Category: Music

Albums of the first quarter?

According to last.fm, the list goes like so:

  1. Frank Turner – Love Ire & Song + The First Three Years
  2. And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – The Century of Self
  3. The Hold Steady – Separation Sunday         
  4. The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love   
  5. The Hold Steady – Stay Positive     
  6. Modern Skirts – All Of Us In Our Night     
  7. Robyn Hitchcock – Goodnight Oslo   
  8. Morrissey – Years of Refusal     
  9. British Sea Power – Do You Like Rock Music?         
  10. The Dada Weatherman – The Green Waltz

I think that’s probably fairly accurate.

Holidays and other things

As of 4pm tomorrow I’m on holiday for 10 days. It’s the first break of any length I’ve had for a few weeks, and I am very much looking forward to it. Last time I was off I ended up spending most of the week working on various projects, but I do intend to make at least a half hearted effort to step away from my laptop for a few hours each day and actually enjoy the sunshine.

I will also review some music, seeing as I’ve actually been asked to by some of the people who make it (which still scares me).

Of course, it would be a good time to upgrade all the computers to Ubuntu 9.04, but I think I may wait a couple of weeks for that.

Trying to catch up on writing about music

Albums I’ve enjoyed over the last couple of months include:

  • The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love
  • Robyn Hitchcock – Goodnight Oslo
  • …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – Century of Self
  • Beruit – March of the Zapotec and Realpeople Holland
  • Chris Difford – The Last Temptation of Chris
  • State Shirt – This is Old (available for free)
  • Nine Inch Nails/Jane’s Addiction/Street Sweeper – NINJA 2009 tour sampler (available for free)
  • Split Seconds – So Sad About it All (available for free)
  • The Hold Steady – Stay Positive (and in fact all their other albums too)
  • British Sea Power – Do You Like Rock Music?
  • The Dada Weathermen – The Green Waltz (available for free)
  • Morrissey – Years of Refusal
  • ne:o – illoj (available for free)
  • No, Really – Rust (available for free)

I’d love to write about each one at some point, but I never seem to have the time.

Buying music in 2009

A couple of things have changed about the way I buy music:

  • The iTunes store now sells DRM free music, so I can actually play everything I buy on all my computers and my iPod.
  • I’ve got a 50 songs a month eMusic subscription.

So my usual decision making process usually involves working out which would be the best value. iTunes sells by the song and by the album, while eMusic sells just by the song. This generally means that very long songs and albums with fewer tracks are better value on eMusic, while albums with lots of short songs are better value on iTunes. Of course, if the music is packaged in a pleasing way on CD, then I’ll buy the CD and pay more for it too, but I am quite picky about what I’ll buy physically because our house is getting quite cluttered and we’re running out of space. This year I’ve bought music via all three methods detailed above, and I think 2009 will be the year that I don’t have a consistent way of buying music.

Of course, there’s always Jamendo when money is tight.

Discovering Free Music

So where do you start? There are obviously thousands of hours of recorded sound available legally for free, but it is quite easy to get lost, and to end up with a large amount of downloaded music that is not representative of what is out there.

These are the places I go when I want something new to listen to and don’t have any credits left on eMusic:

  • Last.fm have a page of freely available (but not always freely distributable) songs available at http://www.last.fm/home/freemp3s
  • For an example of a site that makes individual songs available in the “sampler” model, try http://www.jagjaguwar.com/mp3.php. I’ve bought a lot of music based on listening to things downloaded from here.
  • Jamendo (http://www.jamendo.com/en/albums) have a vast array of great music licensed under Creative Commons. They also have a lot of recordings that should probably have never been made. I spend a fair bit of time playing “spot the difference”.
  • The Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/) has a lot of free music available, and if you look closely you’ll find live performances by some fairly major artists, as well as a few things also available on other sites mentioned above.
  • For an example of a net label that understands about free music you could do worse than try http://aaahh-records.net/. They released the Wind Whistles album last year which makes them great in my book.
  • For an example of a single-artist model of distribution, try http://www.joshwoodward.com/music/. I’d recommend almost anything on here really.

I’d like to recommend iTunes singles of the week, but they need to strip the DRM off first. Although I should say that I did buy something on iTunes this week which plays fine in Rhythmbox, so the claims of trying to make their music more accessible to non iTunes/iPod users are not just an empty promise.

Freely available albums of the year 2008

As promised, a top 20 just including freely available music released under a Creative Commons license.

  1. The Wind Whistles – Window Sills
  2. Abscondo – Midnight Snow
  3. Girl Talk – Feed the Animals
  4. The Rest – Atlantis, Oh Our Saviour
  5. Robin Grey – Only the Missile
  6. Nine Inch Nails – The Slip
  7. Death by Panda – House Made of Glass
  8. Josh Woodward – Not Quite Connected
  9. Depressive Art – Bye Bye Dear Everything
  10. Robin Grey – I Love Leonard Cohen
  11. Josh Woodward – The Simple Life
  12. Brad Sucks – Out of It
  13. Icarus Crash – 13 Segundos de Caida Libre
  14. After The Ice – It Happens All The Time
  15. Mountain Mirrors – Dreadnought
  16. Death by Panda – One Fifteen Four
  17. Silence is Sexy – This Ain’t Hollywood
  18. Sungod Abscondo – Imperfect People
  19. Saint Jean – Zikophren
  20. Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts I-IV

Albums of the year 2008

As always, these are determined by number of plays per track, divided by number of tracks (with anything available for free hyperlinked).

  1. Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid
  2. Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan – Sunday at Devil Dirt
  3. Elvis Costello & The Imposters – Momofuku
  4. The Gutter Twins – Saturnalia
  5. Jenny Lewis – Acid Tongue
  6. R.E.M – Accelerate
  7. The Charlatans – You Cross My Path
  8. Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
  9. The Wind Whistles – Window Sills
  10. Okkervil River – The Stage Names
  11. Bob Mould – District Line
  12. Abscondo – Midnight Snow
  13. Mercury Rev – Snowflake Midnight
  14. Amanda Palmer – Who Killed Amanda Palmer?
  15. Girl Talk – Feed the Animals
  16. TV on the Radio – Dear Science
  17. Black Francis – Svn Fngrs
  18. The Rest – Atlantis, Oh Our Saviour
  19. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!
  20. The Killers – Day and Age

    See also 2007 and 2006

    I’ll be doing a top 20 free/Creative Commons list later today (in theory).

    Introducing aaahh-records – home of free and charming music

    I’ve just stumbled upon this net label, whilst trying to determine which year the Wind Whistles album was actually released in (the answer being 2007 and 2008 in different places).

    The label has so far only released three albums, but two of them happen to already be on my list of favourite freely available music for this year, which makes me think I’m likely to like anything they put out.

    Death by Panda – All the electronica you’ll ever need (and then some)

    I’ve written about Death by Panda before (around the time I was listening to “House Made of Glass” on repeat). Since then there have been three further albums, all of which explore an area of music that can be disconcerting, but that does a damn fine job of sounding both computer-generated and very human.

    The new album is called Straight Lines in Subjectivity (direct download).