Blog: yoontunes

I suspect I'll be short on time for the next couple years, but I'll keep the content online awhile longer. I've always wanted this blog to be an awkward/honest way to talk about music, and should you ever want an outlet, this can do that. Thank you, all, for reading, and writing, and listening to me rant about indie rock. It has been really, really great.

IEM's or in-ear-monitors have a distinct benefit and resultant disadvantage. These are the headphones that fit into your ear canal. Because they completely block out the ear canal, they are hands-down the best way to eliminate outside noise (up to 42dB noise isolation with a good fit) and pipe in good sound. [Ed note: I'm about to get biological] They also have the same problem inherent with hearing aids, in that they prevent ear wax from naturally exiting the ear canal. Earwax (cerumen), a natural lubricant and antimicrobial coating, is formed on the tympanic membrane (ear drum) and naturally migrates [...]

[Ed note: In what has become a tradition that I hope will never end, Metz offers his opus on the music of the year] Everyone, First! Before you start reading the tome! If you so desire to listen to the Best Tracks of 2010 as you read about them. You can find them in the shared folder on my DropBox, which I just shared [...]

I used to live with this German guy. He was originally a friend of my twins, a connection which made the transition easier for him - he could poke fun at me for all of the things my brother did. He kept to himself mainly, darting around the apartment, muttering about the German religious deity Obama. As a result, not much of his conversation made sense to me, but a few things stuck. The first was that life was a waste of money (curiously, he was very frugal - so maybe the afterlife wasn't). The second was that a successful [...]

Shaq's résumé: 4 NBA championships Kazaam Miami Beach police officer Rapper, with platinum album 'Shaq Diesel' MBA, PhD candidate Classical conductor

Lost in the swell of new music this year is how many notable sountracks were made. People who made soundtracks used to neatly fall into two categories: Henry Mancini/John Williams-wannabe composers, or Cameron Crow-wannabe mixtape makers. Effective soundtracks this year had plenty of these types (composer: Hans Zimmer's perfectly matched 'Inception' soundtrack [ed note: any track on this cd would make a hilarious mood-killer for a mixtape], James Murphy's compositions plus hipster mixtape for Ben-Stiller-the-serious-actor in 'Greenberg'), but several prominent musicians tried making soundtracks with surprisingly good results. [...]

[Ed Note: From music expert, humorist, and friend, in possibly his final music post- Mitch, the third and final part] #2! The National , High Violet Best Track: "Terrible Love" (This is taking into account how spellbinding it is live) Our favorite band of the last five years is at it again. They found their [...]

[Ed Note: From music expert, humorist, and friend, in possibly his final music post- Mitch, the second part of three] #7! Wild Nothing, Gemini Best Track: "Chinatown" "Cause our lips won't last forever, and that's exactly [...]

[Ed Note: From music expert, humorist, and friend, in possibly his final music post- Mitch] Folks, we're back. To make a long story short, the fireside chats got a little out of hand during the Stephen Malkmus installment. A spark landed on his plaid, which was shockingly flammable and, just like that, we had ourselves a bit of situation. Steve stormed out, and once word about his "episode" circulated throughout the indie rock ranks we couldn't get any more guests to stop by our fireside. [...]

Sometimes you have a song with pops that you can't just download again, maybe it was ripped off an obscure CD that isn't in rotation anymore. How do you save a file like that? Previously I'd used Audacity or GoldWave (both great programs, Audacity being free too). But recently I tried Adobe's SoundBooth CS5 and it's pretty excellent for my purposes. It can filter out pops, noise, clicks like the others, but now it also has an intelligent sound-removal tool that can filter and 'heal' in 0.5second increments. The file opened: [...]

Thanksgiving hosting mix for a friend but it is really just a mix of 2010 songs appropriate for playing as background. On the subject of 2010, I'm going to try and survey this year's overwhelming amount of really good new music. I thought it'd also be interesting to ask friends to rate some popular albums of 2010, then see how they match up with composites, pfork, metacritic, stereogum with bell curves. I'll try to work with the data and come up with something interesting. The best thing about this [...]

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If you don't read the rest of this post or anything else, take 3 minutes to listen to this. It is absolutely devastating. The title character Tosca is a singer in Rome during Napoleon's tyrannical occupation. Her lover Mario is imprisoned and tortured for sheltering a leader of the Resistance, and in the last hours before his execution Mario looks out his prison window and remembers when he and Tosca were together. "The stars were shining, and the earth smelled sweet, the garden gate would creak and a footstep would lightly crease the sand....and she fell into my arms...Now, my [...]

Salem - King Night Recently I checked out the much hyped, demon-spawned goth juke-inspired electro-pop of Salem (the band from Michigan, there are at least three bands of that name). They invented their own genre: Witch House. If we're to believe their interviews, frontman John Holland- former prostitute, Chicago art student, and unapologetic drug user (who revels in being provocative, their first record is called 'Yes, I Smoke Crack' and the music video involved a crying woman crying in a car trying to kill herself with carbon monoxide poisoning...while another nude woman dances on the [...]

• Salem - King Night

If you listen to music off your computer, I think you've run into this problem when Tom Waits' solo voice is drowned out by the hum of the computer fan and hard drive (no? you don't listen to Tom Waits on a bi-weekly schedule?). There are a lot of noises that come out of a computer, and I've discussed some them previously, but here are few tricks to improve the signal-noise ratio. (warning: it's about to get really nerdy) The sound output [...]

Jonny Greenwood has written absolutely stunning music to be used as a soundtrack for the upcoming film adaptation of Haruki Murakami's book 'Norwegian Wood.' (I highly recommend this book). It is with a stringed orchestra and small brass section, but Greenwood's composition heavily relies on stringed soloists with orchestral accompaniment. It often dims to a string quartet playing that grows into full orchestra. Music played by stringed instruments is intrinsically a high wire act. Tightly wound coils of silver, tungsten, nickel are stretched over wood. When a string is drawn [...]

Filed by guest writer Mindy Wait… Is this Oh No Oh My? Are these the same Austin twee popster who sang about walking in the park and seamlessly transitioned upbeat electronic beats in "I Love You All the Time"? It is clear that People Problem is a different beast than Oh No Oh My's self-titled release. The songs are more polished and the lyrics a little less accessible. I'm not going to say that Oh No Oh My has matured since their debut release, [...]

Think about what you were doing when you were 19 years old. Imagine that you got a band together, started playing out of Virginia Beach, and making incredibly polished and beautiful music. This is what James Nee and Co, of rising (and recently signed) band We Are Trees, did. The precocious indie rockers will undoubtedly be compared to Grizzly Bear for eerily similar voice and arrangement, but this does not give enough credit to how well We Are Trees plays. The guitar work is surprisingly complicated and I can't get enough of Josiah Schlater's drumkit when he bangs the blunt [...]

The appeal of mafioso rap to me was that it didn't have to be tough and hardcore. It was that these rappers could emote while maintaining a masculine stance, they got real with you because they weren't busy showing off how many cars, stds women, and diamonds they had. Because they had the cover of killing for the fam and being a thug, they could openly cry over the brothers they lost (2Pac), the women they let down and can't get back with (Jay-Z), their own potential being wasted by the choices they've made (Notorious BIG, Nas). [...]

"Every group has a night of nights," Joe Strummer recalled, "...when you have a night of nights, everything is kicking in together...it was mayhem." Something was wrong with bassist Paul Simonon that night on September 21, 1979 at New York's Palladium. Paul Simonon remembers the moment he grabbed the neck of his bass guitar, his legs wide apart, and brought the wood down. "The show had gone well, but for me, inside, it just wasn't working well, so I took it out on the bass. If [...]