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.
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of seeing the Pet Shop Boys at the Greek Amphitheater. It was a warm night, but not unbearable and perfect to see a concert under the stars. I believe this is my third time seeing them and probably the most memorable (hopefully this is not due to my old age and I just can’t remember the previous ones). They came out like always with wonderful stage theatrics to get the crowd going. The stage design was pretty cool as well. It had a cube, boxy, pixel, theme going on that they used through out the performance. They had three huge projectors shooting video and pixel like graphics upon a wall of white boxes, which purposely came tumbling down after they played a few of their songs. After that, the dancers use the boxes as part of their set and show. It was very entertaining and it was like watching two shows at once. The Pet Shop Boys played some of their new songs from their Yes album, and also played many of their popular hits from the past, reaching as far back as Actually. Their set lasted close to an hour and a half and one of the most memorable parts of the night is when they mixed Cold Play’s (Joe Satriani’s “If I Could Fly”) “Viva La Vida” and “Domino Dancing” together. As part of the encore they played “Being Boring”. That’s such a damn good song live. Here are some videos from their tour shot by some hardcore fans in HD from You Tube.
Oh, and yes they are wearing boxes on their heads.
As we all know by now Itunes 9 was released last week. If you’ve downloaded the new version and are having some problems figuring where things are, or want to know how to do some of the new features like the wish list and Itunes LP, MacLife has a “How-to” guide for you.
I’ll be honest with you and say that I haven’t downloaded the new version yet. I usually end up waiting a week or two before downloading any new updates just to see if there’s some major bugs.
One feature that I will definitely like is the Home Sharing feature. From the Apple site:
iTunes makes it easier to share music, movies, TV shows, and more. With Home Sharing, you can browse the iTunes libraries of up to five authorized computers in your house, import what you like, and automatically add new purchases made on any of the computers to your own library.
I’m glad they finally released a feature like this. My wife is thrilled to know that she can grab all of her music that she likes off of my computer and put it on her laptop and I’m glad I can get rid of them. HAHAHA! Just kidding. I’m so going to pay for that.
Sorry for the wait in between post, my only excuse is that I’m just lazy. I have a few things to discuss, so lets get to it.
Concerts
First, I’m sad to say that I missed the Band of Horses concert last week in Pomona. I heard from a friend that the show was great and they played a lot of new music from their next album. I guess I’m going to have to wait and hear it. I also heard from the same source Grand Archives will be releasing a new album as well and I believe the release date is September 15th.
I am going to the Pet Shop Boys concert on September 24th at the Greek, They’re promoting their latest album Yes. What I’ve heard sounded pretty good, at least better than their last album. Oh, and Johnny Marr plays guitar on the album as well (I don’t know any other musician that plays in so many bands, it’s like he’s talented or something).
Other upcoming concerts that I’ll probably be missing are:
The Pains of Being Pure in Heart – Shows are September 19 at The Troubadour and the 21st at the Casbah in San Diego. Their new EP Higher than the Stars is being release September 22nd and I should being looking forward to that.
Nocturnal Festival – It’s that time of year again and I’ll be skipping out on it this year. The concert is September 26th and it’s going to be at the NOS Events Center again this year. A big Booo! to that one. Last year was just so so and you can read the review here if you wish. I wouldn’t mind seeing Roni Size and Rabbit in the Moon perform live, but I don’t think it’s worth the price. I say move it back to LA and have some more big headliners and make it 18 and over please. Hopefully next year.
Camera Obscura – The band is coming back to the States around November, but mostly on the east coast. They’re coming back to play the shows that they had to cancel from their previous trip and to make it up to their fans, what a band. I wish I can see them again.
Other Hodgepodge
Sambassadeur – is going to be releasing a new single in November and will be releasing a new album in January. I can’t wait for that one and I will see them in concert this time. Oh yes, by the power of gray skull I will.
Pitchfork Media - has a few Camera Obscura videos of them performing live on their Cemetery Gates series. Too lazy to find the videos? Don’t worry I got you covered. I believe you don’t have to watch the annoying advertisement in the beginning of the videos, because I embed them in the post. You see, I take care of my peeps. Enjoy.
