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!
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.
Writing year-end music lists can get a little complicated. One of my biggest gripes is having to figure out what to do with those albums that I didn’t catch when they first came out. My 2006 best-of list had a 2003 album as #1. You can see where it gets tricky. Last year I just refused to even acknowledge any non-2007 albums. This year I’m giving them their own separate list. So here are my favorite non-2008 albums of 2008:
Picking my top 10 songs of the year is actually a fairly easy task – writing about them is not so easy. But I did it, so there:
I pride myself in being the most musically literate of us threevuers, but my friend Jeff’s blog, Radiation Output Determined, makes me feel a little behind the times. Which is funny, since the focus of the site is mostly on music that’s 30+ years old. He also moonlights as a DJ on KTUH 90.3FM, the University of Hawaii radio station, which runs from 6-9pm (HST) on Sundays.
So imagine my delight to be featured on his site the other day – not that I consider myself to be on par with the likes of Chuck Berry, Neil Young or David Crosby – but it’s flattering nonetheless. He’s planning on doing some writeups for some more of our friends, so keep checking back often.
This week’s You Should Know features the critically-acclaimed “slow-core” band Bedhead, who hailed from Texas and disbanded in 1998 (although the band essentially reunited under the name The New Year and still exists today).
You can purchase their albums on iTunes or on Amazon.com.
Click here to subscribe to this feature via iTunes.
This week’s installment of You Should Know features the Georgia-based band Luxury, who have released four great albums since their inception in the mid-90′s.
You can download the mp3s from 3 out of their 4 albums on iTunes or on Amazon.com, and you can get the remaining album right here.
Click here to subscribe to this feature via iTunes.
I’ll most likely never live in New York (thanks C.H.U.D.s ), but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to go there some time. Especially around the X-Mas season so I can ice skate at the Rockefeller, eat a slice of pizza in Times Square, contract a few venereal diseases, and go to the Blip Festival. Sadly, the closest I’ll probably get is watching this documentary made by Paul Owens
I read it was a free watch for the next week on pitchforkTV (a site that earns it’s own mention by being the next best thing to television) so I started watching it last night. Is it any good? Does it represent the scene in a positive way? Is the first image in the movie of a big, buff, black cowboy wearing a jockey strap slapping Al Pacino in the face? Click below to find out!
Continue reading ‘Reformat the Planet: Blip Fest Documentary is A Winner’
Taking a second to spread some love. My friend Tommy plays music under the moniker of lovehandles and made the video above to one of his songs, “Yes Yes Oui Oui”, and it’s pretty damn awesome. Have a watch/listen, let him know what you think on his myspace page.
With June fast approaching, I thought I would do a short list of my favorite albums of 2008, six months into the year:
Heading down to Mexicali, Mexico for Video Games Live on the 15th at the Califia Bullring pictured above. Pretty pumped, especially because the show is going off hand in hand with the new Gamacon Convention taking place right now in the heart of Baja. Expect a full report Sunday.
Do you know who this friendly, Ewok of a man is? What if I told you that he is responsible for some of the most well known, intricate and beautiful music you have ever heard? Well, maybe you haven’t heard his music, because it’s usually only in video games. Specifically, the Final Fantasy series. It’s Nobuo Uematsu, and the man is a musical Midas. He sets the bar for video game soundtracks.
I bring all of this up because 1UP has an awesome interview ( less of an interview and more of a documented slice of life) with the man and his wife taking place in and around his house on the slopes of Mount Fuji. I gotta say, going to E3, attending the VGAs and seeing triple A titles before they launch are big attractors to working in the games biz in a spectacular, look-what-I’m-doing way. Taking part in a meeting like the one with Uematsu seems more introspective and personally enriching. I’ve never been so jealous of games journalists as I am of Ryan and Milky.
I was inspired by Mark and his recent music list, and I decided to make one of my own.
I speak a couple different languages, so I’m always impressed when a non-native English speaker can speak English well. Here is a list of five great albums written by non-native English speakers but sung in English.
The 8 bit era of video game music is a fond time period for most of the people who currently play video games. If you are still playing today, you have a favorite game song. It was the point in gaming history where the music of the game added significantly to the emotion of playing the game. Would I have liked Bionic Commando as much if when I began my first mission the stark bombed out environments didn’t match the military snare beat pushing me though the world? Most likely I would not, because the music primed me mentally to play the rest of the game. This is what happened when actual musicians began actually writing actual music for games, instead of the code writers who made the game adding it as an afterthought. Continue reading ‘Why I love video game music’
Russ Crandall:
Tyler Miller:
Steve McKay:
Giang Cao:
Recent Comments