Category Archives: Downloads

High Places – 03/07 – 09/07 (Review) & Upcoming Show

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The High Places’ first release on Thrill Jockey is a collection of singles and hard-to-find tracks leading up to their signing. This release stands as an introduction to the collaboration of Robert Barber and Mary Pearson. Barber provides a babbling brook of cut-and-paste drum circle riddims propelling the paper boats of Pearson’s innocent iko-ikoish jumprope chants. Daycare psychedelica for the Thomas the Tank Engine set, if you will.

At times the at once atmospheric and Caribbean feel of the songs reminds me of my favorite parts of Adventures in the Ultraworld by the Orb.

The cover art used in this release is exactly the same as the band’s 2007 High Places EP 7″ (only 300 made) on Ancient Almanac that earned an impressive 8.2 at Pitchfork. All four songs from that EP are represented here along with some harder to find tracks including “Jump In” which was a song commissioned for an elementary school music program. It seems to me that this band isn’t entirely inappropriate to play for the little ones, in fact, and certainly a bit more interesting that some of the kid fodder dolled out today.

The band is currently on tour gearing up for their self-titled release on 9/23. You can hear two songs– “Golden” and “From Stardust to Sentience” from that release if you visit the band’s MySpace page. They also have some downloads available, too.They will be stopping in Grinnell College at Bob’s Underground Cafe on Thursday, 9/25 and at The Mill in Iowa City on Friday, 9/26 where they will be with Ponytail and Wet Hair.

Sep 6 2008 8:00P
FREE! East Village Radio Music Festival at South St. Seaport New York, New York
Sep 11 2008 8:00P
Le Poisson Rouge w/ Crystal Slits, Breathe Owl Breathe, Deastro New York, New York
Sep 16 2008 9:00P
Brillobox Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Sep 17 2008 8:00P
Grog Shop Cleveland, Ohio
Sep 18 2008 8:00P
The DAAC Grand Rapids, Michigan
Sep 19 2008 8:00P
Forward Festival w/ Dan Deacon Madison, Wisconsin
Sep 20 2008 8:00P
Pygmalion Fest @ Krannert Center w/ Yo La Tengo Champaign-Urbana, Illinois
Sep 23 2008 8:00P
Record Release Show at AV-aerie Chicago, Illinois
Sep 24 2008 8:00P
Triple Rock Social Club Minneapolis, Minnesota
Sep 25 2008 8:00P
Grinnell College w/ Ponytail, Wet Hair Grinnell, Iowa
Sep 26 2008 8:00P
The Mill w/ Ponytail, Wet Hair, Peaking Lights Iowa City, Iowa
Sep 27 2008 8:00P
Rhinoceropolis w/ Ponytail Denver, Colorado
Sep 29 2008 8:00P
Kilby Court w/ Ponytail Salt Lake City, Utah
Sep 30 2008 8:00P
Badlander w/ Ponytail Missoula, Montana
Oct 2 2008 8:00P
Nectar w/ Ponytail Seattle, Washington
Oct 3 2008 8:00P
Department of Safety Anacortes, Washington
Oct 4 2008 8:00P
Richards on Richards w/ Ponytail Vancouver, British Columbia
Oct 6 2008 8:00P
Backspace w/ Ponytail Portland, Oregon
Oct 8 2008 8:00P
Bottom of the Hill w/ Ponytail San Francisco, California
Oct 10 2008 8:00P
The Smell w/ Ponytail Los Angeles, California
Oct 12 2008 8:00P
Modified Arts w/ Ponytail Phoenix, Arizona
Oct 15 2008 8:00P
Emo’s Austin, Texas

Listen to Head Spins

High Places MySpace Page

High Places Blog

Calexico Video at All Songs Considered and Joey Burns Interview

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Thanks to the the Yahoo Calexico group, I bring another video clip from Calexico and Quarterstick. This one is from NPR’s All Songs Considered and is bundled with a review by Robin Hilton. The clip has some stripped-down arrangements of “Two Silver Trees,” “Man Made Lake,” and “The News About William” along with some commentary from Convertino and Burns about their hometown Tucson and the role it plays in their music. Apparently, this is the first of a series. So, visit that page for updates. These videos are filmed and edited beautifully, I would love to see these all edited together or possibly turned into a DVD.

NPR: Video: Calexico Previews New Album

NPR: Video: Calexico Part Two

Also, the fine folks at the Aquarium Drunkard blog published an interview with Joey Burns this morning about Carried to Dust complete with a couple of mp3’s to download. Go read it.

Upcoming Show: Backyard Tire Fire @ The Picador 9/10/08

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Backyard Tire Fire is a band I’d heard of, but never searched out. So, it was cool that the band’s manager reached out to me via MySpace last week to be a friend. I gave a listen to some of the songs on their page and checked out the streaming songs from their upcoming album on their website, too.

The guys from Backyard Tire Fire are from Bloomington, Illinois which is next to Normal, where I spent part of my childhood and one of my brothers was born there in the early Seventies while my dad worked at General Electric. Not that this makes them my neighbor, but they might be the only band I’ve ever heard of from there.

I bought and downloaded from mp3.rhapsody.com Tire Fire’s 2007 release Vagabonds and Hooligans in an acceptible 256K rip. The band delivers a confident mix of Americana-leaning rock with Indie sensibilities. Across the album we are offered glimpses of the bands influences– “Green Eyed Soul” comes off like an early Wilco track, “Tom Petty” draws a bit from Tom Petty. The Black Crowes could stand to write a soulful ballad like “The Wrong Hand.” But, to break Backyard Tire Fire down to comparisons misses the fact that it is a strong album from a band that is growing with every release.

In a time when bands that tour as much as Backyard Tire Fire does tend to wait a while between releases, it’s a bit surprising to see that they are releasing the followup to Vagabonds and Hooligans at the end of this month (August 26th) titled The Places We Lived. The three songs streaming from their website and MySpace page shows the promise of another great release. According to the press info on their website, the band holds true to an analog asthetic preferring to record with tape over ProTools. The logical The There will be a vinyl version of this album as well!

The band is getting ready for a run of late-summer Midwestern dates in support of the release that will run through the end of September. Here are the dates as of today from their MySpace page.

Aug 13 2008 9:00P
Lucky Aces – Ed Anderson acoustic Le Roy, Illinois
Aug 16 2008 9:00P
J Bucks – Ed Anderson acoustic Bloomington, Illinois
Aug 20 2008 9:00P
Official TPWL Chicago Listening Party – Alive One! Chicago, Illinois
Aug 21 2008 9:00P
Highdive Champaign
Aug 22 2008 9:00P
Paulie’s – w/ Dirty Hands Band Bloomington, Illinois
Aug 23 2008 9:00P
Paulie’s – w/ Company of Thieves & Peter Adriel Bloomington, Illinois
Aug 28 2008 7:00P
Kiss the Sky – BTF acoustic instore Geneva, Illinois
Aug 31 2008 10:15P
Strip Mines Music Festival – Shawnee Cave – Strip Mines Music Festival Murphysboro, Illinois
Sep 5 2008 8:00P
Metro w/ Ha Ha Tonka Chicago, Illinois
Sep 10 2008 7:30P
The Picador w/ Ha Ha Tonka Iowa City, Iowa
Sep 11 2008 7:00P
The Rave w/ Ha Ha Tonka & Blueheels Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Sep 12 2008 8:00P
The Annex w/ Ha Ha Tonka & Blueheels Madison, Wisconsin
Sep 13 2008 9:00P
7th Street Entry w/ Ha Ha Tonka Minneapolis, Minnesota
Sep 17 2008 7:00P
Blue Note Summerfest w/ Avett Bros & Ha Ha Tonka Columbia, Missouri
Sep 18 2008 8:00P
Record Bar w/ Ha Ha Tonka Kansas City, Missouri
Sep 19 2008 9:00P
Josie’s w/ Ha Ha Tonka Emporia, Kansas
Sep 20 2008 7:00P
Lucas School House w/ Ha Ha Tonka St. Louis, Missouri
Sep 24 2008 8:00P
Grog Shop w/ Ha Ha Tonka Cleveland, Ohio
Sep 25 2008 8:00P
The Basement w/ Ha Ha Tonka Columbus, Ohio
Sep 26 2008 8:00P
Spin w/ Ha Ha Tonka Indianapolis, Indiana
Sep 27 2008 7:00P
Southgate House w/ Ha Ha Tonka Newport, Kentucky

The band will be in Iowa City at the Picador on September 10th. The show is at 7:30PM so maybe it will get over early enough for me to do a mid-week show. Opening is Ha Ha Tonka who did a Daytrotter session in July. Tickets are $7 and if you order them in advance you get a signed poster of the album art you can pick up at the show.

There are a lot of places to stream or download content for Backyard Tire Fire.

They did a session for the kind folks at Daytrotter in March with some new material.

Click Here to download a FREE EP called Sick of Debt (a zip file of mp3’s)

Click Here to download live shows of the band from archive.org

Click Here to stream Vagabonds and Hooligans at Indie911

Click Here to download an in-studio recording with My Old Kentucky Blog from last year.

Click Here to visit their MySpace page which has six tracks from The Places We Lived.

Free Download : Break Up The Concrete by The Pretenders

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As reported by Billboard yesterday, Chrissy Hynde and company, aka The Pretenders have a new album titled Break Up The Concrete which will be released 10/7 on her new label Shangri-La Music. The album was recorded in 10 days with a mostly-new version of the Pretenders. In addition to original Pretenders bass player Nick Wilkinson, she added James Walbourne and Eric Heywood on guitars and notorious session drummer Jim Keltner. Coincidentally, this week I was just listening to super-group Little Village from 1992 that had Keltner on skins!

The first track “Boots of Chinese Plastic” a rollicking roots-rock twang-fest is available for free download from AOL.com’s Spinner.com site via the Pretenders site.

Visit the Pretenders site and sign up for e-mail notifications because the plan is to release one track per week leading up to October 7th from Concrete as mp3’s through other website partners including QuickTime, clearchannel.com, cmt.com, ilike, imeem, mp3.com and others. The track available today is a surprising 320Kbps mp3! I hope that the rest of the tracks will be of the same quality! I can’t find a track listing for the new album anywhere. Based on the 1-track-per-week, I guess there will be 10 tracks.

Here is the tracklisting (Thanks to user Mark666!):

01 Boots of Chinese Plastic (download from Spinner.com)
02 The Nothing Maker (download from iLike)
03 Don’t Lose Faith in Me (download from C|Net download.com)
04 Don’t Cut your Hair (download from imeem.com)
05 Loves A Mystery (download from CMT.com)
06 The Last Ride (download from WindowsMedia.com)
07 Almost Perfect (download from Yahoo! Music)
08 You Didn’t Have To (download from iheartmusic.com)
09 Rosalee (download from VH1.com)
10 Break Up The Concrete (download from thepretenders.com GarageBand Contest Page) – fill out your info in upper right area of the page which will bring you to a page to download.
11 One Thing Never Changed

Free Download : “Two Silver Trees” by Calexico from Carried to Dust

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Today we get to hear and download the full track “Two Silver Trees” from the upcoming Calexico release Carried to Dust which will be released September 9th. You might recognize this track from the first trailer that I reported about on July 11th. In addition to the free download, there is another one of these great trailers. This one is an instrumental, so I can’t begin to guess what it’s called.

Click Here to download “Two Silver Trees”

(Almost) Free Download : Paul Westerberg 49:00

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When I stumbled into this during my daily diet of music blog cruising I went out and immediately purchased Paul Westerberg’s new recording 49:00 from Amazon for $0.49!!!

As one track clocking in at a confusing 44 minutes, it is apparently the “tip of a really large creative iceberg.” The songs were recorded  The recording is a cut-and-pastishe of new songs, older songs and samples of classic rock songs. It’s lo-fi sensibility and Westerberg’s signature vocals gives it a feel that reminds me of the early Replacements. The jarring editing of the recording has songs sliding in and out sometimes edging the previous song out of the speakers from the left or right which might be why they are suggesting that you don’t listen to this while driving (LOL). The snippets of songs reminds me of Lolita Nation’s little soundscape. The Classic Rock mix at 40:00 or so is pretty great– especially since he would likely have recorded full versions of these songs to create this.

I stopped following Westerberg– who at one point was kind of a personal hero of mine– some time after his second album Eventually in 1996 completely missing his Grandpaboy catalog (BTW: Eventually is available used from Amazon on CD for $0.37!!!!)

Anyway, Paul is a genius and this is an amazing gift to his fans and would-be fans. For $0.49 what are you waiting for?
Download the whole damn thing from Amazon

Update: Likely due to the cover songs included, this has been unceremoniously yanked! He has provided an addendum track called “5:05” at TuneCore that gives us the missing minutes and kind of an explanation.

Crazy Deals at Rhapsody mp3 Store

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It’s pretty clear that Rhapsody/Real is taking this targeting of iTunes seriously. Even in the midst of bugs in their download mechanism they are drawing new members by offering insane discounts! Just in the last week they’ve announced two serious $9.99 downloads– both anthologies in the form of box sets. The first one on July 4th was the Doors Perception boxset which included all 6 Albums– 90 tracks (this deal ended some time today). The next one announced this morning was The Complete Led Zeppelin Collection which included all ten albums, plus the live BBC sessions AND the 2007 Mothership remasters! That was 165 songs for $9.99! This offer is now done as well. I’ll try to keep posting these deals here as I find out about them.

The comments on the slickdeals.net posting where I found this has a bunch of people bitching about the sound quality of these mp3’s. They are supposed to be 256Kbps, but some folks think they can hear the difference between these and 192K rips they did of their own CD’s. I didn’t notice anything in my car when I listened to them, but I haven’t tried these with headphones. Admittedly, I was wondering how they spun all of this content up so quickly unless they could on-the-fly convert their DRM content. At any rate, the Led Zeppelin deal is still a HELL of a good one!

My First Experience With Rhapsody MP3 Store

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I found out about Rhapsody’s mp3 store quite accidentally. I was doing some reading about Umphrey’s McGee’s “Jimmy Stewart” performances when I found a link to a Jimmy Stewart collection at Rhapsody which was all mp3. This was news to me. I was familiar with Rhapsody because Coke Rewards was affiliated with them since Sony killed off Connect. Both Connect and Rhapsody were lame as they needed special software and players to support their proprietary DRM media.

I had a collection of points going due to my Coca-Cola habit, and aside from burning points bidding hopelessly on a Canon EOS 5D camera I hadn’t found anything I wanted to buy or didn’t have enough points to buy and they got rid of the ability to convert the points into a BestBuy Gift Card. I was pretty disappointed in the Coke Rewards deal especially since Pepsi’s rewards could get you mp3’s from Amazon. I said as much in an online survery that mycokerewards presented to me recently.

So, as of June 30th, Rhapsody has mp3’s in addition to their DRM content! This is in a BETA mode so caveat emptor. I ran into my first issue with my first attempt to cash in some points. I found that they had Pieta Brown’s pre-One Little Indian catalog and I wanted to get that so I started with In The Cool. I happened to be sitting in an airport waiting to board a plane which was my first mistake. I cashed 225 points to get one album download and proceeded to check out. There are two ways to download the mp3’s: have the album bundled into a .zip file or use their downloader utility. I chose .zip. Well, needless to say they started boarding the airplane and I couldn’t finish it. So, I closed the lid of my laptop thinking that I’d be able to resume it.

Nope. As far as Rhapsody was concerned I downloaded the whole album except two tracks. I did a bit of searching on the ‘Net and found this BetaNews article which effectively describes the same problem. Rhapsody doesn’t allow you to re-download the album once they think you’ve got it.

So, I signed on with their support chat utility which effectively needed to hand me off to second-level support who issued me credits for the 10 tracks I didn’t get. This is a much better situation than described in the BetaNews article where they were out $22! This is the right thing for Rhapsody to do, I think, until they can get their software able to tell whether a download completed successfully.

While its software needs some fixes, it is great to have another source for mp3’s in addition to Amazon and eMusic. I plan to stick around as long as I’m collecting Coke points. One cool thing about Rhapsody is you can purchase albums without signing up for their subscription– unlike eMusic. For the next download I’m going to try to use their utility or at least wait until I have a dedicated connection and enough time to sit through the download.

Free Downloads: Some Baltimore-related Live Downloads

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As I mentioned earlier, Baltimore’s Arbouretum is releasing a split album with new Thrill Jockey signees Pontiak called Kale. The two bands played one show together in Baltimore on June 4th at The Talking Head. I knew about the show, but I didn’t know that the show was taped and available for download via Aural States which is a blog/site dedicated to happenings in the music scene of Baltimore.

Arbouretum headlined and played a set of mostly tracks from Rites, but also included one of the covers from Kale “Buffalo Ballet.” A great set, in my opinion.” Pontiak’s set was also very good and included “Dome Under Sky” from Kale.

The opening act was another side project of Dave Heumann from Arbouretum called Television Hill. Television Hill is more of a throwback folk/blues outfit, but still very good. This set is available from Beatbots which also covers the Baltimore scene.

Big thanks to Jeff the Taper who made these recordings available.

Click Here to stream or download Arbouretum’s set.

Click Here to stream or download Pontiak’s set.

Click Here to stream or download Television Hill’s set.

Aural States is also hosting a live set from Wye Oak from March along with an interview. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to catch the show next weekend with Pontiak and Wye Oak in Iowa City!

Cut Copy Offer Up “Hearts on Fire” Acapella for Remixers

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Cut CopyOne of my summer soundtrack albums is Aussie band Cut Copy‘s new album In Ghost Colours. Produced by onetime UNKLE member and DFA Records head Tim Goldsworthy it’s an excellent pastiche of 80’s Synthpop acts drawing from New Order, Human League, and even clubby techno inspiration.

Already the album– which was released in March– has had a number of really great singles and remixes done. Cut Copy announced on their MySpace page that they would like to extend the opportunity to their fans as well, so they’ve provided the vocal acapella to the dancy “Hearts on Fire” track. With it’s four-on-the-floor beat it is a pretty likely mashup candidate, I think. From the blog:

for all you folks who like having fun with these things. Go nuts, but if you want to do anything commercial with it, ask us first, and let us hear it. Who knows? It might even get picked up for official release. Actually – we’re excited to hear all uses, commercial or not, so send them on!

Send all mixes, mashups, muzak, etc. to: info@punkdafunk.com or to one of the fine folks at your local Modular office.

Click Here for Cut Copy’s MySpace Page

Click Here for the mp3 of the acapella (Sendspace Link Alert) (The AIFF file is here)