to lollapalooza. Why should I have to read through this stuff?”

Well, you might think that you’re not going to lollapalooza, but then come this Saturday, you’ll be listening to bands from the other side of the gate wondering why you didn’t have tickets so you could follow this guide. Perhaps a purchase of tickets is in order?

Must See Band of the Day (famous band): This one is really easy: Radiohead. Is there currently a band bigger than Radiohead? This is the band of the festival playing uncontested. The main negative about having Radiohead is that there will be a large crowd standing at the AT&T stage all day so that they have front row seats that night.

Must See Band of the Day (non-headliner): I could make a pretty good case for three bands here, but I’m the most excited to see Mates of State. There’s two reasons for this – I really enjoy the guy/girl harmonies, and I’ve had good experiences with two person bands. If you’re two people on stage, you need to have personality to pull the show along, and I’ve heard that these guys have more than enough of that.

Who’s My Opener (early show of the day): You actually have two choices here, depending on your musical tastes. If you want to start off the day with some thumping beats of African hip-hop, then you should start the day with K’Naan. If you prefer 80’s hair metal, then Bang Camaro is your choice.

Biggest Conflict of the Day: This is a big one because the sets kind of overlap, but not completely: Raconteurs vs. The Cool Kids vs. CSS vs. Bloc Party. If you want to see The Raconteurs,  you’re missing out on the other three. If you don’t mind skipping the Raconteurs, it’s possible to see both Bloc Party and one of The Cool Kids or CSS.

Although I like K’Naan, I’m probably more of a hair metal guy, myself. So, today’s song comes from Bang Camaro and is called Pleasure (Pleasure).

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Mondays gone,
Tuesdays fadin’.
Wednesdays gone,
Thursdays all but wasted now.
- Stone Temple Pilots

Sorry, Kevin. No mid-nineties song for you today. I did give you some Stone Temple Pilots lyrics, though. That should make you happy.

You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been talking about any concerts this summer. I take a hiatus from concerts in the summer due mainly to going to see lollapalooza, which is only a week away! To top that off, I hope to be in Milwaukee next Thursday to see The Go! Team, CSS, Matt & Kim, and Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head to start the weekend off right.

Deerhoof has released their first single from their upcoming album, Offend Maggie. Wait, you were expecting a song? There’s a song there, it’s just in sheet music form. Get working on your version and upload it. I, unfortunately, will be too busy, and not that musically inclined to create a noeviltwin version.

For those of you who are really wondering who Deerhoof is, I posted a song by them last September. Accompanying it was some musical renditions of the “Don’t tase me, bro” guy.

Today’s song comes from Bodies of Water, whose new album, A Certain Feeling came out on Tuesday. Their previous album had a youth choir / Christian Polyphonic Spree sound. Now, it would appear that they’re getting preachy and using a lot of organ. By preachy, I mean, out of the nine songs on the album, six are over five minutes long with five of those over 5 minutes, 50 seconds. Check out Darling, Be Here.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes,
Turn and face the strange.
Ch-Ch-Changes,
Just gonna have to be a different man.
Time may change me,
But I can’t trace time.
-David Bowie

There were a couple of CD’s released yesterday that I was somewhat interested in hearing. Amongst them was the new album by Black Kids, called Partie Traumatic. These guys have been receiving a lot of buzz lately, especially from Pitchfork, due to their four-song EP. Well, apparently Pitchfork want to apologize for hyping them so much.

Speaking of new albums, the new TV on the Radio album, Dear Science, drops September 23rd. Now there’s an album to be excited about.

Not wanting to be left out, eMusic has dropped a major redesign of their site. Most of the updates have gone to the album pages. Check out the album page for the new Broken Social Scene Presents: Brendan Canning album. The album art is now big and can get even bigger. Click on that art, then click on download hi-res and it will become large and in charge. So large, in fact, that I can’t fit it on my computer screen.

Lousy small monitor with the scratches on your screen from all the times that I’ve moved you.

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.

What? Oh right.

Amongst the other nice features now included on the eMusic album page is a Discover section, which appears to include as many articles about the album that you’re looking at, and then fills in with other eMusic content. There’s also a section called “Dig Deeper on the net” which includes YouTube videos, Flickr images, and wikipedia entries, although I’m pretty sure that I read that the Flickr images kind of violate the Flickr terms of services, so they’re not up anymore.

I should also mention that some of the wikipedia results are funny. Check out the results for a band you’ve heard here before, Bodies of Water. Apparently, a body of water is “any significant accumulation of water, usually covering the Earth or another planet.” Interesting.

Even though there are things to be fixed, (I really miss the user list feature) it’s definitely a strong step in the right direction and looks like it’s going to be great to use for the future.

Today’s song comes from the next installment of the Broken Social Scene presents series. It’s from BSS co-founder, Brendan Canning. Gotta say, it was hard to pick a song from this album to properly represent it. BSS is definitely a band that you want to engulf yourself into the entire CD. Check out Hit The Wall.

P.S. I know that I’ve written a lot here, but I really like the website for these BSS presents albums. Click on the album cover to check it out.

Last weekend was a nice weekend with no commitments or responsibilities, so I took about an hour to discover some new music. Searching was a little interesting, and I really only picked up four tracks, but we’ll get to that. While looking for music, I thought it might be a good idea to teach you some of my tricks.

I’m not going to give you them all because that would lead to a very long post. Also, if I gave away all of my secrets, then even more websites like mine would pop up. I only have a small following and I’d prefer it if it didn’t get any smaller.

On to the tips!

1. Find websites where you can listen to full songs. Spinner is a great place where you can listen to entire albums. 30-second clips rarely give you a good idea of how either the song or the entire album sounds. The A.V. Club and stereogum are also two places where you can get your hands on some sweet tune-age.
2. Keep your ears peeled. That’s right, I used an action usually reserved for your eyes and flip-reversed it right back at ya. The indie scene is exploding in front of you every night on prime-time television, whether it be during the show or at the commercial break, indie music is getting very popular to set the mood. Google is great to find out what songs are played during what shows.
3. Don’t always believe what you read. Use websites to find bands and then decide for yourself what ranking you would give them. I’ve loved albums that other websites have hated. That’s why music is great – it’s so subjective. Note that this is not applicable to boy bands or pop country.
4. Similar to #2, use multiple sources. Sometimes you have to cut through the hipster snobbery and find a website that agrees with your point of view. I’ve found that a negative review can change the way that I listen to an album that I previously liked. If I can find somebody else who liked the album, there’s a camaraderie there that helps. This is assuming that you need some kind of validation that the music you’re listening to is actually liked by somebody.

So, as I said before, after all of my searching, I only picked up four tracks this last weekend. Only picking up four tracks usually happens when there’s an album that I could like, but it has too many tracks for me to blindly download them all. The fact that I only downloaded part of one album after an hour of searching means that I didn’t necessarily find anything that was worth my money based on 30-second clips.

The band that I picked up the four tracks from is called Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, and well, they’re hard to describe. Allmusic calls them both country punk revival and psychobilly. I like psychobilly, personally, although I think that Old Testament Country Gospel may suffice. They like the fire and brimstone side of religion, it appears. Check out This Land is our Land Redux.

This is how we do it.
- Montell Jordan

Gotta say, nothing like sitting down to my computer late on Thursday night trying to figure out what song I should play on Friday. There were a lot of moments this week where I said, “Hey, that’d be something neat to write about” or “That’s pretty funny, I should throw that up here.” Unfortunately, my brain is holding all of those things captive right now.

If any of you saw the comment posted by Angela about The Hold Steady being on Letterman last night, you may have stayed up to watch them. If you’re like me, you waited until the video was posted on youtube the next morning.

And, since apparently I have to learn a special way to embed youtube videos into my web page without making the sidebar disappear, here’s a link to pitchfork’s compilation of both the song and their skit with Andy Kindler.

I get asked a lot how I manage to find the music that I do to post here. Well, today’s song comes from a band whose album cover I thought looked interesting. They are called Circle Research and the first track sounds like a combination of The Avalanches and last Friday’s band, Ratatat. Unfortunately, they’re not quite in the same league as either of them, but then again, not many people are.

Check out Nothing Can Save Ya (Extended 12″ Mix) and have a fun weekend. I know I will.

When there weren’t any parties,
Sometimes she’d party with townies.
- The Hold Steady

New Hold Steady!!!

Stay Positive came out yesterday and was easily my most anticipated album of the year.  Actually, maybe I should time-line this thing. The album was first available streaming on their myspace page until it was available early on iTunes, and finally yesterday it was officially released. Ah, the new digital world.

Often referred to as “The best bar band in America,” The Hold Steady have put out four excellent records in a row. In the first two albums, it seemed like focus of the songs was on lead singer, Craig Finn, singing/yelling (yelling/singing?) his crazy stories at you, while only later did you realize that the background music was pretty awesome.

Finn’s voice was often the reason why a lot of people had a hard time getting into the band. I’ve told multiple people to check them out, only to be asked why people would like this sort of music.

The last two albums have shown more of a willingness to put the band at the forefront. Sure, the lyrics haven’t changed much. We’re still hearing stories about Holly, Charlemagne, townies, and people who like to drink down by the Mississippi river, but it feels like it’s getting harder for a listener to focus on the lyrics through the wave of music. I should mention that with music like this, it’s not a bad thing.

Then again, I might just be getting used to their style.

Listening to the album, I was immediately attracted to the song, One For the Cutters. It’s a song about a college girl who starts to party with townies, thinking that they’re just like her. Only later does she find out that they’re just like her, only they have a problem with stabbing people. Check it out.

I’m going up the country,
Baby, don’t you wanna go?
-Canned Heat

While trying to figure out who sung that song, I came across this youtube video clip. It made me wonder why is the recorder no longer a popular band instrument?

For future note, I should come up with a post topic prior to driving across Wisconsin, because as much as you would think that I would have time to think about what to post about, most of that energy was used to pay attention to the brake lights of the car in front of me.

When trying to figure out what song to play today, I came across the new Ladytron album that came out earlier this year. It received mixed reviews, mostly because it sounds too much like Ladytron. I’ll try and explain.

Typically, bands will get a bad review due to them losing the sound that made them famous. The easiest example of this would be Weezer’s second album, Pinkerton, which was so poorly received that it made Rivers Cuomo run away to Harvard to get a degree.

Sidebar – Pinkerton is actually a very good album, but people wanted mindless Weezer rock.

Getting back on topic, there’s a fine line that you have to walk to keep yourself from taking too many risks and not taking enough risks. For some bands, it’s just a can’t-win battle. Ladytron has a sound that when you hear it, you know it’s Ladytron, and I think reviewers fell into the trap of complaining that it sounded too much like their other material instead of enjoying it for what it is.

Today’s song comes from that album. Check out Runaway.

Hey guys.

The new Hold Steady album, Stay Positive comes out next week. Spinner has video of “The World’s Greatest Bar Band” playing in their studios.  You can either watch Constructive Summer on the web site or download a Video (or MP3) podcast of the 5-song set. I’ll be checking this out myself later today.

Bellamy – Oh, just experience I suppose. I started out as Roadrunner. (Roadrunner voice) Meep!
Homer – You mean “meep-meep”?
Bellamy – No, they only paid me to say it once, then they doubled it up on the soundtrack.
-The Simpsons

Does anybody remember the above episode? It was the one where Homer became the voice for Poochy, but nobody liked him. Poochy, that is. Everybody likes Homer. Except maybe Erin. She doesn’t put up with tomfoolery in her cartoon characters.

There is a cool game out on jamsbio.com where you  have 20 seconds to match up 9 album covers with either the artist or album title. I’m really bad at it. I’m just not good with the classic album covers at all.

One of the first podcasts that I listened to was hosted by an original MTV VJ whose name is failing me right now. This was right around the time the word ‘podcast’ was hitting the news as something newscasters could talk about instead of telling us about real news. Anyway…

There was always an issue on his podcast that he couldn’t play original content, since technically being a podcast, he could be accused of illegally distributing music. He got around this by playing user-submitted mashups – a combination of two songs that you wouldn’t expect to go together. There seemed to be a lot of hair metal and rap combinations on this show.

Then came The Grey Album, a mashup created by DJ Danger Mouse that combined songs from The Beatles White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album. That wasn’t available for very long due to Jay-Z not being to happy with it. He later went on to create a new mashup album with Linkin Park.

All of this leads to today’s song. Today’s song comes from one of my favorite new artists, Girl Talk. He has taken mashups to the next level, by jamming 10+ samples per 3-minute track. He recently digitally released his new album in a pay-what-you-want format.

With this album, Girl Talk has taken his game to the next level. He effortlessly combines songs you recognize from your childhood, songs from your parents childhood, and songs that the annoying teenager down the street would recognize. The album is meant to be listened to in a full loop, so taking single tracks from it is often difficult.

I decided to play Set It Off for you today. I think that Girl Talk is at his best when he finds a great combination and sticks with it for a little longer than normal. He does it in this track by combining the aforementioned Jay-Z with Radiohead. Oh, and he ends the song with a sample of Come On, Eileen.