Blog: Time to play b-sides

As reported in Pitchfork and Largehearted Boy , Minneapolis band Tapes 'N Tapes have a record deal with XL Recordings. The Loon will be re-released on XL in July. There will be a sizeable tour kicked off in June. The seem to have lost their bass player in the process, but this isn't the first lineup change for this band. They are an example of the incredible PR power of music blogs. In a Pioneer Press article , their band manager Keri Wiese is quoted saying, "It started pretty much right after the first [...]

Rob Galgano reports in The Great Leap Forward that Neil Young's new album Living With War is in the can and may come out this summer. Howie Kline , current label head for Reprise talks about having heard it . It will be interesting to hear this album as it sounds like Neil getting back to business. This is an anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war album being described as "Metal Folk," I guess. Rob comments in his post that Neil's work has been "spotty as of late." I think that is a [...]

As noted earlier CBS cancelled the show Love Monkey after only three episodes. VH1 has picked up the show [note: this link seems to work best with IE]- at least the eight episodes that were taped. No additional episodes have been ordered. Evidently, there was discussion of moving this show to UPN that yielded no results. The first of the un-aired episodes will show Tuesday night. So, for the next five weeks at least, I've got a new show to watch! This Tuesday night's show is the one with Aimee Mann .

As stated earlier, I had been in Boston twice in three weeks. Unlike previous trips to Boston, I got some shopping in. I hit record stores and book stores. Trip #1: I managed to hit Newbury Comics while the group was waiting for our table at the fantastic Capital Grille , which was just down the street. Newbury is one of the great record stores and I would recommend hitting it if possible. Plus it is down the street from one of the best ice [...]

Per Largehearted boy and The Great Leap Forward , a new Wiki has been started to track music blogs. I made an entry for Time To Play B-Sides. Ultimately, blogs and wikis will play together to make for better organization of the internet and aid searches.

I'm sure the blogs will pick this up pretty quickly, but I had to post this when I saw it. This should be the example to show when people doubt that turntablism is an art. Here is a blog entry about it. Here is the YouTube version. The best part about it is the facial expression on the guy standing next to him. He must have been the guy he was battling!

I was in Boston last week for LinuxWorld . This is the second time this year that I have been in Boston for work- and I will be in Boston again in June for Microsoft TechEd. Seems the tech conferences are all moving there this year. I really like Boston. From a music perspective there is quite a bit to do there. While I was there I saw Blackalicious with Pigeon John and the Lifesavas at the Paradise Rock Club . They also had Pharcyde MC Fat Lip and Leftcoast [...]

The word "gospel" comes from the old English "Good News." The word is typically reserved for the four books of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) or to describe the call-and-response style of singing employed by a Gospel Choir like the Voices of Praise that Howe works with on his new album on Thrill Jockey 'Sno Angel Like You . As reported elsewhere on Time to Play B-Sides , Howe Gelb is the frontman for a number of projects and bands and is related to the exciting music scene coming out of Tucson. Gelb [...]

Greetings! It's been a bit since I've done a post. Since the last post I've been in Boston and Minneapolis for work and personal. I've got a couple of posts I'm working on for both trips, plus I have a couple of reviews I'm working on. I hope to have most of this up this weekend. In the meantime media mogul Rob Galgano is posting the phenominal Raise album by shoegazer alums Swervedriver. Rob posts great out-of-print stuff one track at a time under his "Hard To [...]

The tendency for reviews is generally to compare whatever artist is being reviewed to other artists- especially established ones- to help describe to the reader what a particular band is like. This helps guide the reader to a particular sound or aspect of a sound. Unfortunately, it also has the effect of possibly pidgeonholing the band. And, so it is with Minneapolis band Tapes 'n Tapes . I started listening to this album last week. Frankly, I can't stop listening to it for long. I've been swimming though a lot of albums from bands lately, and I'm [...]

I was in Philadephia this week on business and heard on the news that Philly Mayor John Street declared March 18th "Daryl Hall and John Oates Day." The duo will be celebrating the honor with a show at the Tower Theater tonight. They were quoted on WXPN as saying the only thing that would have topped this honor would be a lifetime supply of Philly Cheesesteaks. In this article in the Philly Inquirer , we find out that Hall and Oates liken themselves to an R&B Grateful Dead due to their diehard fans attendance to their shows [...]

From Slashdot: The settlement process has begun from the class action suit brought on to Sony by the EFF. If you purchased any of the CD's from Sony that have the flawed digital rights management , you have until the end of 2006 to file a claim. Depending on which of the two rootkit DRM's you have in your posession, you could be due a replacement of your CD sans DRM software, a digital download of your CD in question, AND you could receive a cash payment of $7.50 and 1 free download from [...]

Rob at The Great Leap Forward has an entry from Pitchfork on a couple of Ryan Adam's fans who leaked Jacksonville City Nights tracks before the album came out. Unfortunately, they face some hard time for this under the new Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. Watch where you put your mp3's, kids! Posting mp3's on websites is really stupid, especially if they aren't released, yet!

I was listening to NPR during the drive in this morning and they had a piece on "Pi Day." I guess this is a recognized day to celebrate Pi- at least in this country (3/14). I'd assume that in places that don't adopt our date format they would celebrate on July 22nd (22/7). In the piece they commented on the fact that on Kate Bush's new album Aerial , she has a song called "Pi" where she sings the digits of pi and it is wrong. Here [...]

It just shows you how much I pay attention to big retail music chains. Musicland files chapter 11 , and also closes a bunch of Sam Goodies and Suncoasts . Included in that is the Sam Goody in Lindale Mall in Cedar Rapids. Over lunch on Friday I was at Lindale and happened upon a store closing sale. Everything in the store was 40% off! I left with some things that I hadn't gotten around to buying. I picked up the new Big Star In Space , the turntablism documentary "Scratch," DJ Shadow's "In Tune and On [...]

In 2001 when I was helping DJ Shadow bring his website on line he asked me to write a bio to include on the site. I was pretty excited for the opportunity and a bit nervous. Although I had been writing for my endtroducing.com website rather prolifically, I hadn't tried to write a concise piece- FAQs and "posts" only. So, I spent about a week on it. Josh had a couple of revisions he wanted. In my original version, I implied that the label was at fault for the failure of Psyence Fiction from becoming a [...]

I went to a hockey game on Tuesday night with some people from work. We saw the Cedar Rapids Roughriders vs. the Indiana Ice . We had center ice seats against the glass. This was my third time to a hockey game- the second time to a Roughriders game. This was much more fun having a close up view to the game. It adds a lot to the game fearing that you'll spill your beer at any moment! It was cool, the Roughriders were victorious. The music that was being played over the action was lots of [...]

While I was cruising around The Paste website I noticed in their News scroller at the top that CBS's Love Monkey was put 'on hiatus" after three episodes! This is old news, I guess. I'm pretty bummed about it as I enjoyed the show. But, evidently over 1 million viewers didn't enjoy it enough to watch it the next week. Adding insult to injury a rerun of "Law and Order: SVU" drew more viewers! Aimee Mann was supposed to be on an upcoming episode. I wonder how many episodes they taped? Maybe [...]

Yesterday was Sherry's and my Six-Year Anniversary, so I planned a dinner at Joseph's Steakhouse in Iowa City after some shopping. I was looking at some other things on-line and happened to notice that The Diplomats of Solid Sound were playing at Martini's, which is in the Ped Mall as well. I also noticed that there was a 73 that I was missing from my collection: "Grease Monkey" b/w "Loaf and Jug." It is a Spanish import on a label called VampiSoul. So I shot Doug from DOSS a quick e-mail asking if I'd be able to get [...]

I don't know if you've ever noticed the numbers on the wall at Best Buy. They are black on yellow and typically are located by checkout. These numbers are statistics tracking things like theft or inventory discrepancies, Sports Illustrated subscriptions, and credit card applications. This is a really good article on it. There is a link in the article that ties to a website where workers from Best Buy talk about theft issues. Even though the employees are not paid bonuses on sales as they will repeatedly tell you, they are paid bonuses on other metrics.