everyday

In Rainbows is Radiohead’s (Wikipedia article) seventh major studio album. While I (and many, many others) have written about the manner in which it was offered before, I have been reserving my judgment of the music until I had time to let it all sink in. I tend to be too critical and judgmental during the early phases of my listening experience. I want the new album to be like the previous album (or the first album, or second album or whatever I happen to think is the greatest). This desire to hear more of the same clouds my judgment of the new offering. Knowing this, I like to give a new album some time to grow on me. That being said…

I love it!

It is altogether fantastic. A wonderful mix of their own stylings; touching on nearly every form they have created to date, while updating and improving the sound all the while. The songs each have a distinctive sound and appeal to me for entirely different reasons. In my earlier listens, I felt like the first half of the album was considerably stronger than the second half. This feeling has subsided, completely. The entire album, comprised of so many different songs, is absolutely wonderful!

I just listened to the album from Eddie Vedder (of Pearl Jam fame) that was used as the soundtrack for the movie Into The Wild, and I am loving it. Eddie Vedder has an amazingly powerful and evocative voice that is used to great effect on this album. I highly recommend it! The movie was also great, it is highly recommended as well.

Radiohead have announced that they will be releasing their upcoming album on October 10, 2007. While this, in and of itself, is wonderful news, the truly amazing part is the way that the album is being release. Radiohead have decided to release the album as a digital download available on their website! They will be releasing what they call a “discbox” in December as well that will contain additional materials that are not available in digital download. Kudos to Radiohead for their forward thinking approach to music distribution.

But wait, there’s more! Not only do you get the new album “In Rainbows” as a digital download from Radiohead, you also get to specify how much you want to pay! Let that sink in a bit… You go to their website, click on the link to buy (pre-order before the 10th of October) the new album and you are presented with a shopping cart that allows you to fill in the price! This is absolutely amazing and, I believe, completely unprecedented (at least from a band with the stature of Radiohead).

The below screen grabs show, from left to right, Radiohead’s explanation. Just click on the “?” in the shopping cart.

Bloc Party

Weekend in the City

I can’t quite figure out what it is that I like so much about Bloc Party, but I do like them! I just downloaded their latest offering A Weekend in the City and I am giving it a listen. So far, I like it…

Snow Patrol, particularly the song “Chasing Cars” off of their Eyes Open album.

I have been listening to Snow Patrol for a while, since the album Final Straw came out. I always liked them quite a bit, but recently they played a couple of songs acoustically on KROQ’s morning show. I was super impressed with how good they sounded and how real they sounded playing acoustic. I began playing them in heavier rotation and they are still gaining in popularity in my playlist.

Thanks to iTunes’ new “Cover Flow”, I think there may be a resurgance of beatiful and artistic album cover art. Kudos to Apple! The neat thing about this little addition to iTunes is that it wasn’t initially programmed by Apple, they purchased the code from a third party Apple developer, kudos again.

So, Apple had a little press show today, if you aren’t familiar with Apple’s press events let me just say that it is almost a cult phenomena. That being said, the new products and software they have released are really cool!

iPod

The new iPod, iPod Nano, and iPod Shuffle are really sweet. The design changes and improvements, while subtle and evolutionary in nature are really well thought out. I really like what Apple is doing, with the direction they are going.

iTunes

More of the same here, subtle changes that just make you go “ah… that’s nice”. It seems that Apple truly cares about making their products better. Instead of letting their accountants design their products and software by cutting corners everywhere, they are making high quality products and software, charging appropriately and reaping enormous profits!

One good, one… not so much.

Dave Mathews Band at the Hollywood Bowl, not too shabby. The quality of the music was very high, it sounded really good. If there was one thing I could change, I would limit the number of long winded jamming sessions. Dave Matthews Band has a whole library of wonderful songs that they can play, but they spent a great deal of time playing 5-10 minute jam sessions throughout the concert. I would have preferred to have heard more songs than a few long songs. Overall, it was a very good concert though.

Then there was Faith Hill and Tim McGraw. Faith Hill was boring, she sounded like a high pitched windbag. Tim McGraw was a good performer at least. Too bad his throat was hurting, or he may have done more of the performing.

Courtesy of Last.fm. If you haven’t checked out Last.fm yet, you should give it a try. It is a social networking site based on what you listen to. I haven’t met anyone interesting through it yet, but I am not active on it at all. Mostly I think it is a cool idea. That, and they provide a XML feed of my most recent 5 tracks, which I would like to integrate into this very weblog.

Normally I post an individual band, or their album and try to say why it is that I enjoy their music. This time, I thought I would display my top 10 bands of all time (not really of all time, just since I started using Last.fm to track my musical interests). I don’t forsee this list changing all that much, certainly not the top 3 entries, they are my fallbacks (simply because I love their music so). The rest of the entries will probably normalize as time goes on. Take for instancet the Red Hot Chili Peppers (#5 as of this post), I have been listening to their new album, Stadium Arcadium a bit which has skewed their ranking. In the future, as my playlist grows and more data is collected, I presume that it will be extremely difficult for any new band or album to drive itself into my top ten.