Inflight At Night

Hey, my friend Matzah (who thinks I am blowing it by not posting very much lately) is putting out a The Muslims 7″ next month on his bedroom label, I Hate Rock N’ Roll. Of the two brand spanking new songs on the 7″, Parasites b/w Walking With Jesus, are two of the best the band has written to date “Parasites” is one of the best the band has written to date, and “Walking With Jesus” is a Spaceman 3 cover.

Stream Parasites b/w Walking With Jesus and pre-order now

An excellent lineup that shouldn’t be missed…

Tickets for Tee Pee Records 2nd Annual ‘Manifest Destiny’

Not to sound like a claimer, but ah fuck it, I’ve been singing the praises of this band since April last year and have continued to ever since…so I am very stoked for them, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer and harder working bunch. Here’s what Touch And Go has to say about signing the band:

HOT NEWS: Crystal Antlers sign to Touch and Go Records

Now that YouLicense has some money, maybe they can afford to pay someone to make it so the mp3s uploaded to their site by artists looking to license their songs aren’t easily downloadable by just viewing the source code and finding the path to mp3 files.

Music Business Resource YouLicense.com Raises Funding

Initially released in Europe in October 2006, Blackstrap’s second full length, Steal My Horses and Run, is finally seeing it’s official release in the U.S. via New York’s Tee Pee Records.

At first pass it would be easy to write off Steal My Horses and Run as just another retread of the JAMC and My Bloody Valentine catalogs, that is if it weren’t so well executed and/or if you weren’t able to make to the last quarter of the album where the band really opens things up with some more diversified song writing. Coming across much the same as Black Rebel Motorcycle Club did on their first album, Blackstrap wear their influences (Velvet Underground, My Bloody Valentine, Neu!, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Stereolab and Suicide) on their sleeve, writing songs that would fit on any of the aforementioned bands’ albums, only with much better production.

Made up of former and current members of Bottles and Skulls, Fleshies, Lower Forty-Eight and a drummer who is in too many other bands to list, San Francisco’s Triclops! are a veritable hybrid of the Bay Area underground punk/hardcore scene.

Triclops!’s “trademark” are their vocals, which for about half of Out Of Africa are run through broken solid state amps with a phaser explosion - achieving a sound that I can only describe as how the Mars Volta’s Cedric Bixler-Zavala would sound singing underwater. While slightly off-putting on first listen, the phasered vocals effects - delievered by Fleshies’ Johnny - become pretty aurally addictive over the course of the album, so much so that when the effect is not being used, I found myself anxiously awaiting it’s return.

Yes, basing songs upon classic literary works and-or their creators at first always seems pretentious, even ColinMeloyian, but hey, if it was good enough for the likes of Iron Maiden and David Axelrod who are we to disagree. Enter Bloomsbury, the new 4-song EP from Eagle Rock, CA’s own shaggy academes turned shaggy indie rockers, Princeton. All glib - borderline sarcastic introductions aside, Bloomsbury is well put together and accessible, surprisingly so when you consider the lyrical focus on early 20th century London intellectuals and the long list of instrumentation.

Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul is arguably one of Redding’s best albums, if not one of soul music’s best. It presents a cohesion beyond the usual collection of singles and b-sides common of the time, and it also set the stage for what would become his most recognizable and influential yet ultimately tragic song, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay”. In many ways Otis Blue is the last Otis Redding album, not technically as there’s his duet album with Carla Thomas and the posthumous Dock of The Bay, but in terms of an album that’s Otis through and through, not to mention proof of what could have been to come from the young Georgian, this is the one.