The other night I was looking for new bands to listen to and I stumbled upon this gem of a band. Taking their name from a character from the movie Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, the female trio from Brooklyn produces soft synth pop beats over laid with lovely female vocals. Their music is described as hip, alt-folk, synth, soft electronic, and you just can’t help feeling really relax when listening to them. If you’re looking for something soft and poppy Au Revoir Simone might be the band you’re looking for. Check out this vid.
I decided to check out the Labrador Records site to see if any of the bands are coming out here to play and lo and behold:
US tour in April
19/4 – Philadelphia, PA – Marathon Bar
20/4 – Washington, DC – DC9
21/4 – New York City, NY – Mercury Lounge
22/4 – Boston, MA – Great Scott
23/4 – Columbus, OH – Summit
24/4 – Chicago, IL – Schubas
25/4 – Seattle, WA – Sunset Tavern
26/4 – Portland, OR – Holocene
27/4 – San Francisco, Rickshaw 28/4 – San Diego, CA – Soda Bar
29/4 – Los Angeles, CA – Viper Room
Yes I’m excited. The question is can I get my lazy ass out to LA on a Thursday night?
On a side note:
Shout Out Louds released the album Work last week. Sounds more low key, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s definitely a changed from their catchy Swedish Indie Rock that fans have been accustomed to.
Malory also released an album called Pearl Diver in January to the ClubAC30 label. Some other bands that you might have heard of off that label are: Airiel, Air Formation, Broadcast, Chapterhouse, The Daysleepers and much much more! Pearl Diver reminds me of their last album The Third Face, but sort of a continuation or a progression of it. I’m glad they finally finished and released an album though, because I was starting to wonder if they turned out like so many other bands who just disappear and are never heard from again.
I just downloaded the album today and there’s some pretty catchy songs like “Days” that should instantly be a hit with people. Most of the songs that I’ve listened of the album European still has that signature Sambassadeur pop. It makes me think that I should be riding a bike or walking around some city in Sweden, or for me Riverside which doesn’t have the same feeling when I think about it now.
I went to the official Sambassadeur website and found out they’re only touring in Sweden so far. I hope they come out to the States, and if they don’t, The wife and I will take an unexpected trip to Sweden (just let me dream a bit Dear).
The Mary Onettes just released their album Islands yesterday and some songs that immediately caught my attention are: “Puzzles”, “God Knows I had Plans”, and “Dare”. For those who do not know, The Mary Onettes is a Swedish Indie Band that has a retro 80’s sound to them. Echo and the Bunnymen is probably the strongest artist that I can compare them to, and that’s a good thing my friends.
I’m still listening to the rest of the album to find some gems and I’m hoping they come to the States for a tour. If I find anything, I will definitely let everyone know.
A couple of weeks ago I was browsing the internet and found a music website that you may have not heard of. The website is called lala. At first glimpse it functions like most music websites where you can listen to and purchase songs; however it goes further than just that. There are many aspects of this music website that sets it apart from the rest. I’ll be honest with you. I just registered over the weekend and started to get myself familiar with it, so I’m still a newbie and I’m still trying to get a feel of it.
Okay, this might get confusing and I really do apologize for my lack of writing skills on this one.
The way lala works is that they provide their entire music inventory for you to listen to anywhere over the web. You can actually listen to an entire song of an album before you buy rather than those 30 second samples that I hate so much. I of course found this feature to be really cool. Now, if you really like the song you can sign up, purchase it for 89 cents and download it on to your computer. Or if you don’t want to download it, but you really have to have it, you can just pay 10 cents and you can listen to it as much as you want and lala will store it for you. All songs are DRM free and are in MP3 format. It pretty much acts like a music library for you, but your music is living on the web and you can have access to it anywhere as long as you have internet service.
Another feature they offer is something called lala music mover. It’s lala software that you download on to your computer and what it does is scan your entire music library on your computer and matches it up with their music catalogs. All the songs that are matched up will now be playable through their service which you can listen to it anywhere on the web. Oh, and if you have playlists through itunes, those playlists will be added as well. I noticed the Smart Playlists were not added but only the regular Playlists. So I did this entire procedure and it took two hours for about 1800 song, but that’s only for the songs they have in their catalog. For the songs they don’t have, you can upload them if you wish. It’s actually an automatic process that does it behind the scenes, but for me it’s going to take a total of 1day and 8 hours for  the 1,000+ songs they don’t have in their catalogs! For those songs they don’t have, I believe you can just manually pick the songs you want to upload.
Lala also has no advertising on their site which is pretty amazing in today’s web world and I really can’t figure out how they work that in their business model. When you sign up, which is free by the way, you get 25 credits added to your account to purchase web songs. One credit buys you a web song. The web songs are the songs that you can add to your library, but aren’t down-loadable unless you want to purchase them for 79 cents more.
The other aspects of lala are like most other music websites like eMusic or even Pandora. You can create playlist, queue songs, share music with friends through twitter or facebook, browse music, and lala also gives recommendations. One thing I found out is that you can embed a playlist or a song into a blog. Like this.
This is going to be so much easier for me to share music, instead of uploading a song or trying to find it on the web. Awesome.
Well I hope I was able to bring something new for you to explore and if not please feel free to add some helpful tips or suggestions.
Update: For some reason the music player does not work in Firefox 3, but does work in Safari. I emailed lala’s tech support to let them know about the bug. Hopefully this will get fixed soon. My apologies.
