pterodactyl, in color

pterodactyl have made a fun fun "music video."

Animal Collective?

Animal Collective "rarities" are here. Found via SeeqPod (which is like Hype Machine but better).

Do you guys like Animal Collective? I'm giving them a second chance, and suspect they may grow on me. Alternatively, I may get bored quickly and leave like I did before the end of the Akron Family show.

I'm getting bored...


SeeqPod Music beta - Playable Search

a political aside

"When he was approached near the House floor by a reporter, Mr. Young responded with an obscene gesture."
NY Times, 7 June 2007

Rep. Don Young (R-AL) may be trying to set a record for longest-distance pork. NY Times article here. Key funny bit:

Asked in a telephone interview who had organized the fund-raiser, Mr. Mazurkiewicz, the consultant, said he was then at another fund-raiser with a member of Mr. Mack’s staff who would know.

“Aronoff,” the staff member told Mr. Mazurkiewicz, within earshot of his mobile phone.

“Just some local businessmen,” Mr. Mazurkiewicz said into the phone.

Pterodactyl are a band!

So, my friend's pterodactyl-- ha ha... that would be cool to have a pet pterodactyl.


Pterodactyl have released their first full-length album! Yay! Check out the review at the ever-ridiculous Pitchfork, or read something that actually describes the music in words instead of in band names at a place called Dusted. Pitchfork has a couple of tracks up for listening and the band has more mp3s scattered around their site. Warning: many people possibly including your neighbors or your girlfriend will not like this music. Some people just can't handle the rock and roll.

the best band you never heard of.

Seriously.

Jetpack were a band in Providence in the late 90s. They released one 7" single called Investigator Man (on clear vinyl with accompanying comic book), and one self-titled full-length cd, on their short-lived label Sampson Recordings. I saw them play a few times, including opening for Don Caballero and on their own at the very hip AS220. Then they lost their drummer, and the remaining two guys became Hya Kcha, playing drums and bass-with-many-pedals. I also have a two-track cd of Hya Kcha's, cleverly titled "A Demonstration," which I will happily dig out and share if anyone's interested.

But back to the point: the self-titled Jetpack cd is one of my top 10, maybe top 5 favorite albums of all time and ever, bar none, and I absolutely pull it out and listen to it with much regularness. Simply put, it ROCKS. To be a little more descriptive, this is very much in the Math Rock vein, with off-kilter syncopations and odd-length phrasings and so on, but with a firm emphasis on the Rock part as well. To contrast, I never got into Don Caballero that much because their stuff can be too focused on the math part, and end up feeling almost clinical. Unwound, one of my other very favorite bands, might be a better comparison except that Jetpack is less dark and grungy/metally (metallic?). Not that Jetpack would ever jam, heavens no. Every riff is repeated exactly as many times as necessary for you to get your head around it, and then the song moves on. The volume or tempo shifts in that way that I love, building and falling and building again so you can barely sit still, like good early Mogwai but without the feedback, if that makes any sense. And I almost forgot to mention - these guys were fucking tight as tupperware. Unbelievable.

Okay, enough talk. No guilt about sharing these tracks since the guys have made them available on the Sampson site, and I'm sure the cd is essentially impossible to buy. (The Jetpack on Amazon is a different one.) So get the tracks from them, or over at Multiply, or zipped up, and let me know what you think.

turntable music

The very decent music blog debaser recently posted a link to a large (3 cds) and apparently rare collection of turntable wizardry from Ninjatune, called Xen Cuts. The label's tenth anniversary compilation, from 2000, includes tracks from Kid Koala, Z-Trip, Coldcut, and DJ Food (subject of an upcoming post), along with many others. If you like turntable music or, even better, aren't a fan yet and want a good sampling of some of the best the genre has to offer, definitely grab this while you can.

Xen Cuts, from Ninjatune.

Stranger Than Fiction soundtrack

Apologies to all three of my readers (LALOL!) for the extended absence.

We finally saw Stranger Than Fiction this weekend. In addition to being a really super duper movie, it's one of those films that makes great use of an excellent pop music soundtrack. Coincidently, considering I'll be seeing them at Toad's this very Thursday night (all right!), the soundtrack was compiled by Britt Daniel and Brian Reitzell of Spoon, and includes instrumental sections written by them in addition to several Spoon songs, including one previously unreleased (The Book I Write).

Grab it here. Enjoy!

more lazy post

this is awesome. Here comes the marching band of The Future! make sure to check the videos.

via here.

lazy post

i'm busy. just to fill the void:



via here.

and I'm listening to rjd2.

Last.fm is quite okay.

Last.fm stations can now pop out to a separate window, or be embedded elsewhere. Are you underwhelmed?

Bands similar to The Crownhate Ruin:



Music tagged with "mash-up":



Geek note: blogger complains about the sloppy html provided by last.fm, so you have to add </embed> right before </object> for it to work.