metric reflection

I think this album hit me somewhere around the second song, Francoise. In an eerie canvas, colored only by the scraping bow of a violin and some soft accordion, the album blossomed in my mind fully formed, a picture already painted. It’s a tundra tale of a lonely, desperate man trying to scratch out a living for his family in the frozen wasteland of an early Quebec. The plains of Eastern Canada carried few opportunities; it’s easy for any man to succumb to the destitution, falling victim to the cold wind of frontier life.

And so it goes in Midwest Dilemma’s Timelines and Tragedies. The album tells singer-songwriter Justin Lamoureux’s family history, starting with their initial journey from France to Montreal, the ship’s discomforting creaking lacing the song, fur trading their way into the U.S., down through the Midwest, where they’ve shared in the American story. In The Great Depression, the driving anxiety of the time motivates the song; pushes the character, Victoria, into leaving for greener pastures, even as the expected disastrous crescendo falls around her ears. But then the family sends its sons into war, where they march to a victory anthem.

And on through the Industrial Age the family wound its path around America’s, working on the railroad, finding love and losing it. Family members succumb to illness, but family is what keeps you going, and, like Faulkner’s Emily, their memory remains, lingering like the sound of angels. Even so, just a few generations later, a main character loses himself to alcohol, and another goes off to Viet Nam with fingers crossed.

The music reflects such tumult. “Good Samaritan,” the song about Viet Nam, is really three songs in one - a moody description of a broken man, decades after the war; a march through the jungle; and the wild behavior of the recently returned vet losing control. Sioux City is about giving up to alcohol; slide guitar and clarinet whistling through the vast open skies - nothing above, nothing ahead, until the bottle is as empty as the future.

This is an album for our times. Borne of despair, there are few lucky breaks, just the desire to push ahead, through economic woe, family tragedy, and hopelessness. But even when Lamoureux claims that the “damage is done” on the album’s closer, it’s obvious he hasn’t given up - how can one give up when there’s nowhere lower to go? It’s an insight only offered through historical analysis, through learning from the lessons of our predecessors, and carrying that knowledge into the future.

I figure tonight, of all nights, as the Presidential candidates conclude their 3rd snoozeslugfest, is the best time to introduce this catchy little song from The Rosebuds:

The Rosebuds - Bow to the Middle: The Religion of Politics

This is a dance song, but not in the traditional sense: it’s not meant to get the listener on their feet (though it’s certainly catchy) but to describe the Chaplin shuffle politicians perform every couple years - the one the candidates are both dancing right now.  I’m not going to get too far into the actual politics of our two candidates, or the substance of their arguments (though my roommate has a great dissection of one question in the last debate that I’ve been meaning to commend him for), but rather in the meta-aspect of it.  The point is summed in the chorus:

Hey yeah, walk to the middle and bow to the middle
Hey yeah, walk to the left and bow to the middle
Hey yeah, walk to the right and bow to the middle
Hey yeah, walk all around and bow to the middle

It’s what candidates in our system are required to do:bow to the incessant demands of the inattentive swing voter, the person who still thinks Obama doesn’t give any policy details and McCain just wants to be like any other Republican, but doesn’t really get why.  It’s the continual groveling before the altar of the low information constituency that really undermines everyone interested in furthering the country’s policies - including that very same swing voter.  See, when you spend all your time tempering your statements with an eye toward the middle, with covering your beliefs up just enough that those in the middle will miss your appeals to your base, they end up seeing you as insincere - and that’s when they start doubting.  You, as a politician, carry on your shoulders the mantle of the inadequacies of the system and all the old politicans you evoke in people, and it’s your job to move the discussion past it to the issues you want to discuss.

Incidentally, it’s the Democrats who have traditionally had the biggest problem with this.  Even Bill Clinton, the master of connecting to the white working class, suffered from this.  Republicans, like Bush, were able to wink in both directions by using coded language (see: the Dred Scott decision as a dog whistle to pro-lifers or Reagan, Philadelphia, MS and race).  In this race, it seems that this dynamic has shifted a bit, with McCain being seen more and more as the insincere one, particularly in regards to the economy.

I spend a lot of my off time thinking about political movements - how they are formed, grow, communicate, and, eventually stagnate.  Bowing to the middle on the election trail has been the premier requirement in American politics for at least a generation (right up there with kissing babies), and in that generation, one party has shown itself better practiced at this performance.  I’m curious how much longer this will last, and the form this dance will take in years to come.

***

I haven’t written much lately; in part, my free time has been focused on the election and less on music (though I have picked up a lot of great stuff lately), but also because of the demands of end of the year performance metrics coupled with my knack for finding more side projects for myself.  No clue when this will end, but the end of the year looks like a nice cutoff point.

Oh, and the Rosebuds are really great.  Everyone should check them out.

Windmill, the nom de guerre of Matthew Thomas Dillon, is a rhythmic journey into the coldness of modernity. It’s cold marble and plastic; a life lived divorced from emotion. Events of the world, affecting millions, are just pictures on a tv screen, tinted unrecognizable with the glare of a morning winter sun.

One of the big name automakers recently released a commercial featuring a woman staring transfixed through a moonroof as her friends, party bound on a Saturday night, drove through an unnamed city. So mesmerized by the constellations of lights in the office buildings above, she completely missed the fact that her friends had all disembarked. This is what this song conveys: the calmness of drifting through a crowd, detached and aloof, yet in touch with the atoms colliding around you, people, sounds, lights, steel and plastic.

In my ever-increasing search to ensure that I’m doing this legally, I’m trying out Seeqpod. I’m not sure I like how it displays (which is what has kept me from using it before), so anyone reading, let me know what you think.

Anyone who invests the amount of time I have into music - even if this blog doesn’t always reflect that - eventually runs into roadblocks with their music player. Usually, they’re the result of problems that afflict any large quantity library - sifting through everything to get to exactly what you want. Even in large quantity-high quality libraries like - I pretend, at least - mine is, it’s difficult.

There are a couple different facets to the problem. First, there’s a constant stream of new music coming in. Each new song is, in theory, categorized as to genre and rated on first (or second) listen. It’s then thrown into a complex playlist scheme, which I’ll get to in a bit. The problem here, though, is that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with new music, as it’s a constantly shifting set. (I envision the constant march of new music to be like a stream. You can dip your toe in, reach down and cup some water in your hand, but you’ll never be able to taste or feel all the water that rushes by.) Moreover, your brain (well, my brain) can’t keep all the artists and albums in at once, so songs aren’t able to properly gestate in your inner theater like they used to.

On the flip side, older stuff just slides away completely unless the serendipity of shuffle rediscovers it. Then there’s a flurry of activity as I remember just how damn good something like The National’s “Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers” disc is, leading me to listen to their catalog a couple times until I need the complement to their style. So I move onto Arcade Fire, or take the switchback to Shearwater or something. This is great, and sets me on a path to rediscovery, but the path is overgrown and poorly marked.

Apple’s Genius

Apple’s new Genius feature in iTunes is billed, in part, as a solution to this problem. Like Pandora, you select a song and allow Genius to create a playlist of related songs. Assumedly, those songs are related by mood, genre, rhythm, etc. It… works, sort of. When I built one off of a Sufjan Stevens song (Predatory Wisp of the Palisades…), I got some Iron and Wine, Decemberists, Andrew Bird, etc. But, somehow, it also decided Deerhoof would be a good fit. What? Deerhoof fits only in that it’s Indie, but in a completely different way than Sufjan. They’re not from the same genre, or even artists that you’d probably listen to in succession. However, there’s probably a statistically significant amount of crossover between Deerhoof fans and Sufjan fans, and I think that’s more of what they’re going for.

With bigger name acts, the results are a little less obtuse. I Geniused “Right Behind You (Mafia)” from Our Lady Peace’s Spiritual Machines album, and I came up with a bunch of 1997-2001 Alternative, as I would expect. Bands like Live, Radiohead, Stone Temple Pilots and Everclear ended up on the list (yes, I have Everclear in my library. I’m ashamed.) - bigger bands with wider population rates in iTunes libraries. Moreover, for the most part, the songs selected are similarly mid to up tempo, unlike the haphazard tempo distribution of the Sufjan Genius playlist.

Obviously, 2 attempts by no means creates a complete set, so this all could be statistical noise. But I’ve done some random Genius tests over the past week, to similar results: more well-known songs will warrant similar results, and, in general results stick to the same genre or identity set. As a result, it’s probably pretty good at setting up, say, and 80s Alternative Mix, but not so effective at maintaining a mood for an hour.

On a different note, this is an astonishing data grab by Apple. I’d love to see the relationship trees they’re able to develop now between artists. Sure, they’ve had iTunes Store info for a while, but Genius analyzes your library before submitting it anonymously. I’m sure record company owners would love to have access to the data.

My Imperfect Solution

I mentioned above that I have a complex playlist scheme. It’s not really all that complex, though it probably vaults me into the iTunes Power User cloud. Essentially, I copy any song I think has lasting value into a “Singles” playlist. If it’s an older song that I’m just getting around to buying - let’s say there’s a great sale on old Elvis Costello repressings - it also goes into a “Flashbacks” playlist.

From here, I exploit iTunes tracking capabilities to the fullest extent I can, building a playlist that’s meant to be flexible, heavy on more recent and favorite songs, and constantly updating. I end up with a playlist of songs, chosen by random but using the following formula:

• Pre-1980 Songs [2%]
• 80s songs [2%]
• 90s Alternative [2%]
• 90s Songs (non-Alternative) [2%]
• Songs from 2000-2007 [10%]
• Songs from the last 12 months (that are not Flashbacks) [23%]
• Songs added in the last 3 months (that are not Flashbacks) [52%]
• High rated (4 or above) songs not played recently [5%]
• Songs not played in the last 6 months [2%]

This gives me a rough mix; my radio mix, so to speak. In other words, if I was setting up a radio station and needed to have an automatically generated mix, it would do something close to this - though I’m constantly fiddling with those percentages. The result isn’t too bad, but there are some real problems nonetheless.

First, iTunes’ Smart Playlist language is a very limited conditional one. In other words, I can tell it to grab 2 songs from the 1980s, but there’s no way to ensure that those songs are from 2 different artists. Thanks to the paucity of my pre-1980 library, I find that I end up with a ton of Beatles songs in my playlist and very little other stuff.

Second, though I have ratings to separate songs, those ratings aren’t necessarily accurate. To do so, I would have to be in exactly the same mood when I rated each song - but that’s not the case. I go on huge rating sprees whenever I add new stuff, but that’s not always the most accurate rating. Really, it reflects how I felt about the song at the moment I rated it. I try to keep some general guidelines, of course. I can tell when a song’s a 5, but sometimes the line between a 4 and a 3 is blurred. I tend to never give anything a 1, under the assumption that I wouldn’t have anything in my library if I hated it that much (exception being the random filler tracks) and only a few 2’s. That means almost everything’s a 3 - which makes differentiation difficult. Additionally, something that’s a 4 when I first hear it can easily fall out of favor - or a song rated 3 could be a 5 that I just missed somehow when I first heard it (or I wasn’t in the right mood; it hadn’t sunken in, etc.)

Third, the playlists, when I first made them, never actually changed. I had to add a requirement on each playlist that it not include songs played in the last x days, where x varies by the playlist. This is how iTunes does it; I’d just like it to automatically generate a new playlist each time I go to it.

So despite these complaints, my playlist scheme mostly works. I’m locked into the iTunes ecosystem because of its excellent tracking and (mostly good) rating capabilities, so no real complaints there. Because this is a blog, though, I have to make some general recommendations (that would go nowhere) for some intrepid soul who has more time than me to implement. So I’d love to see something that:

• Notices bands you’ve been listening to a lot lately and puts them into a playlist more frequently. So if I go on a Built to Spill kick, I’m probably going to want to hear them a bunch over the following few days. Currently, the opposite will occur, thanks to the “Not played in last x days” requirement. The frequency that songs from this band will show up will decay over time.I can see this happening in several scenarios, particularly when a band makes the news - a member dies, they’re playing a show near me, a new album is coming out. I’m not necessarily going to want to hear a whole lot of them, but it would be nice for them to pop up more in my playlist.
• Allows you to set the genre, year, etc. composition via a slider. In other words, I’d like to very easily shift the mix from a more recent singles heavy mix to a classics mix. Right now, that means changing several smart playlists, which takes 5-10 minutes and isn’t really worth the effort.
• Gives you the ability to limit the number of songs from a particular artist or genre, etc., or require that certain artists, etc. appear. One of the biggest failings of my pre-1980s is that lots of late 70s punk gets lost if there’s only 2 songs that can be selected at any given time.
• Reminds you to re-rate songs after a few months. A second review is always helpful. If it was linked to other people’s music habits, it could actually elevate songs that you have been ignoring to this Revisit Me list.
• I could probably implement this without too much difficulty, but there might be several different types of songs. Songs like “Lost in the Supermarket” aren’t just a 5 - 15 years after I first heard it, it’s still one of my favorite songs of all time and I would love for it to come up more frequently. Last time I was in LA, I found that Kroq was still playing Smashing Pumpkins’ “Disarm” regularly. I’m not sure how this would be implemented; it would probably require some sort of multiple Singles playlist scheme.

I could go on. And on. And on. But no need to belabor the point - I’m getting lost in my music, and while I love it, I wish I didn’t feel like I was constantly missing something as it went by - or ignoring something in front of me. Genius is an ok tool for this, and iTunes offers some other great ones as well, but nothing I’ve found so far offers the flexibility and automation that would make me (theoretically) happy.

(Image from Flickr user thismeik)

It’s a rollicking game of poker, here in the Old West.  None of us really trust each other, but we’re here for the money, the thrill, the rush of red splayed across our hands when we get the flush.  Time isn’t linear here.  It strolls by at low tide and then comes crushing back in hours later, making you realize just how devastated you and your wallet have become.  And that’s when things get a bit hazy, as, your head spinning, you pull your gun, screaming about dirty cheats.  You’re floating above watching the mess unfold, intent on where those bullets are going to go, screaming red balls of steel sinking into flesh, splaying crimson over the cards, until your inner addict, parasite as it may be, looks out for its survival and talks you back down.

In Cadeo - Vultures

***

In Cadeo’s website is sparse, but it does offer a free EP (from which this song came) and some hints at November’s full-length.  Check it out and enjoy.

So yesterday I promised a second round of music from last week’s crazy grab bag, and I make good on my promises. Track listing:

1. Marching Band - Travel in Time
2. The Clientele - George Says He Has Lost His Way
3. Marissa Nadler - My Little Lark
4. The Silents - Eat Your Face
5. Viva Voice - From the Devil Himself
6. Tricky - Bacative
7. Starlight Mints - Pearls (Submarine #2)
8. The New Year - My Neighborhood

So far this week, I haven’t had a whole lot of time to look around for new stuff, but I’m not super impressed with anything. It happens, I guess.

Picture taken at Great Falls, VA

Whew, so 2 weeks ago, I said to myself, “dammit, must update blog!” and Self snickered but said sure. Who knew Self was going to rely on external exigencies to get its nefarious non-updating way?

Yes, the past week has been too busy for me to do any writing, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been listening.

There are some weeks where 1 or 2 interesting albums drop, and I pick up an album or two from a year ago from some band I’ve just stumbled across. But not last week! Last week alone the following great albums came out:

1. Bound Stems - The Family Afloat
2. The Broken West - Now Or Heaven
3. Damien Jurado - Caught in the Trees
4. Fujiya and Miyagi - Lightbulbs
5. The Lovely Sparrows - Bury the Cynics
6. Marching Band - Spark Large
7. The New Year - s/t
8. Okkervil River - the Stand-Ins
9. Parenthetical Girls - Entanglements
10. Tricky - Knowle West Boy

I also picked up:

1. Birdmonster - From the Mountain to the Sea
2. The Clientele - That Night, a Forest Grew
3. Jessica Fletchers - Less Sophistication (yay!)
4. The Last Shadow Puppets - The Age of the Understatement (finally on eMusic - glad I waited)
5. Marissa Nadler - The Saga of Mayflower
6. The Uglysuit - s/t
7. Viva Voice - Get Yr Blood Sucked Out
8. The Silents - Sleepwalker

I’m weary just from typing all of them up. So far, all of the new albums are standouts; not a bad album in there. I’ve never encountered Damien Jurado before, but I find his Elliott Smith suddenly got happy approach to music relaxing. The new Tricky, though at times a bit too reggae for me, reminds me how much I’ve always liked his work - and resurrects the giddy laughter that always bubbles up whenever I hear his music thanks to his minor role in Fifth Element. Some of the new stuff, like Marching Band or The Lovely Sparrows, is just beautiful orchestral indie pop. How can you go wrong with that? Finally, the new Okkervil River and the new Broken West kick ass. Haven’t gotten to The New Year’s latest yet.

So I threw together a quick mix; Part 2 will be up (probably) tomorrow and then it’s off to the races for another week’s new releases!

1. The Lovely Sparrows - Year of the Dog
2. Parenthetical Girls - Young Eucharists
3. Damien Jurado - Coats of Ice
4. Bound Stems - Happens to Us All Otherwise
5. Fujiya and Miyagi - Knickerbocker
6. The Broken West - Auctioneer
7. Okkervil River - Lost Coastlines
8. The Uglysuit - Chicago

Note: I’m focusing on an entire album this week just because it’s so damn good.

1998 was a lost year. Bogged down by an education I wanted in a field I didn’t care for, seeing my friend pool contracting as marriages proliferated and the trials of those first few years after high school pulled people apart, I was the stereotypically adrift college student. Seriously, my most poignant memories of the year are filled with the shadows of dusk or lit by streetlight; my writing from the time period was self-referential and pitying without really being illuminating - a climber fumbling around for the next fingerhold.

This album was my theme. It’s one of the best explorations of male post-adolescent depression I’ve seen. From the outset, Jarvis Cocker’s characters don’t know how to deal with a machismo society; how to grapple with the sexual tension of the age.

The first song, “The Fear,” sets the tone:

This is our music from the bachelors den;
the sound of loneliness turned up to ten;
a horror soundtrack, from a stagnant waterbed
and it feels just like this

This is the sound of someone losing the plot
making out that they’re ok when they’re not

The facade: trying to determine which face to display to the world as it rushes by. And grabbing little bits as it goes by is wearying; this resignation is conveyed throughout the album in snippets. From Party Hard: “Why do we have to half kill ourselves just to prove we’re alive?” Like a Friend: “I’ve done this before/ And I will do it again / Come on and kill me baby / while you smile like a friend.” Glory Days: “Oh my face is unappealing and my thoughts are unoriginal” and “Come share this golden age with me in my single room apartment/and if it all amounts to nothing - it doesn’t matter, these are still our glory days.” Finally, “I’m a Man” on the battle over masculinity: “Your car can go up to a hundred and ten / You’ve nowhere to go but you’ll go there again /And nothing ever makes no difference to a man.”

The disillusionment and raw distaste with society’s expectations were empowering. They provided the express flight to a world of Londonian or Parisian cafe decadence: late night discussions over too many drinks of Sartre or Fanon, shaping yourself as an intellectual for the purpose of learning. Thanks to the anthemic backing music and Cocker’s rich warble, they painted euphoric pictures of writing on the train, inspired by the trees and old stone houses whizzing past. Of anything but the outer suburbs, freeway systems, and mindless entertainment dictating life. (It wasn’t a bad life, of course. I had food and clothes and shelter, and a couple great friends who shared my disillusionment.)

But what really struck me, what cemented this album in the canon, was “The Day After the Revolution.”  It’s a song about waking up to a changed world; bordering on the cliched image of the deep sleeper murmuring awake post-disaster, a closer listen points to the importance of recognizing what you need to change to make yourself happier:

I love the way you do it.
I love the way you put them on.
You know the answers but you get it wrong. (Just to confuse things).
Why did it seem so difficult to realise a simple truth?
The revolution begins and ends with you.
Now all the breakdowns and nightmares look small.
Now we decided not to die after all.
Because the meek shall inherit absolutely nothing at all.
If you stopped being so feeble you could have so much more.
The answer was here all the time, you see.
Just how I missed it is a mystery to me.
I have waited and waited for this day to arrive.
The revolution was televised.

This part of the song is used in this compilation of the Civil War comic series (which I know nothing about; maybe my roommate should talk about it a bit sometime?):

Let me tell you a story:
My friend and roommate at the time worked the night shift at a hospital on the edge of town. It had been built 5 years before, while we were still in high school, in the middle of a field that was still tilled just the year before that. By 1998, the land around the hospital was still undeveloped (though that’s changed in the last decade) such that the 2 lane road to the hospital was, briefly, a country road bisecting 2 dirt fields.

I often picked him up at 4am for some godforsaken reason - I’m such a pushover. One night, driving along this deserted road, absent of even an ambulance, watching the tract home streetlights fade in my rearview mirror, this song came up. Something in the emptiness of the moment - the California dust, tinged by summer, hanging in the air - the sleeping people a mile away - the machines fighting for people’s lives, pushing air forcefully into their lungs ahead of me - made the song all the more poignant. I pulled over, a cloud of dirt and gravel bouncing off my back tires to listen.

This is what a revolution would really be like, I thought. It could be a momentous occasion, heralded by rhetoric and iconicism, but most people would go to bed that night, and wake up the next morning ready to continue their routine. The real revolutions are the battles you fight with yourself; those are the ones that change your outlook.

The stars were obscured by the vast city light of greater Los Angeles, but the ones that were still out shone indiscriminate of anything I had to say. It didn’t matter who I was, just so long as I was myself. I got back in the car, threw on A Little Soul, and picked up a disgruntled roommate annoyed at my lateness.

Today I’ve been stuck listening to Deastro for some reason.  Ages ago, I had an extra download on eMusic - one of those perilous situations where I didn’t want to waste the 25 cents, or whatever it’s actually worth, soI spent an hour looking for that one perfect track that will complement the 99 others I just spent half a day downloading (of course, I almost always blow through my allowable downloads the first week I realize they’ve reset) - and ended up randomly grabbing Deastro’s The Goodman of the House.  Goodman is a sprawling track that starts off brooding before exploding into a fantasy synth and guitar driven rock anthem.

Like M83 before them, Deastro sounds like a throwback to the best parts of late 80s synth-pop, but this nostalgia is edgier; informed by the layered simple melody approach to music indie rock was championing a few years ago (see: Bright Eyes’ Lover I don’t Have to Love).  It’s fun and invigorating, especially for an office dweller.

Some Deastro samples can be found at My Old Kentucky Blog.  Keeper’s, the newest album, is available only through eMusic.

I was sad when Muxtape was shot down.  It was a glowing star arcing across the night sky, a great, simple service whose brilliance made its demise inevitable.  Of course, the goons at the RIAA killed it instead of trying to work with it.  I’m surprised it took them as long as it did.  They don’t believe in innovation, even when it draws more attention to their (and non-RIAA) bands.  You couldn’t download any of the songs in a mix, but any user could build their own mixes to share with people.  It very effectively updated the old practice of trading mixtapes for the digital age.  Moreover, it was quickly being upgraded for band use - so they could quickly and easily offer a selection of songs on their website in a more attractive interface than myspace’s clunky UI.

But Muxtape’s existence was a waltz with illegality.  The act of storing songs on a server that are not owned by the server’s owner brought down MP3.com almost a decade ago, and this wasn’t too much different.  Limited a bit, but only in that just 12 songs could be uploaded at any time.

8tracks.com, a Muxtape competitor, claims their service is a bit more legal, at least under the DMCA, because they believe they are a webcaster, not… whatever Muxtape was.  I took it for a spin today, and was generally impressed.  It’s not as slick as Muxtape; the interface is pointlessly disjointed, with the main focus of the site (the mix) shoved off to the right for some reason.  Once you get past that, though, it’s fairly straightforward - upload your mp3s, reorder them as needed, and edit the title or author tag if it’s not recognized.  It even allows you to embed the mix (see below) which was one of the shortcomings of Muxtape, and add cover art (I’m too lazy right now).  You’re limited to just 8 tracks, in keeping with the site name, which can be kind of a drag.  But arbitrary limits have to be set somewhere, right?

In other news, Google released their new web browser, Chrome, today.  It’s got a lot of great features, including better memory management than Firefox, a privacy mode, and overall snappiness.  I’m still playing with it, and not sure that it will replace Firefox as my browser of choice (especially since it’s not available for Macs yet), but it’s definitely running lighter than Firefox ever has.  Check out this webcomic for more details.

Now for the mix:

Listing:

1. The Real Tuesday Weld - It’s a Wonderful Li(f)e: What a terribly pretentious name for a great song.
2. The Week That Was - The Airport Line:Sounds like Village Green Preservation Society era Kinks.
3. Devotchka - Comrade Z :I’m really digging this Eastern European sound.
4. The Race - Feathers
5. Kyle Andrews - Tennessee Torture Dream:Andrews wishes he was old school Pete Yorn. We can forgive him for this, but only because new Pete Yorn is so terrible.
6. Takka Takka - Silence:Check out the video.
7. Good Old War - I’m Not For You:My friend Mike found this band, and he’s almost always right when he points me to his discoveries.
8. Billie the Vision and the Dancers - Lily from the Middleway Street:A strange Swedish collective, all of their albums are available for free on their website. This is from the newest one, I Used to Wander These Streets.