Au Revoir Simone will be playing at The Echo on July 7. I believe the tickets will be $14 at the door and $12 online.

If you’re looking for a site that keeps track of all the bands that you love and tell you when they go concert,  you might want to check out this site called songkick. It tracks your favorite bands, emails you when they play in your area, and it’s free!

Sambassadeur just released a video for “I Can Try” off their new album European. I found this video on a site called stereogum, which is another cool music website if you’re looking for more sites to peruse through. Enjoy

Another concert on the horizon will be the Shout Out Louds and they’re playing at The Glasshouse in Pomona on Monday the 24th. The tickets are $20 at the door, but I will unfortunately miss them this time around.  If you have a chance to see them, or need some cheering up since LOST will air its final show the night before, then I would highly recommend seeing this band. I saw them play in Seattle and I remembered them putting on  a pretty good show. Here’s some vids to pass the time.

One show that I definitely want to go see is Stars. My friend introduced me to this band not too long ago and I’m glad he did.  They’re playing at The Troubadour on June 22nd and 23rd.  They just released their single called “Fixed” and their next album The Five Ghosts will be available  June 22nd. I guess I have to download their album before the show that night!

Hopefully you get a chance to see anyone of these bands. Cheers!

Hi Everyone. The  National posted their tour dates and you can find the list here. It looks like they’re playing at the Wiltern on May 21st and 22nd which is a Friday and Saturday. I need to find my way to one of those shows!

A couple of weeks ago the NY Times website had a pretty in-depth article about The National and their whole musical process. It seems to me after reading the story I would fail miserably as a band member. Not only because  I can’t play an instrument, but it seems pretty stressful at times and I’m a pretty no drama type of guy. Highlighting the article was all their songs off of the new High Violet album available for free streaming. I read on another forum that the NY Times took it down, but NPR now has it up, so go to their site and check it out. I believe you’ll find at least one song that you’ll connect with.

And last but not least, Pitchfork has a wonderful series called Castle Rock where bands would play live in abandoned castle that overlooks the Hudson River.  Here are the videos for your viewing pleasure.

Well, it was a sad day to find out The Mary Onettes had canceled their US Tour do to that damn volcano (which I still can not pronounce) that is disrupting the entire globe. How did I found out about this sad news you ask?  I went to the Viper Room website and noticed they weren’t showing The Mary Onettes on the calendar list for April 29th.  I being somewhat neurotic had to find out why and sent and email to their info department.  I honestly didn’t think I was going to receive a reply, but in a matter of seconds I did! I have to give a shout out to Sarah Berkowitz at the Viper Room for her quick response of the sad news, but she did inform me that The Mary Onettes are going to try to reschedule their US Tour in the fall after their European Tour.  Let’s keep our fingers crossed on this one.

In other Swedish Indie news The Radio Dept. is releasing their new album Clinging to a Scheme today! Go get it!

This is going to be short and sweet. The National just released their single “Bloodbuzz Ohio“. You can also download it here for free.   That’s the sweet part. If this single is any indication of what their next album is going to be like, you can count me in.

One more thing, the band is going to be playing at The Wiltern in LA May 21 & 22 (Friday and Saturday night folks!) The new album drops May 11. Can’t wait.

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.

The new Sambassadeur album is out!

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).

Here’s a sample of  “Days”

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.

Here’s some vids to keep you busy.

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.