August 2012 – Music For Kids Who Can't Read Good

MP3: A.C. Newman – I'm Not Talking

It’s not uncommon for a band frontman to do solo work on the side, but few have been as rewarding as New Pornographers singer/songwriter A.C. Newman. His solo albums have included some of his very best tracks like “The Heartbreak Rides” and “Miracle Drug and his new album Shut Down The Streets looks to be following in the same mold. “I’m Not Talking” is the first single and it’s an excellent marriage of lush, serene instrumentation, hopeful lyrics and winsome harmonies. Just what you’d expect from one of the best songwriters working today.

MP3 A.C. Newman – I’m Not Talking

Pre-order Shut Down The Streets at Matador Records.

Listen: Princess Music – "White Wave"

Despite what their name may imply, Princess Music are not a cover band specializing in Disney musicals and the Legend of Zelda soundtrack, but instead a budding new folk band from Denver, CO. The six-piece collective has a unique style that owes debt to baroque and classical music as well as modern folk virtuosos such as Sufjan Stevens and Dave Longstreth of the Dirty Projectors. The band’s debut track “White Wave” has been on the internet for just one week and already has earned rave reviews from bloggers like I Guess I’m Floating and The Needle Drop.

The track immediately transports you to a simpler time with a pretty piano melody and fingerpicked acoustic guitar, with lush, evocative strings and Tyler Ludwick’s soothing vocals following to give the piece a grand, sweeping feel. The arrangement is so organic that time seems to float right by as the verses and chorus flow naturally into each other. It makes for just about as promising a debut track I’ve heard this yea and I’m looking forward to seeing where Princess Music go from here.

20 Albums Snubbed By The People's List

Like many of you, I’ve been spending a lot of time today digging into Pitchfork’s People’s List and, while I think the 27,000+ voters got lots of stuff right, there was also plenty of albums I thought were criminally overlooked. So I turned those harbored resentments into a list (because that’s just what bloggers do, right?).

So, these are my picks of the albums from 1996-2011 that were robbed of their deserved People’s List glory by the 88% male, urbanites that voted in this thing. I limited myself to one album per artist (otherwise you’d be getting a lot more Mountain Goats albums on here). So without further ado, here’s the 20 Albums Snubbed By The People’s List. Enjoy!

20 Albums Snubbed By The People’s List

20. Beluah – When Your Heartstrings Break
MP3 Score From Augusta

19. The Decemberists – Castaways & Cutouts
MP3 July! July!

18. Bright Eyes – Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground
MP3 Bowl of Oranges

17. Mates of State – Bring It Back
MP3 Beautiful Dreamer

16. Destroyer – Destroyer’s Rubies
MP3 European Oils

15. Andrew Bird – Armchair Apocrypha
MP3 Heretics

14. Rilo Kiley – The Execution of All Things
MP3 With Arms Outstretched

13. Okkervil River – Black Sheep Boy
MP3 For Real

12. Jens Lekman – Oh, You’re So Silent Jens
MP3 Black Cab

11. Cloud Cult – The Meaning of 8
MP3 Take Your Medicine

10. Phoenix – It’s Never Been Like That
MP3 Consolation Prizes

9. Sunset Rubdown – Shut Up I Am Dreaming
MP3 Us Ones In Between

8. Belle & Sebastian – Push Barman To Open Old Wounds
MP3 I’m Waking Up To Us

7. Stars – Set Yourself On Fire
MP3 Ageless Beauty

6. Sunny Day Real Estate – How It Feels To Be Something on
MP3 How It Feels To Be Something On

5. Iron & Wine – The Shepherd’s Dog
MP3 Resurrection Fern

4. of Montreal – Satanic Panic In The Attic
MP3 Disconnect The Dots

3. The Mountain Goats – Tallahassee
MP3 No Children

2. Beirut – Gulag Orkestrar
MP3 Postcards From Italy

1. The Hold Steady – Separation Sunday
MP3 Your Little Hoodrat Friend

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If you have any albums you thought were overlooked by the People’s List, let me know in the comments!

Listen: Jens Lekman – I Know What Love Isn't

The delightful title track to Jens Leman‘s latest opus I Know What Love Isn’t comes in the middle of an amazing 4-song run that ends the album. Although the song lives outside the main narrative, reflecting on a relationship with a friend whom Jens considered marrying for citizenship rather than love, it illustrates the album’s theme of living with a broken heart beautifully. And it does it in a way only Jens Lekman can, with lyrical dashes of whimsy, melancholy and humor set against a breezy flute-and-strings arrangement and one of his most infectious, unforgettable melodies yet.

Stream the track and watch a video of Jens performing a stripped-down acoustic version below. You can pre-order I Know What Love Isn’t at Secretly Canadian.

Jens Lekman – “I Know What Love Isn’t” by Secretly Canadian

Album Art Lover: Blurry

For this edition of my ongoing album art lover series (where I discuss album art trends and stuff), I’m focusing on the album covers using blur, an effect I’ve seen pop up more and more this year, from Cloud Nothings to The Antlers to Chromatics. Probably the most iconic blurry album photo is Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, which was thought to symbolize the dazed and druggy times of the mid-60’s (but was actually because it was freezing cold the day of the photo shoot).

From the 60′ on, blurry and out-of-focus album art continues to be popular aesthetic choice, used to evoke feelings of confusion, intoxication, dizziness or unrest, or it could just be that artists think it looks cool. Whatever the case, below is a mix of 15 albums featuring blurry covers. View the cover art and download an track from each album below, just make sure to take your dramamine first.

MP3 The Antlers – Drift Dive

MP3 The Cure – In Between Days

MP3 Cloud Nothings – Wasted Days

MP3 Bob Dylan – I Want You

MP3 Blur – Beetlebum

MP3 Tom Waits – Hell Broke Luce

MP3 The Gloria Record – The Arctic Cat

MP3 James Blake – The Wilhelm Scream

MP3 Moonface – Fast Peter

MP3 Avril Lavigne – Complicated

MP3 The Raveonettes – She Owns The Streets

MP3 My Morning Jacket – Heartbreakin Man

MP3 Black Sabbath – Paranoid

MP3 Nada Surf – Popular

MP3 Chromatics – Kill For Love

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Cold Showers

Today, Pygmalion Music Festival announced its schedule and some updates to the line-up, which included a couple big adds with Lower Dens and Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Among the lesser-known additions is Los Angeles band, Cold Showers who’ll be playing with Eternal Summers and Craft Spells on Saturday night (in what should be an amazing show).

The sonically rich quartet combines influences like Jesus and Mary Chain and Joy Division into a wonderfully hazy post-punk sound where noise-pop guitars, throbbing bass and otherworldly vocals abound. Download their propulsive new single “BC” and gritty jam “I Don’t Mind” below.

MP3 BC
MP3 I Don’t Mind

The band’s debut album Love and Regret will be out 10/9 on Dais Records.

MP3: Digits – Where Do You Belong

We were quite taken by Digits track “Lost Dream” last year, and now the Toronto electronic artist has caught our attention again with new single, “Where Do You Belong” and this is truly some next-level stuff. The track features a minimalistic beat, warm synths, crisp production and smooth, heartfelt vocals, bringing to mind some of the very best Junior Boys songs. This is a hard one to take off repeat.

MP3 Digits – Where Do You Belong

Get the Where Do You Belong EP here. If you send him a photo of any album you’ve bought in the last two months, you can download it for free!

Commercial Watch: TV on the Radio, Fanfarlo, Sleigh Bells, Interpol, Youth Lagoon + more

With the Olympics going on, I’ve been watching way more live TV than normal, which has given me plenty of opportunity to see which of the latest hip, indie tracks advertisers have harvested for their car, beer and cell phone commercials. So that brings us to another edition of my long-running Commercial Watch series, where I watch the ads so you can keep skipping them with your fancy DVR-machines. There’s twenty commercials embedded below with MP3s / streams of the songs included. Make sure to click the continue reading link to see them all!

Budweiser – Makers of Tomorrow