October 2009
19 posts
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Hey, A Place to Bury Strangers! You owe me money!
I blew out the speakers in my car last week. Although I’ve never had any top of the line equipment, at least it got the job done. Now every time I want to listen to music in my car I get to hear what at best sounds like radio static and at worst the sound of someone eating saltines into a microphone. I can no longer rely on some soothing...
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Now that the weather has begun to really cool down it looks like we’re at everyone’s favorite time of the year: the time when every single person in the entire world is sick. Despite my best efforts to eat my fruits and veggies, wash my hands regularly and not to touch anything in a public restroom, my finely tuned machine succumbed this past week. As I laid in bed coughing my guts up,...
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Pick of the Week: Tranz-Kunt-Inental
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Last week, Passion Pit came to Los Angeles, selling out the Henry Fonda Theatre. While I’m sure I don’t need to extol the virtues of Passion Pit to any of you readers, I would be committing a crime if I didn’t pass along the newest band that sent shivers down my spine.
That band would be Tranz-Kunt-Inental. They are made up of...
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All Blissed Out
I’ve been revisiting this record from eleven years ago called Wave Field by Portugese musician Rafael Toral. It’s very warm ambient drone music really informed by the rock and roll music. It sounds good either as background chirpy-chirp stuff or as fully immersive loud heaviness.
Resounding frequencies overlap and gyrate, wiggling their way inside your body. The...
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I Hate Ryan Gosling
Ryan Gosling is a jerk. Seriously. First, he was born beautiful. Then he goes and stars in The Notebook making every woman on earth fall in love with him. Naturally, he becomes a darling of the critics after starring in Half Nelson. And as if that weren’t bad enough, he set his sights on world domination with the release of the self-titled debut LP from his band Dead...
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The Devil Makes Americana Exciting!
The Devil Makes Three came to Amoeba Records earlier this week to perform a free live set and I was left in awe. The band came out a little after seven, then played a set of blistering blues and bluegrass tunes about drinking, demons, and wild women. The band is covered in tattoos and they infuse their brand of Americana with the energy of a punk gig. The...
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New Loudness Tuesday!!!
So, it’s the second day of the work week which means that we have just added three new tunes to the playlist. This week we have killer new tracks from three great indie rock-type acts:
Portland, OR-based thinking person’s dance-pop act The Blow, who were aided and abetted once upon a time by Jona from YACHT; The Lights, a group from Seattle who have now...
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Songs for Shlocktober
October is finally here! And that means scary movies, mischief nights and listening to the same three pop songs on repeat. I don’t know how it happened, but in the last 25 years there hasn’t been a new song added to the fearsome party trio that is “Time Warp,” “Ghostbusters,” and “Thriller.” Nick Cave couldn’t do it,...
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An Interview With HOCKEY
Hockey, a band whose name was the result of a joke, recently released their debut LP, Mind Chaos, through Capitol Records. Based in Portland, OR, their sound has been compared more often to New York and London based new wave bands than their northwestern counterparts. Mind Chaos is an album with slinky guitars, ’80s synths, and huge dance beats, but attempts to have...
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Sherburne’s Kitchen Sink Mixer
Holy moley, Philip Sherburne’s mix for the Krakow-based Unsound Festival — which starts next week — is phenomenal. You might think it’d be easy to throw a jillion different genres together to create something that’s interesting, but it’s hard as hell, really. Believe me, I’ve tried and failed more than I’d care...
If you never checked our ‘Happy Snacks’ playlist featuring A-Trak, check it out in the game today. If you have already checked it out, you can of course still check it out. I guess what I’m saying is that… you should check it out! But maybe you aren’t so into fun, or grooviness, or sexiness? In which case you should come back tomorrow for our Mormon Tabernacle Choir...
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Pick of the Week: 1, 2, 3, Partyy! by Mission of Burma Finally, I’ve found my personal party jam of 2009. And it’s even one that I can be proud of. Before Mission of Burma released “1, 2, 3, Partyy!”, it was looking like Miley’s “Party in the USA” was going to be it. And it’s hard to maintain my street cred when I use a Miley song to get jazzed...
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New Loudness Time
It’s a fine Tuesday in October — the first one of the month — which means that we’ve got some really rad new songs hitting the site today. These three songs will help shake the leaves off of the trees and get this season started. They will rattle your skull. They will help you attain enlightenment. Also, they will cure that persistent acne problem of...
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Pick of the Week: The Drums, Summertime! EP When I first heard of The Drums as “Robert Smith meets surf,” I thought to myself, could it be? Is there a band out there writing the music that exists only in my dreams? Is there finally a band making the music that I always wanted to make, but couldn’t because of my lack of quality songwriting skills? Then I got worried. I thought,...
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The First Days of Spring
Have we got a great batch of indie-dance tunes for you on this new playlist, you might be asking? Well, the answer to that is heck yeah. If you can close your eyes and remember all the way back the first days of spring, what it felt like to finally be relieved of winter’s heavy grip, then you’ll have an idea of what we were going for here with this one.
I...
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TOP 5 TV THEME SONGS There is a great new show that recently debuted on HBO called Bored to Death. It is from the amazing author Jonathan Ames and stars Zach Galifanakis, Ted Danson, and Jason Schwartzmann who formerly drummed for Phantom Planet and is currently fronting the band Coconut Records.
When it came time to write a theme song Ames and Schwartzmann teamed up to pen a fantastic one....