August 2009
21 posts
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Did you ever join a fan club for anybody or thing, perhaps a musician? The first fan club I ever joined was for the Who, when I was 13 years old. This is very pre-Internet; I got a little fanzine in the mail a few times a year. Thanks to a cute little section at the back, I became penpals with a few older fans who very kindly made me cassette and VHS tapes of unreleased/ otherwise unavailable...
July 2009
29 posts
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I live in the Pacific Northwest which is enduring a heatwave; it’s supposed to hit 105 today. Almost everyone I encountered was in an awful mood yesterday; they all acted as if they’d just dropped their fresh ice cream cone onto the pavement. And I felt very similarly, though I tried not to.
My room is in the basement of the house I rent, so I lent my air conditioner yesterday to a...
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We always drop new music into the game on Tuesday.This week’s batch is extra banging, because it’s so hot outside you might as well just stay in and dance about next to your computer.
“Beat Bang” by Machines Don’t Care lives up to its name: it’s unrelenting and fun and squelchy and cool.
The Rakes’ “Retreat (Phones Remix)” sounds kind of like...
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Glossalalic or obscure/indecipherable lyrics shouted, chanted and sung atop music that implies volume – this is hopefully what rock and roll music sounded like the first time you heard it. Not to get all nostalgic-rock-crit on your ass, but I remember being transfixed as a nine-year old by the then Top 40 (‘77) song “Black Betty” by Ram Jam (a song with a curious history, as...
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So, my roomate and I are cat-sitting the most wonderful cat ever. She’s a girl with a boy’s name (Smokey Joe), is huge and adorable, comes when she is called, and knows how to tap people on the shoulder. She has better social skills than most of my friends. But more importantly, she’s made me think a lot about my own existence/sense of accomplishment.
As someone who has suffered...
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THE NEW AGE MOVEMENT STILL THREATENS US ALL
Are you ready to see the most amazing thing you’ll see… all day? Check out this here clip and bear in mind that this is taken from an actual video produced by an actual band, who sold a bunch of records at one point, who made a comfortable living for years.
It’s not from a Mr. Show episode, despite the ultra ridiculous mullets and the...
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Three songs drop in the game today:
1. The Dirtbombs’ “Get It While You Can,” a soulful, propulsive and awesome track. It’s weird to me that Dirtbombs frontdude Mick Collins isn’t better known. He’s clearly a recombinant-minded, genre-fucking genius. Check his “career highlights,” and instantly feel like you’ve never done anything with your...
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Threw the iTunes on shuffle as I tried to clean up my messy bachelor pad today and what should turn up amongst the 53480 songs but Montreal’s We Are Wolves, who I sort of had forgotten about! The twenty-oughts will def. be known for its plethora of “wolf” bands, but We Are Wolves should be tops of that heap based just on their Fat Possum debut Non-Stop Je Te Plie en Deux, which probably means...
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Pick of the Week: The Gossip
Sure, I’m a little OCD about the way I do certain things. One of those things being the way I fill a record bag. For each party, I have to have at least five new songs that I’ve never played in a set before. This is actually a lot harder than you might think. But thank you Gossip for making it almost simple for this last round of preparation.
Their newest...
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New Loudness Tuesdays
OK, so it’s Tuesday again which means we have new music for you. Free, awesome, new, music: four great things all inside of one thing! That’s like a turducken wrapped in bacon, except you’re less likely to have a heart attack.
Plucky Canadians The Voices’ song “Street Commander (Stretch Armstrong Remix),” shows that it’s possible to mix deadpan, Joy...
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YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS! WELL, NOT REALLY.
Watch out Brokencyde! We’ve found an electro-screamo band that makes you look like you’re not so bad after all — a new favorite act to “WTF?!” over.
The emo-ver hair band Confide’s cover of “Such Great Heights” is wrong in every way. Plus, Iron & Wine already did a perfect cover of the song, back when it...
Lee “Scratch” Perry - Jungle Lion
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PICK OF THE WEEK: JUNGLE LION plus our new FRANZ FERDINAND WIDGET!
Back in ye olde 2004, there was Volume, to date one of the best New York City clubs of the 00s. This was when Williamsburg was still sort of cutting edge; Volume was a vacant warehouse transformed into the sweatiest pretense-free dancing paradise, featuring amazing DJ parties like a pre-trendy acid house jam with a pre-Runaway...
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I don’t know about you but I feel pretty empty and burnt-out. I’m glad that Michael Jackson has finally been buried, that the messy and super-hokey and surprisingly moving tribute service at the Staples Center in L.A. went off without any Soy Bombs (or worse). But the bit at the end of the service, where his daughter spoke? Holy frijole. I cried like a baby at her few, succinct words;...
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New Loudness Tuesdays!
Fritz Helder and the Phantoms give us some seriously fun and smart retro dance-pop. For this we are highly grateful.
The Units, a punk-era act from the Bay Area, had an interesting battle cry, especially for the time: Fuck the guitars! Along with Nervous Gender and the Screamers, they were one of the first synthpunk acts. Thanks to the brand-new release History of the...
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Hope your Fourth of July weekend was a blast; that you can still walk straight, are not missing any digits, and still have the same number of eyes you entered the weekend with. For some reason at one party I visited, the subject veered towards “best-show-everrrrrr” territory. I figured it might have been the first time I saw Black Flag, in 1982? I couldn’t hear for a week...
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Je suis un Rock Star
REWIND: JE SUIS UN ROCK STAR
Every Friday, we hit rewind to visit one of our older playlists. The following is one of our favorites from the Loudcrowd vaults.
Common wisdom about French music for the entirety of “the rock era” was that it was, at best, schmaltz. If there maybe were a few solid French punk acts — notably Metal Urbain, the first band released by legendary...
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Happy Independence Day! July 4th, woo! I love the fireworks and do not eat burgers that often. But they always taste the best on July 4th, don’t they?
I have always had friends who can’t get into a holiday like this as it goes against their ambivalent-at-best feelings vis a vis American imperialism, etc. I myself prefer to not dwell on personal experience (including how messed up my...
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YACHT Is Not A Cult.
VIEW OUR EXCLUSIVE, DIY VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH YACHT RECORDED JUST A FEW WEEKS AGO IN A COOL CAFE IN PORTLAND HERE: ONE, TWO + THREE!
“Jona Bechtolt is no more a normal human being than a toaster is a Ferrari.” — austinist.com
Jona and Claire from YACHT both seem to have the Midas touch; just for instance, last year on a whim they came up with the idea for the perfect slipcase...