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  • Will You Dance?

    The latest casualty of the streaming wars is The Bird and the Bee’s 2015 album Recreational Love, which unceremoniously disappeared from Qobuz sometime recently. The album still shows up, but lists all the tracks as “unavailable.” Usually this is a sign that the service has loaded a newer version of the album to select. Not so in this case.

    Music by The Bird and the Bee can sometimes be hard to find. The band followed up their first volume of Interpreting the Masters, an album of Hall & Oates covers, with a volume of Van Halen covers. The first is readily available, the second, almost impossible to hear on any format other than used vinyl.1 All the album’s listed on the merch site that the band links to are sold out. When there are so many music services out there, it seems careless not to make your albums available somewhere digitally.

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  • These Dreams

    Heart was the band that broke the glass ceiling and bought women-fronted hard rock to the masses. By 1985, they had expanded beyond just pummeling riffage and Renaissance Fair folk that betrayed their love for Led Zeppelin. They didn’t completely eschew the hard stuff, but they had synths and they were going to use them.

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  • I Set My Face to the Hillside

    Tortoise – I Set My Face To The Hillside (YouTube)

    Last year, I bought TNT by Tortoise on CD from a Discogs seller.1 I should tell you, this sort of activity is as sure a sign of my devotion to a particular album as any. After all, I’ve got access to high-quality digital copies of albums like this through streaming. I don’t need to seek them out on an online marketplace, where, let’s face it, you don’t always know the quality of the merchandise.2

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  • A Room You Can’t See

    Terry Godier might be something of a genius, as evidenced by his masterfully crafted RSS reader, Current, and the ideas behind it. So when I saw he had created a short documentary about musical formats, one of my favorite subjects, I had high expectations.

    Godier hits upon a lot of the problems intrinsic to streaming media in the video. When he discusses the limitations of physical media, he’s able to make them sound like desirable features.

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  • Forgotten Favorite

    Some good news came this week in the form of more Velocity Girl remastering. This time it’s a compilation of non-album tracks from various places being released by Slumberland Records. The collection is called 1989-1992 and the contents are precisely what it says on the tin.

    The first available track from the release is my favorite song by the band, “Forgotten Favorite.” Even after the remaster, it’s still a bit muddy, but I’m not sure if there is anything more the band could do apart from rerecord the track completely. It’s still a stellar song through, with a shoegaze-worthy crush of guitars that’s as propulsive as anything put out by UK pedal hoppers. Despite some muck still on the recording, the vocals are pristine, and Sarah Shannon sounds heavenly.

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  • We Might As Well Be Strangers

    The last few days have brought with them some serious nineties nostalgia. So it’s fitting that Weezer released a video for their new single, “We Might As Well Be Strangers.” The song represents a return to the form for the prolific but not always consistent band.

    Perhaps the best part of the song and the video is the inclusion of guest Karly Hartzman of Wednesday. Hartzman brings her punk rock sneer and pout to the breakup song. As Grace Robins-Somerville notes for Paste Magazine, Hartzman perhaps outshines Weezer’s frontman.

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  • Chemicals Make You Small

    When I read that Hammock had collaborated with The Flaming Lips on their song “Chemicals Make You Small,” I was a bit shocked. Wayne Coyne and The Lips are brash, experimentally noisy, irreverent, sometimes goofy and often oversaturated. They seem to have almost the opposite of Hammock’s ethereal, slow, quiet and completive approach.

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  • Jim Carol New Year

    With Life in Small Spaces, the upcoming album from Black Marble, the project’s creator, Chris Stewart, taps into one of my semi-obsessions. The album’s description on its Bandcamp page has further details on the clue we are given with the album title.

    It is an invitation to accept and consciously agree to a more minimal lifestyle for the sake of creative expression and freedom, and to never need to compromise your values for the tempting illusion of success.

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  • Quick Hit

    Clive Thompson has the story of how Phil Collins accidentally invented gated reverb, the drum sound of the 80s, by leaving a talkback microphone on.

    Normally, the reverb on a drum hit is intense at first, then slowly fades away. But in the Phil Collins drum session, the accidental reverb behaved differently. It had a nice, loud, booming reverb for a moment — then the reverb abruptly stopped. This created a very cool new type of drum sound. It was boomy and huge, but wasn’t messy, because the reverb for each drum hit ended before the next drum hit.

    Gated reverb was used to startling effect on “In The Air Tonight” (watch a first-time reaction video to the song if you haven’t already). Prince jumped all over the drum sound, and it was also used by Kate Bush, John Cougar Mellencamp, Hall and Oates, and Duran Duran.

  • Don’t Panic

    Despite seemingly being designed by a corporation to be mostly inoffensive, sometimes to the point of banality or worse, Coldplay launched into the world consciousness hot, with “Don’t Panic,” the song in the pole position on their debut album Parachutes. Though I personally feel more generosity towards Chris Martin and crew, some believe “Don’t Panic” is the band’s only good song.1 Whatever the case, the track was certainly a winning way for Coldplay to announce their arrival on the scene.

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