Like Russ, I also discovered a whole bunch of bands that completely blew me away this year, but couldn’t be added to the list due to the fact that these albums were all released outside of 2009.
For me, 2009 was a year that really cultivated my love of instrumental bands, so this list contains a number of albums from instrumental bands in various forms. Enjoy!
If you’re a new iPhone owner, or you just don’t scour the App Store every five minutes, you may have missed out on the thousands of apps available today. Luckly, Mac|Life released their 100 Greatest iPhone Apps of 2009 list, and it’s a great introductory list as well as great way to catch up on those apps you might have missed.
Most of the apps on this list are good deals, although there are a few deadbeats in there as well ($20 for Wolfram Alpha, when I can go to it on Safari for free?). For instance, I’m still waiting for the GPS apps to go down in price, personally. But according to the list, Peggle is only $2 right now, so I’d jump on that with a quickness.
One glaring omission is the last.fm app, which is one of the best ways to experience new music for free.
Every year, I stumble upon albums that weren’t released that year but are still damn good. Some are new acquisitions, some are albums that I’ve had for a while but never gave them their due; either way, here is my list of non-2009 albums that were part of my 2009.
Here are my picks for my favourite songs of this year. These songs aren’t in any rigid order per se, though generally speaking, the further down the list a song is, the more I liked it.
This week we’re happy to present you with three individual Top 20 Albums of 2009 lists, from all over the globe. Agree? Disagree? We don’t really care, but leave your comments below.
Here we are on our third Top 20 Albums of 2009 list, though hopefully I think you’ll all agree that each list is refreshingly different. My list is perhaps quite heavily weighted towards UK bands, as well as a few minor label bands, so apologies if a couple of these albums are a little difficult to track down.
This week we’re happy to present you with three individual Top 20 Albums of 2009 lists, from all over the globe. Agree? Disagree? We don’t really care, but leave your comments below.
P.S., My list is the best!
Continue reading ‘My Faves: Top 20 Albums of 2009′
I just stumbled upon bandbcamp.com, which allows bands and musicians to upload their music and then distribute it as they see fit – for free or linked to a PayPal account for some dollahz. The interface is really smart and easy to use, and I was able to upload my music in its original, high-quality .aif format, so that people can download it in any level of quality they please.
I found the whole experience much easier to use than what I’ve been using on last.fm, especially because bandcamp lets people download the albums in full, as opposed to last.fm’s track-by-track headache. If I was still in a band, I’d use this site to distribute my music, mos def.
And, it has an embedded player that works with our hosting site, which is pretty cool:
Check out my page here and download (for free) my latest EP, 2013, if you’re so inclined.
It’s not often that I’m dead wrong when it comes to my gut instinct about music. I’m a snobby motherfucker most of the time, and I know what I like and what I won’t like. And for some reason, I got it in my head that the band Pinback wasn’t for me, even though some of their first releases were on a record label I deeply respect (Absolutely Kosher Records) and they’ve always received favorable reviews.
It wasn’t until the other day that I even gave them a shot, and I was surprised and annoyed by how much I liked them. I didn’t expect catchy music; in fact, somehow from seeing the Offcell EP cover about six years ago I had surmised they were a math rock band (you know, because the cover has a graph on it!) and figured they made lo-fi, angular and dissonant music, which is the exact opposite of the truth. Their songs have a distinctive aura of progression about them, while still maintaining a comfortable, catchy quality to every track. Overall, the songs remind me of a young, mopey Death Cab For Cutie. I was mostly annoyed because now I have like six albums to go through. So far, I’ve liked nearly everything I’ve heard, and the only time I reach for the “skip” button is when they make something super-poppy with fake drums, which is probably 10% of the time.
All I can say is that I’m dumb, and shouldn’t jump to conclusions with music so much. Then again, being skeptical has saved me from making some horrible purchases as well, so who knows.
Boy, tell you what, I thought I had found a little slice of perfection when I found last.fm about six months ago. Recently I found a similar site, lala.com, and my mind has been blown. Let me break my mind-blowage down for you. Lala is a two-pronged devil: on one hand it lets you archive and stream your entire music library, and on the other hand it lets you search for and find new music to buy on the cheap.
1. You sign up for a free account, and install a “lalamover” program onto your computer. You then specify what folders you want lala to look at (i.e. your music folder) and it will scan all of your music. It then compares your collection to what they already have on their online servers, and that music becomes instantly associated with your lala.com account, allowing you to stream those songs (in surprisingly high quality, too) as much as you’d like. You can create quick playlists of albums, artists, etc, without having to shuffle it like Pandora or last.fm. For all the music you have that lala doesn’t have (which isn’t much – of my 18k songs, it had 14k online already), the lalamover program will upload the rest of the songs and you can then listen to them all you’d like. That last process takes a while (about a week for me), but after that, you have your entire library archived and available to stream from any computer, for free. Pretty awesome.
2. You can also browse or search the lala.com site for music, and listen to anything once (unless you already own it, which means you can listen to it all you want). Signing up for a free account also gives you 25 free “credits”, which is the ability to add a song to your account and listen to it as much as you’d like. After that, you can add a song to your lala.com profile for about $.10 or download the mp3 for about $.89, which is pretty fair.
And in a nice move, you can sync your last.fm and lala.com profiles, so that your listening habits on lala.com will be scrobbled onto your last.fm profile for maximum anal retentiveness.
This weekend’s entertainment is a two-parter: I found the site lecargo.org today, whose YouTube channel features nearly 200 intimate recording sessions like the Kings of Convenience video above. It’s one of the better songs from their most recent album, Declaration of Dependence, which I’ve been too busy/lazy to review lately.
As you may already be aware, some of us here at Threevue are big fans of Last.fm. As some of you may also be aware, Last.fm is one of three new apps (joined by Facebook and Twitter) to be integrated into the Xbox 360 dashboard in an attempt to further blur the lines between games consoles and media centers.
For those who aren’t yet aware of Last.fm, it’s a music program which lets you listen to music of your choice, in full, online. Not content with just doing that, Last.fm will also recommend music to you based on your selections, track your listening habits, provide pictures and biographies for the artists, as well as tour schedules for any touring artists, as well as having a burgeoning community. On top of all of that, it’s also free!
As is, there are already a number of ways to use Last.fm; via the site, a desktop app, and an iPhone/iPod Touch app, all of which vary greatly in their functionality; the website is the most feature-packed, whilst the iPhone app is extremely bare-boned. As a result of this variance, I was naturally a little sceptical when I first heard that this service would be coming to the Xbox dashboard.
However, I finally got around to checking this out today (despite downloading it when it launched on the 17th), and I found myself pleasantly surprised at how robust this app really is. This version of Last.fm allows you to perform the vast majority of tasks available on the website, plus a few more gamer related things that the site doesn’t offer. It all works fairly well with the Xbox 360 controller too, though the ability to skip tracks with the triggers/bumpers would have been good.
There are some noticeable omissions though; whilst your listening habits are “scrobbled” to your website profile for tracking, there is no stat tracking functionality available on the dashboard app itself. Also, the “on-tour” schedule is sadly missing from the dashboard app, as are all of the event planning functions available on the site. I have personally found these to be really useful as a single-source way of finding out which bands are playing in my city, and when. There also doesn’t seem to be any way of adding people to your Last.fm or Xbox friends lists through this app, which seems like a huge missed opportunity.
Regardless of these omissions, the Last.fm dashboard app still contains a host of worthwhile features, and is well worth checking out. Of course, it’s debatable as to how much use you’ll get out of this if your Xbox and PC are set up in the same room, but if you do have them set up in different rooms then this could be well worth your time.
release date: September 22, 2009
Volcano Choir is a collaboration between that singer/songwriter guy that everyone went ga-ga over last year (Bon Iver) and post-rock band Collections of Colonies of Bees. Before we get anywhere, I have to admit that I think “Collections of Colonies of Bees” is a stupid band name (but a good band). Basically, I think most band names should pass the mom test – if I feel like an idiot telling the band name to my mother, that band fails. And that band fails.
Volcano Choir, on the other hand, is a fine band name. This is a fine album, too, so long as you don’t expect another Bon Iver release. Truth be told, there are only two out of these nine tracks that I would consider singles – the rest are explorations and soundscapes. But they’re done really well; they fit somewhere between drones and movements. It’s a bunch of people playing a bunch of instruments lightly and making a big sound out of it. And personally, I like it, if only because it’s the perfect music to study to. The two singles – “Island IS” and “Still” – are some of the better songs I’ve heard this year, and the latter features some T-Pain autotunage. It clocks in at 35 minutes, which is about as long as I can stand music like this, so it works out perfectly.
release date: October 6, 2009
I’ll be straight up with you, right here, right now: the only thing wrong with this album is that there are so many good Mountain Goats albums out there already. This is the seventeenth Mountain Goats album. I’ve had my soul churned by the scathing, insightful voice of singer John Darnielle so many times before that it’s hard for me to jump into this album blindly. For example: I had open-heart surgery in 2007, and for the first month afterwards every time I tried to get out of bed, the chorus of “This Year” (from 2005′s The Sunset Tree) would play through my head incessantly; it’s a harrowing experience to hum “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me” repeatedly to yourself like that. Sorry, but as good as The Life of the World to Come is, I don’t plan on having an experience like that with this album.
For those of you that don’t know, The Mountain Goats is really just one guy and some friends that record something between conventional singer/songwriter songs and indie rock. It’s hard to classify, but there’s one universal element to the music – Darnielle’s urgently bleating voice, complemented by some truly incredible wordcraft. The past couple Mountain Goats albums have been a little too restrained, but The Life of the World to Come has a few hot-burners, so it’s all g.
If you’ve never heard The Mountain Goats, I recommend The Sunset Tree. If you’re already a fan, you won’t be disappointed with this one.
Russ Crandall:
Tyler Miller:
Steve McKay:
Giang Cao:
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