I am a bad man. I have not posted in a long time, excusing myself on account of the not-at-all-as-fast-as-blogging pace of my precious baby The Groton Independent . Let's all put this behind us. I know that any number of misspelled primates would love to do so. You remember the Gorillaz , don't you? I'm happy, I'm feeling glad, I've got sunshine, In a bag, I'm useless, But not for long, The future, Is comin' on. Damon Albarn (of Blur ) sure knows how to lay [...]
D-Stroy is from Brooklyn. D-Stroy wears a G-Shock watch. D-Stroy was on Matador records summer 2001. D-stroy is part of the Arsonists. D-stroy is of the genre of "mainstream rap beats are kinda tired" genre. I like D-stroy. That generalization about his take on rap beats is kind of unfounded, as my frame of reference is only his song " Roll Out ". However, it is almost infinitely better than any number of similarly-named rap songs. And the beat is dope.
Trent Reznor, lead singer and only member (?) of Nine Inch Nails, released his latest single as a Garage Band format file so that any old musician can remix it. Of the over five-hundred remixes available here , not all of which I have reviewed, Nathan Chase has the most promising ones. Toxic Trent ", the remix with Britney Spears's "Toxic" is pretty sweet, contrasting Reznor's dark voice with the you-have-to-dance beat from "Toxic". But there is more to the track than just clever juxtaposition that won't last. The track has legit [...]
Hot Hot Heat, previously reviewed here , has a track from theirn new CD Elevator called " Goodnight Goodnight " about embarassing girls. It's sweet.
Rockmedaddyrockmedaddyrockmeda ddy! Yes, The Cuts will throw you into involuntary coital proclamations to the effect that they "do you right" they ought to "keep going just like that." It 's not hard, but it's not soft. It's quite all right. Its smooth...that's the word, and filling like a cornbread muffin with peanut butter on each half. Their site has a number of streams as well as " How Can I Get Through " for download. It's filling like smoked salmon and cream cheese. I don't have a fetish for [...]
Lead singer of pavement Stephen Malkmus (does this mean that they broke up?) has struck out on his own with a few albums, and the work is pretty impressive. The vocals are still "fractured," but the instruments are different. The electric piano is killer, as is the guitar. The style is less all-over-the-place, and the tempos are more unified than Pavement. However, none of this is to say that Pavement fans are going to go hatorade all over the new tracks. I like Pavement; I like Stephen Malkmus. The styles are not altogether [...]
I just found another friendly repository of free hotness. Songzilla is cool in terms of quantity (at least 1500 songs), although it doesn't do reviews. Still, if quanitity is your game, Songzilla is the place to go.
When I reviewed Atmosphere , I said outright that really sincere rappers are my new thing. Dizzee Rascal falls into that category in a different way. He raps about life in London, where the "front gate" and "the road" both refer to the street. The beat on " Fix Up, Look Sharp " is kind of crazy. Crazy Simple. Simply Crazy. Drums, claps, and a "Whoo". Don't get low, just dig. This is a sort of half garage half hip-hop tune. And it's old, but since he didn't blow up [...]
How many guitar tracks are enough? Two? Three? No, if you want to go absolutely bananas and dance dance dance, you need four guitar tracks. And a bass track. And simulated percussion. You need one minute and twenty-four seconds of pure unadulterated guitar dance. You need Jasper Perkins'" James Wilson" . Jasper, my dear older brother, recorded this track with Thomas "Tomo" McDonnell, lead guitar and vocals of Tres Coronas , whose EP (album?) is this blog's namesake. They recorded it one afternoon with Garage Band on Tom's iMac. Jasper [...]
Really sincere rappers are my new thing. Slug, half of the group, Atmosphere is that kind of rapper. He has been pretty underbround for his whole career, and his latest album, last year's Seven's Travels showed a certain frustration at his anonymity. His songs are all pretty gritty, kind of dark. On this album, his lyrics are far more assertive than on his earlier work, he throws the words out of his mouth rather than sings them. " Trying to Find a Balance " is definitely kind of dark, but not so depressing. [...]
Podcast is now available. I had to make a new blog to do it, since the traditional podcast model doe not apply to this blog, as I publish multiple songs instead of just one recording. The link to the podcast is in the sidebar, and the title of this post, and here http://feeds.feedburner.com/Do ItForFree-Podcast . For those who don't know whatup with podcasts, here's quick tutorial. -Download and install iPodder -Click the "subscriptions" tab, then the "add new subscriptions" button -Paste the [...]
The mind boggles at Smoosh. The above picture is not two girls pretending to be Smoosh; it is Smoosh. And they do exactly what the picture indicates, play piano and drums and sing about whatever. Their interview on NPR (in Real and WMP) is really amazing. They just write whatever they feel like, and they have fun doing it, and then they open for bands like Sleater Kinney and Cat Power. While their website is sparse, their label, Pattern 25 , offers " Massive Cure " for download [...]
Ratatat is two guitars and synths. Ratatat is occasional vocal samples. Ratatat has bass lines to make you twurk. Ratatat is great rock and roll music. Two-guitars, drum machine, no vocals, occasional synth that actually sounds really novel: they are the real freaking deal. " Seventeen Years " is kind of like a slowed down dance song, with grungey guitars and a synth bringing the pain. Part of it sounds like the intro to Sonic the Hedgehog for Gamegear, but they aren't hokey or hipsterish about videogames. The whole no lyrics [...]
Hot Hot Heat blew my doors off their hinges a little over a year ago with Make up the Breakdown . Now they are poised like coiled pit vipers to release Elevator and set up camp on your alternative radio station. Their sound is definitely modern, without sounding like poseurs. They don't use any frilly stuff like synths or drum machines or what will have you, rather just straight guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. Except they also have an organ, used to great effect on "Talk to Me Dance With Me" (streaming wmvideo, S [...]
Pitty Sing is, by default my favorite band named for a fictional cat. They don't rock as hard as one might like, and their production values are kind of too much, especially for a less is more type of guy like me. Definitely would like to here some harder guitar. Still, I like any song with the hook: "We'll fuck on the radio...We'll make it go ooh oh oh..." Escapist songs are cool in small doses, and I think that this one will hold me over for the next long while.
I will soon be offering the mp3s that I link to here as a syndicated podcast, just as soon as I can get my head the HTML required of me. Sorry for the delay until then!
Hypothetically, if you were to set out on a tour of the US on which you played the greatest music to ever come out of a GameBoy, NES, or Atari, could you come up with a better title than DATA DESTRUCTION TOUR 2005? No. A friend and I went to the final show on this tour in Brooklyn USA. The venue was a garage that had been labeled a gallery and called vertexList in trendy Williamsburg. vertexList is actually a pretty cool venue in that it provides a certain intimacy between the [...]
Tres Coronas is a band made up of some of my brother's friends from high school. The sound is refreshingly hard, not in a "society has cast me out" way, or a "three cords is my limit" way; rather, they quite simply play hard, with more than just power-chord driven rhythm. The guitar hook at the beginning of "Style on Trial" is incredibly catchy, in a way that will get your foot tapping when you think about it, and your head banging when you hear it; the drums in "Mess" keep the quiet parts interesting. [...]
Do it for Free!
Avicii – Two Million
Beck – I Just Started Hating Some People Today
H&M Lookbook Mujer y Hombre Otoño 2012.
