ListenBeforeYouBuy

[Update] For some unknown reason Spinner have removed all known traces of the stream, however I got my hands on the MP3, so check it out below.

MGMT are set to release their much anticipated second album “Congratulations” in the next couple of months and the guys over at Spinner have an exclusive first listen of the song “Flash Delirium”. Check it out below and let me know what you think.

Also, thanks to WeAllWantSomeone you can hear the title track “Congratulations” too.

[Update] Ok, so after listening to it repeatedly, I really really like it.  It starts of quietly and ends epicly (new word).  Now I can’t wait for the album to drop.

(via MGMT)

Eight days ago a mysterious, unknown band called Cults uploaded three songs (“Go Outside”, “Most Wanted”, and “The Curse”) to their Bandcamp page that quickly started being passed around the interwebs among bloggers and music fans alike.  The fact that these three songs are pretty damn good but yet little-to-nothing was known about them is what makes it all the more intriguing.

As it turns out it’s a couple (Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin) based in New York, both 21, both from San Diego, and both really fucking talented.  They spoke to Pitchfork who got some more information about them which you can read after the music.  I’ve posted the three songs below, each of which you can download for free from their Bandcamp page.

Pitchfork: How did Cults start?

Brian Oblivion: We were just making music in our house in our free time. Neither of us have ever been in serious bands before. Actually, Madeline had a record contract when she was nine years old.

Madeline Follin: Yeah, it was pretty funny. My stepdad’s band was recording, and I just got on the mic. He had me cover “Amoeba” by the Adolescents, and some record company offered to sign me, but my parents wouldn’t let me. In the song and another song I had recorded, it said something about me drinking gin or something; it was really funny. I had a chipmunk voice singing punk rock songs at nine years old.

BO: The band was called Youth Gone Mad. But that’s the extent of it thus far. Doing music together really just kind of came out of living together and dating. I would make tracks and try to sing on them. Eventually, I realized that Maddy was a lot better at it than I was, and we started writing songs together.

Pitchfork: I just looked up Youth Gone Mad on iTunes. Did you do a record with Dee Dee Ramone?

MF: [Laughs] Yeah, I did. Dee Dee was friends with my stepdad and my mom. My mom was his art dealer.  He was a nice guy.

BO: She was obviously really young when…

MF: Yeah, I was super young. I was probably only 12 when he passed away. But yeah, he would come over and record all the time.

Pitchfork: I know you weren’t expecting to get any kind of attention this early, but do you have any plans for Cults? Are you going to play any shows or release any music?

BO: Yeah, we’re finishing up a full-length record right now. We’ve been working on it for a while. The first three songs were just part of a larger full-length that we were working on for a long time. But we’re making plans to tour this summer and just kind of seeing where this could take us.

Pitchfork: Are you talking to any labels?

BO: We’ve had a couple of emails so far. But we just put these songs up online two weeks ago. It’s all just been really surprising and bizarre. Madeline’s been walking around almost throwing up all day.

MF: People have been emailing us. I don’t really know what to do at this point.

Pitchfork: It says something about the way the internet works that you can get attention so instantaneously like that.

BO: Right. I think that’s awesome. Part of it plays into the fact that we didn’t have any information about the band online. That’s what’s so great about the internet. Someone out of left field with no connections can gather a lot of attention if they create something worthwhile. But it’s also a problem with the internet. Everybody wants to know everything about you. We want to pigeonhole and categorize bands, and it kind of flattens their image. Back in the day, there was kind of a mystery to rock and roll, where you could look at album covers and imagine what their lives are like. Now we’re not satisfied unless we know exactly what they do everyday, who they are, where they live. Putting the songs up online without any info was partially just a coincidence, but it’s also a reaction to that attitude– trying to inject something bigger into what’s become an extremely compartmentalized music industry.

Pitchfork: Does it make you uncomfortable that people want to know these things about you?

BO: Yeah, kind of. Because we’re not… I don’t know. As cheesy and cornball as it sounds, at the end of the day, it’s all about the songs. We want to make classic music, and where we live or how old we are and what records we’ve played on before is all interesting, but that doesn’t really matter.

MF: Yeah, that’s why we’re so happy about it. Nobody has any idea who we are, and everybody’s like, “Whoa, what is this? Awesome.”

BO: It’s been really validating for us.

Pitchfork: Your songs have this nostalgia to them. You’re both young, but they sound like simultaneously like 50s pop songs and 80s pop songs.

BO: Yeah, that was kind of the idea. Madeline comes from a largely punk rock background. We both grew up in San Diego, but I came from more of like a psychedelic surf-rock kind of thing. So when we got together and started dating, we had the problem of finding music to listen to. We met up on the common ground of Motown and soul music.

MF: Lesley Gore.

BO: The Shangri-Las, stuff like that. Through listening to that, we started getting really into it and writing songs like that.

Pitchfork: On “Go Outside”, you sample the cult leader Jim Jones talking. How come?

BO: The next sample is these kids being interviewed by the BBC. They were living in a cult, talking about the terrors of the outside world. A lot of the idea of the band and its name is the idea of liberation, of choosing your own way of doing things. Madeline and I both had weird times in our life before we met up and got together and, through the music, got into a really good place. It’s about finding your own meaning and how something that’s potentially looked down upon doesn’t necessarily need to be bad. I wanted to incorporate these speakers saying beautiful things even though they’re bad people.

The quality of the rip is a little on the poor side, but the quality of the music is not.  Ripped from NME Radio and sent to WeAllWantSomeone, it’s a brand new song that features on the upcoming movie “Greenberg” starring Ben Stiller.  The soundtrack features more music by LCD frontman James Murphy, so hopefully it won’t be too much longer until we get our grubby little hands on more.

Check it.

Mumford & Sons have been a round for a couple of years now, playing gigs in and around London along with buddies of the same scene like Johnny Flynn and Noah And The Whale, but they’ve only just (October 2009) released their debut album “Sigh No More”.  Polarising critics (some saying their music is awful, some (most) saying it’s excellent) they’ve made an album that’s passionate and catchy, melodious and stomping, but most of all enjoyable.

I think I’m on an Indie-Folk kick lately as most of the bands I’m featuring seem to be in that kind of genre, but what the hell, the music’s awesome and that’s all that matters.

Below you can hear “White Blank Page” that they did for WOXY, “After The Storm“, single “The Cave”, as well as a top notch cover of “Cousins” by Vampire Weekend.  Also are performances of “Timshel”, beautifully shot for Le-Hiboo and their official video for “Winter Winds”.

If you’re unaware of what Music Monday is, it’s a Twitter recommendation system where users of Twitter share their favourite music, artists, genres, etc in order to not only find new music themselves but help others find new music too.  Using the hashtag (#) followed by “MusicMonday” you can easily find new music posted by the thousands of people making recommendations each week.

Every #MusicMonday I upload a playlist of 20 songs that I’ve been listening to (new and old) over the past week and hopefully you’ll enjoy some of them.  Want me to check someone out? Let me know at that Contact Us thinger up there.

In order to listen to the playlist you’ll need to have Flash enabled.

This week’s #MusicMonday playlist:

I posted Local Natives’ session with La Blogotheque a couple of weeks ago but today I’m actually going to post some of their other music.  Formerly known as Cavil At Rest whom they released an EP (“Cavil At Rest EP”) and an album (“Orion Way”) under back in 2006 and 2007, they changed their name to Local Natives and set about readying another album.  That album (“Gorilla Manor”) was released in 2009 in the U.K. on Infectious Records and on February 16th 2010 in the U.S. on Frenchkiss Records.  Upon it’s release it garnered the band attention they hadn’t seen the likes of under their previous name, and they truly deserve it.

Three singles have been released from “Gorilla Manor”; “Sun Hands“, “Camera Talk“, and “Airplanes”, all of which are below for you to listen to along with their Daytrotter session and  gorgeous videos of “Wide Eyes” that they did for Le-Hiboo and “Airplanes” that they did for Yours Truly.  I also added their La Blogotheque session I featured a couple of weeks ago too.

Above is the artwork (click for a biggie smalls version) for the upcoming album for one of Seattle’s finest bands, Band Of Horses. As announced on March 2nd, the follow-up to 2007s “Cease To Begin” will be called “Infinite Arms” with a release date scheduled for May 18th that will precede a tiny wee baby tour of the U.S. and the U.K..

(via Twitter)

Every year since 2005 the awesome guys at the SXSW festival have put thousands of free songs up on their site for you to download for free, and completely legally too.

They used to create a torrent themselves for all the music but for the last couple of years they’ve left it up to generous members of the public to donate their time and effort to do so. Since all of the artists featured in the torrent have agreed to let SXSW give them away for free, it’s all completely legal and above board. This is about the only time you’ll be allowed to download 3.35GBs of music without fear of the RIAA catching you and sending you to an Armenian prison camp.

For people who can’t attend this is an excellent way to hear some of the bands on offer, and it’s an even better way to discover a shit-ton of new music at the same time. I’ll host some of the music myself but definitely check it out and see if there’s much you like, and chances are there will be.

Download the torrent here.

[UPDATE 00:16 - 03/07/10] As Ben (the guy who does all the hard work of putting these torrents together) has pointed out below, the second half of the torrent is now up on the site.  It’s an extra 392 songs at 2.08Gbs, so if this isn’t enough music to keep your ears busy for a week or two, well then there’s not much anyone can do for you.  Not only that, but he also uploaded the torrent for 2005 too.  Someone buy the guy a beer, or six.

Also check out the one for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005 is coming soon.

(via TorrentFreak)

Joanna Newsom played Jimmy Fallon tonight and it ended a couple of hours ago.  She was absolutely stunning as she did “Soft As Chalk” from her recently released masterpiece “Have One On Me”.

Having only just ended not long ago, so far there’s only one video of it available and the quality leaves a lot to be desired, but the audio is more than acceptable.  Just make sure to turn it up.  Hopefully in the morning there’ll be a Hulu or decent YouTube version of it available, but until then (or until this gets removed), this will more than suffice.

Why the fuck not?

Beginning as a Hip-Hop and Indie-Rock lyricist, Jonathan “Yoni” Wolf has since gone on to attract others into his ever-revolving Indie-Electronic-Hip-Hop-Folk-Rock orbit, including his brother Josiah Wolf on drums (who just released his debut album this week), Doug McDiarmid, and Matt Meldon.  Signed to Anticon Records they’ve dropped five highly regarded albums to date, “Eskimo Snow” being the most recent from September 2009, but it was perhaps their fourth albums “Alopecia” that really got them noticed, appearing on a multitude of year-end lists and a couple of “best album of 2008″ lists.

I’ve posted two of their own songs (“This Blackest Purse” and “The Hollows“, click to download) , an excellent and almost unrecognisable cover of “Close To Me” by The Cure (download here), and a fourth (“Canada”) that they did back in September 2009 with the band “Themselves” (download here).  Also check out the videos for “A Sky For Shoeing Horses Under”, “Gemini (Birthday Song)”, and “Song Of The Sad Assassin”.