Blog: OnlineRock

OnlineRock's new CD Promotion Package ensures your album gets the critical attention it deserves. Along with your CD, our experienced music industry and PR team will develop compelling press material for your band and put it in the hands of leading online music reviewers, so that your music reaches the widest possible audience.

We're pleased to announce our new CD Promotional Package. This package is perfect for musicians or bands that have a new or upcoming release and want to get the word out about it. Labels can also benefit from this new service. Along with your CD, our experienced music industry and PR team will develop compelling press material for your band and put it in the hands of leading online music reviewers, so that your music reaches the widest possible audience.

With fewer sonic experiments than the 2005 masterpiece, I Am A Bird Now, Antony's latest disc plays almost as a homogenous experience, so the imagery and emotion maintain a consistent forward movement yielding fewer singular epiphanies in favor of a unified whole.

• Antony & The Johnsons - Another World

"In the beginning Tigers Can Bite You was totally about just having fun with some friends and getting these new songs out of my head," singer/guitarist Dave Woody says of the band he formed after fronting Modesto's Fiver for ten years. Fleshing out the lineup with drummer Andrew Platts and keyboardist Cindy Morrow, the band earned an opening slot for the Silversun Pickups at the Troubadour. Since that blockbuster show, the band has become a staple of LA's Silverlake scene, playing with the likes of Division Day, Sea Wolf, and the Airborne Toxic Event.

• Tigers Can Bite You - Hawks

At age 21, Ike Willis was hired by late great American composer, rock guitarist and social commentator Frank Zappa as "frontman' - lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist for what were to become some of the greatest musical ensembles to perform in modern music history. Ike "Mr. Big Voice" Willis is best known for his fluid, soulful and hysterical vocal ability. Willis quickly became a popular addition of Zappa's band during the 80's bringing voice to Thing-Fish, and is most widely known as the voice of Joe from the critically acclaimed Joe's Garage

"Love Is Dead," proclaims the debut release by Lowry. What, however, is meant by this? Was love a once-alive thing that is now dead? Do they mean dead, like rotting-away dead, or dead like a dead battery or merely out of fashion dead? Or was love never alive to begin with—is it an idea that is always-already dead on arrival? This is a dangerous idea to play with: not only have many others expressed the exact same sentiment (Tokio Hotel has a song with the same title, as does former Suede frontman Brett Anderson, and both Kerli Kõiv and The [...]

This year marks the 10th anniversary of OnlineRock. Although we were live with a few bands in 1998, we officially launched in May 1999. A lot has happened in those 10 years and musicians as well as businesses have had to adapt and make changes. With the economy the way it is, we still have to keep looking for new ways to keep going. Hopefully OnlineRock can stick around for at least 10 more years. We plan on having celebrations throughout the year including contests, giveaways and other surprises. If you have thoughts on how you'd like to see us [...]

Each March we feature artists that will be attending the conference. If you know any, please send them our way. Just enter "SXSW" in the comment portion of any submission forms for Artist Profile, Free Download and/or CD Reviews and we'll make sure they get a spot.

Tightened and energized by seven plus years of music-making, San Francisco-based, five-piece outfit Loquat arrives at its second full length with some major confidence. Secrets of the Sea is an assured and thoroughly listenable slab of amorphous rock. The 11 tracks expand and jigsaw into a unified whole, sounding like a roadtrip radio set on low frequencies and continually fuzzing in and out of short range, uber-cool college radio stations, the kind that unearths those jubilant b-sides full of endearing lyrical dispatches and fluid, genre-bent pop songs.

The Asteroid No. 4 has a knack for burying beatific pop melodies beneath the rattle and (reverb-soaked) swirl of revisionist psychedelic noise, crafting some good tunes and drowning them within even better noise.

As we do every year, we try to take a look forward and ask what you have planned for your music. How will the recession and economic turmoil impact your plans? Will the new Obama administration be good for the music industry? Will CDs finally be put to rest?

First things first: You have to decide who's going to be the producer, even before deciding on the engineer. None of the later decisions about tracking instruments, recording vocals, doing overdubs, processing signals, or getting a final mix will mean Bo Diddley, to coin a phrase, if your band's three or five or eight members are arguing all the time about who sounds the loudest and what so-and-so's girlfriend is doing in the vocal booth. Someone has to run the show.

My Morning Jacket hail from the city of Louisville, Kentucky, an odd metro-suburban mix of stark industry and fine thoroughbreds and rock and roll fevers. "It's a place with no labels," James says. "It's not the South, it's not Chicago, and you don't think of it as you think of New York or LA. It has some Southern romanticism to it, but also a Northern progressivism, this weird urban island in the middle of the state of Kentucky that has always provided a fertile, often dark, bed.

In 2007, Nikki Sixx presented the world with a double-barreled shot of autobiographical excellence. In September of that year The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star hit the bookshelves, debuting at number 7 on the New York Times Bestseller list; a month earlier, the accompanying soundtrack to that book by Sixx A.M. (Sixx, plus vocalist James Michael and guitarist D.J. Ashba) debuted at #7 on the Billboard Indie chart, ultimately going on to sell over 200,000 copies.

Recording a live show presents a unique set of challenges: The main drawbacks are that the sound is less controllable, it is next to impossible to fix any band errors or sound-equipment glitches, and if one of your selling points is your live show, you will also need a video of a live gig, so you will have two such recordings. The upside to recording a live show? It has an excitement level hard to achieve in the studio, it is faster and cheaper to make, and if done right it can cover all the bases, selling your songs and [...]

This month we thought we'd try something diffrent by providing a video interview. Watch a recent interview with Alex Maas, vocalist of The Black Angels, before their show at the El Rey in Los Angeles with Roky Erickson. Video provided by MishMashMagazine.

I've never been a big Coldplay fan but this is too much.

Dar Williams fashions small opuses out of the usual coffee shop songwriter act, elevating tidy melodies and pleasant acoustic guitars into powerful melancholic pop. Williams is adept at bending adult contemporary sounds and melancholic narratives into her enjoyably poetic (at times abstractly so) songwriting.

• Dar Williams - It's Alright

Last week The Raveonettes, who are heading back out on the road in January, released an amazing Christmas EP. Now you can download the song Come On Santa For Free. Please feel free to share it with all of your friends and listen to it while dancing around the Christmas tree.

• The Raveonettes - Come On Santa - Tagged

How to describe Blue Rabbit? The band's MySpace page cites influences as disparate as The Beatles, ELO, Simon and Garfunkel, Bjork, Radiohead and Rufus Wainwright. Reviewers have called them a mashup of Nick Cave and The Supremes, The Andrews Sisters and Portishead, Bjork and Arcade Fire.

• Missing Piece » Missing_Piece.mp3