Underwater Vocals

Still unable to locate a copy of a Writer album, I'm settling for youtube videos. There's lots of live videos of these guys, but as with most live music on youtube, the audio quality leaves much to be desired. This one is decent, so I hope you enjoy! The track is Miss Mermaid, and it's off of their 2010 album Brotherface.

What Color Is This?

As I mentioned yesterday, both the opening acts for The Album Leaf were pretty spectacular, and I was very glad to catch them both. I have unfortunately not been able to find a copy of Writer's album Brotherface but I have obtained Sister Crayon's Bellow which is a magnificent album. Previously a quartet, the band, hailing from Sacramento now has two female vocalists, Terra Lopez (the band's lead) and Dani Fernandez whose vocals work well together. Dani also provides beats courtesy of an MPC 1000. Jeffrey LaTour handles the guitar work and the keyboards. They have a dark ambient feel to them, but are rather soothing at the same time. Check out their track "I'm Still The Same Person" above!

In A Clamshell!

Last night was absolutely amazing. One of the most substantial concerts I've been to in a while, probably since seeing Kaskade for NYE almost a year ago now. Five friends and I made it to the Lafayette and headed downstairs to the Mississippi Ballroom to see The Album Leaf play. Not only did they play an amazing set, but both opening acts (Writer, & Sister Crayon) played some gorgeous music as well. The Album Leaf is a band I've enjoyed for quite some time and it was really magical to see them live. The Mississippi Ballroom was a great venue for them and the atmosphere was great. I had this sense of everything being in it's right place as they played, even with the #occupysd events going on and the nation kind of in an uproar, The Album Leaf was super soothing and mellow. Just the right thing at the right time. Can't wait for these guys to come back around and play their hometown again! The video above is for the song "Window" which was probably my favorite track they played.

First Show Of Rocktober!

Saw CSS last night with my friend JJ. It was the first show of my Rocktober project and also the first show I got free tickets to because of my blog. CSS performed great, Lovefoxxx is still sexy as hell and has kept her amazing stage presence, still dancing around and just so full of energy. Men, the opening act for the show had me feeling confused for a while. First off JJ and I were playing the "Is that a man or a woman" guessing game for quite some time. I had no idea who Men was until making it home and doing some research only to find out the lead of the band is JD Samson, who you might know from the band Le Tigre (check out their song "Deceptacon" here). So many things made sense all of a sudden! The side project is pretty good, but I definitely like Le Tigre better.

Crabcore!

A while back my buddy Mars introduced me to this band Attack Attack! with the song "Stick Stickly" (video here) and we had a good laugh at the ridiculousness of their "Crab-Core" style and cheesy edm interlude. Now they're making dubstep remixes of their own tracks. Entertaining, but still ridiculous music.

Fighting For The One You Love

I love when remixes have videos and this fantastic remix of Example's "Kickstarts" from Bar9 is a great one! The remix is much different from the original song/video which can be heard/seen here. And if you like this, or even if you don't, you may still like Bar9's remix of Deftones' "My Own Summer (Shove It)" which you can check out here: original & Bar9 remix.

Not Mr. Holland's Opus

This is "The Pavane: Opus #50" by French composer Gabriel Fauré reworked for a series of sequencers. Pretty amazing! The original, dated back to 1887, can be heard here.

Sorry to say, but I've been super busy and will be for the next couple weeks... Probably won't be too much substance to a lot of posts coming up. But you'll still get at least one song/post per day!

To Spotify or not to Spotify?

Spotify

Spotify has come a long way since it's initial release on October 7th, 2008. Now, just three days short of turning three years old Spotify boasts over 10,000,000 members, more than 1,000,000 of which are paying customers who've opted for the bonus privileges that come with it's Premium and Unlimited accounts, for $4.99 and $9.99 per month, respectively. With Spotify's new linking system to facebook which started up in September of 2011 it's popularity/user-base is sure to continue growing. So what is Spotify?

Spotify describes themselves as "a new way to listen to music," and their slogan seems to be "All the music, all the time." Spotify users have the ability to search for songs, and play them. Anytime, anywhere. Seems awesome right? It is for the most part, the library collection they have is massive, and you can import your own library into it for your own use or for your friends to use as well if you make a playlist with songs from your library that are not on Spotify already. There is some music, however, that is not on Spotify and artists can have their music pulled if they wanted to. Spotify's most popular feature seems to be it's playlist sharing feature, made much easier by it's integration with facebook. A user can make a playlist and "Publish" it making it available to all of their friends. Those friends can then listen to them, and if the user who made the playlist deemed it "contributive" then those friends can add to the playlist as well.

This program has some great features and I've been using it extensively for the last couple days. I've been checking out it's features, looking up information on it's business etiquette, and asking friends what they think of it. It seems to be a pretty solid program, but it does have some faults. The library system doesn't work as smoothly as iTunes' (or my own library system for that matter) and often shows the wrong album art, and track tags are incorrectly displayed, even though that material is saved onto the .mp3 file itself. I have a compilation album from LateNightTales which reads fine in iTunes, WinAmp, and Windows Media Player, and whatever else, but reads Late Night Tales in Spotify. This sounds like it's not too much of a hassle, but the problem is that only 4 songs on the 20 track album show up this way, so it thinks they are two different albums. The track tags are all correct so there seems to be no way to fix this issue, and it's pretty widespread, not just this specific album, though it is more noticeable on compilation discs.

Another worry is Spotify's business model. It's been reported that "indie labels... as opposed to the majors and Merlin members, receive no advance, receive no minimum per stream and only get a 50% share of ad revenue on a pro-rata basis." Swedish musician Magnus Uggla wanted to pull his music from the service, stating that after six months he'd only earned "what a mediocre busker could earn in a day". The Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported in 2009 that record label Junior Racing had only earned NOK 19 ($3.00 USD) after their artists had been streamed over 55,100 times! This seems an all too familiar concept/problem with online music programs, but just how much money is Spotify making? Can they even afford to pay more? Luke Lewis of NME doesn't think it can and states he is "convinced the 'free' aspect of Spotify is unsustainable" and that if "Spotify is to have a future, it needs to be a viable business".

So what's in store for Spotify? Will it's popularity bring more customers, or will it continue to have a growing user-base of just that: users. I'll stick to the free program myself, but won't be utilizing it as much. The only feature I find attractive is the sharing of playlists. There are other websites that provide that feature, but not as many of my friends use them. Looks like another facebook conundrum: the program isn't that good, but everyone's using it, so it's hard to move away from it.

I'm With Bart On This One

Here's Rocktober as of now! Still looking for little shows here and there... especially free local stuff cuz I am broke after buying all these tickets!

Can't Spell Colors

This song has been stuck in my head, all goddamn weekend.

Pitchfork's Top 50 Music Videos From The 90's

Pitchfork's Top 50 Music Videos from the 90's

I'm sure I've seen the majority of these videos, but I'm going back and checking out the ones I haven't, and reliving some of the ones I have. The list seems pretty solid so far (I'm about half way through) and some of these videos are totes on my top list as well, some are not however, but, we all have our own opinions. What are some of your favorites?