Blog: Another Form of Relief

Well I did warn you that thursday would be the awkward one, although it's turned out even worse than I could have anticipated. I managed to come up with one whole song that relates to the day. This is really the bottom of the curve though, and there's a bunch of awesome songs for the upcoming three days. The Features - Thursday I'm not a big fan of The Features. I have their album, but it doesn't really grab me at all. It's too kind [...]

And so the bottom of the barrel scraping begins. Apologies for this one, but it's kind of necessary to get a set of the complete week. It struck me earlier on that I should have just combined tuesday, wednesday and thursday into the one post, but it's a little late for that one really. This one will be brief as I'm pretty much exhausted (four hours sleep + going out + working = inability to stand up) and have to be up early to head into the office for once. MP3 Lisa [...]

So it appears as if I may have written myself into something as a corner by doing a whole week of these. Following an in-depth investigation carried out today, wednesday and thursday are looking pretty shit. On the upside though, I guarantee you that the weekend set of posts will be full of awesomeness. And so we reach tuesday, probably the day of the week with the least things to distinguish it from any other. Depressingly, the only unique tuesday thing I can think of is that it's the day of a pub quiz that [...]

Arab Strap is a band that I've always had an irrational hatred for. This is nothing to do with their music, which if I'm perfectly honest about, I don't think I've ever heard. Much like Belle & Sebastian though, something made me decide that I didn't like them and that feeling has lingered. I'm trying to rectify this now though, and will be listening to some Arab Strap as soon as one of their albums arrives. The reason for this change of heart is the guy pictured above, Malcolm Middleton . Malcolm [...]

We're all about the lame gimmick post heres at Another Form of Relief. Or, if I'm entirely honest, we're all about the lazy posts that write themselves. This kind of random post breaks up the constant pimping of new artists a little though, so they work well enough for me. As you can see, we have a bunch of songs that aren't connected in any way other than them all having monday in the title. I'm half kicking around the idea of doing one of these for each day of this week, but it could [...]

And yet another hat tip to You Ain't No Picasso (aka the bestest music blog ever) for putting me onto an awesome little band called Pants Yell! Granted, their name is slightly strange, yet after listening to their songs it becomes oddly fitting. Not that there is anything in the way of yelling here (no idea about the pants), this is gentle twee rock, the kind that recalls 'Oh, Inverted World' era Shins. There's a dorky charm to it all. In fact, you might be noticing this is the [...]

I'm aware going into this that there isn't a way I can post this without losing at least some credibility with some of the people who read this thing, and I'm comfortable with that. The man you see to your left is Lars Horris. He's a rapper. No, seriously, he is. He raps under the slightly more rap name of MC Lars . My initial reaction was that he must be a joke, but I'm doubting that more and more now. Lars describes himself a "post-punk laptop rapper". It's a [...]

I've been dealing with server and domain related issues for a large part of this evening, so tonights scheduled post on Holiday With Maggie has been postponed for a day or two in favour of something wholly simpler. It's time for another batch of covers. I know it was only a mere nine days ago that I put up a batch, but I've got so many of the damn things, and a ton of them are awesome. Regular service will resume again tomorrow, but for now, enjoy this not in the least bit thrown together [...]

It seems kind of silly to come to such conclusions, but Belle & Sebastian just might be my favourite band ever. A cursory glance at my Lastfm page proves I have played them more than anyone else, and nearly twice as much as my beloved Rilo Kiley, who come in a distant second. Yet despite all of this I was incredibly late to the Belle & Sebastian party. I first heard them a long time ago, when, if I'm not mistaken, they picked up a Brit award. Yes, this was long [...]

Swearing At Motorists are Dave Doughman and Joseph Siwinski. They are from Daytona. Swearing At Motorists, despite line-up changes, have existed for more than ten years. This took me by surprise given they only came to my attention a year or two ago with me stupidly thinking they were some great new band. Two of their previous albums, 'Number Seven Uptown' and 'This Flag Signals Goodbye' quickly became favourites of mine. Their upbeat misery and to the point songs worked perfectly for me, even if they didn't break any new ground. It's simple [...]

I can't quite remember where I first discovered Jenny Owen Youngs (I'm thinking Skatterbrain , but I'm not sure). It's one of those cases where I downloaded 'Fuck Was I', played it once and then didn't give it any more thought. A little while back though, Itunes threw it up for me and it grabbed me. I got past the issue of dismissing it entirely based on it's name, previously assuming it was of little value, relying on shock value more than anything else. Second time around though, the whole thing just [...]

Betty By Alone are from Brazil. Their influences include REM, Teenage Fanclub and Guided By Voices. Beyond that though, I couldn't tell you a single thing about them. Although they sing all of their songs in English, their website is entirely in Portugese, meaning it's all gibberish to me. From what I can see though, they appear to have a blog, a detailed history of the band and details about their albums, so if you can read Portugese (less than 1% of you based on my stats), you can find out a ton more [...]

There is just about one thing that I find more interesting than music in this world: politics. Now I realise a ton of you have just written me off as being entire insane, but I can live with that. Nor do I particularly hide my politics, being a card carrying (literally) liberal of the (hopefully) non-loony variety. As such, it seemed fitting that the first mix I'd put together on here would be a combining of my politics into what I usually do here. So in celebration of another glorious raping of our civil [...]

Sparrow House is the solo project of Jared Van Fleet, a member of the mighty Voxtrot . If you're expecting a sound anything even remotely like that from Sparrow House though, prepare to be surprised. The sound of Sparrow House can only be described as folk, and will inevitably draw comparisons with Iron & Wine. The songs began as part of Van Fleet's thesis at the University of Texas, and although this project was abandoned, some of the songs have now been salvaged and form the basis for debut EP. MP3 [...]

I'm pretty tired tonight (it's amazing just how exhausted I get from bowling and then working, but no matter) so this'll be a brief one. We're also going for a non-standard type post, and I'm just going to post a bunch of covers that I've been enjoying a lot lately. I'll admit now that I'm a massive fan of covers. As such, this'll probably become a regular feature. By regular I mean when I can be botherd, not having a set day for them or whatever. I'll leave that to Chad at Everybody Cares, [...]

Like many people, I owe my discovery of The Light Footwork to Matt over at You Ain't No Picasso , who has seemingly been on a one man crusade to get them the recognition they deserve. Which seems to be paying off given I'm seeing them all over various music blogs now, which can only be a good thing. This does lead to an inevitable question about why I'd still write about them here, but I'm not attempting to constantly "break" new bands here, I'm happy just writing about the ones I'm enjoying right now. [...]

The words used when I first heard about Odeon Beat Club were "Scotland's best kept secret". Evidently not the best kept given that I managed to find out about them all the way "down south", but I'm certainly not going to complain about that one. They seem to be getting themselves established rather well, playing a record 25 gigs in one year, and also supporting other major acts like Snow Patrol and Babyshambles. But only in Scotland. From what I can tell they don't seem to like coming any further south than that, [...]

Seeing as we're not just here to hype artists in themselves, I thought I'd try something a little different today. We have a collection of song 'reimaginings' (if it's good enough for Planet Of The Apes..) for your enjoyment. These aren't covers in the strictest sense. While I suppose they technically are, I wouldn't tend to count an artist covering their own material as a cover. Instead, these are songs where artists have taken an original song of theirs and changed it completely, whether in a lyrical sense or a musical one. First up [...]

One of the quirks in my musical taste is that I love the "60s sound" but really don't like very much music from the period itself. I can't really explain this at all beyond finding most music from that era pretty dull and irrelevant. I have much the same issue with "classic" films too, but I digress. Save a handful of Beach Boys, Bob Dylan and the such, the whole period leaves me pretty cold. Yet give me a contemporary band that produces a 60s type sound and I love it. I have no idea [...]

I have no idea where I first found Human Television . I first got hold of an mp3 of one of their songs a couple of years ago. I don't know where this would have come from given this was a time when I thought I had obscure taste in music by listening to Pinkerton repeatedly. I pretty much ignored this poor little mp3 until sometime last year when I finally grabbed me enough to seek out their debut EP, 'All Songs Written By', which quickly became one of my favourite purchases of the year. [...]