Recently in Music Category

Later this month, my favourite group of all time, The Divine Comedy - well, Neil Hannon - releases a new album, Bang Goes The Knighthood.

The first single will be The Indie Disco. And it's a cracker!

You can watch the video here (and here, in HD)

I actually cannot wait for the album...

Oh my word, this is superb.

Take 20 musical YouTube videos, start them at any time, mix them using the volume sliders and you've made your own song.

In Bb 2.0 is a collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon from Science for Girls, and developed with contributions from users.

It's just fabulous.

Links:

• 20 video link
• 16 video link
• 12 video link

It was recently announced that to save money, the BBC are thinking of closing 6Music and the Asian network radio strations.

I am a huge fan of 6Music - I have never listened to the Asian network - and would be most upset were it to not be around anymore.

I can't write about how to help save it any better than other people already have elsewhere, so this is just a series of links. If you are interested, please make sure you follow the advice given in the following pages.

• James Hunt's blog.
• Neil Hannon
• Save 6Music Facebook Group
• Dan Bull's Open Letter (Song) To The BBC

The music of Brad Skistimas has been a part of my life for a good long while now - I can't actually remember how I stumbled upon him. Whatever, he's a wholly independent artist who releases his own albums from the money in his pocket.

Over the next month (until August 16th) he is partnering with the website KickStarter.com and is attempting to raise $20,000. But he needs your help.

Your support will enable me to release Five Times August's next album "Life As A Song" with enough financial backing to make it the success it deserves to be. I know it sounds like a lot of money in a short amount of time, but I wouldn't take on a project of this magnitude if I didn't think we could do it together! I just need EVERYONE'S participation, otherwise my next album might not come out for a while.

Being an unsigned artist has its pros and cons. I have always found more pros, which is why I have yet to sign with any kind of record label. I get to spend more time connecting with the fans, I get to write the music I want to write, and I get to be who I want to be without some corporate fat cat telling me how I need to change. All in all there is simply a lot more artistic freedom. The one major speed bump is that the cost of every album I release comes out of my own pocket. I am by no means a rich man, especially in a day where most people opt not to buy music.

It can be a major struggle making an album a success without the proper funding. Besides the standard costs of recording, mixing, and mastering a CD, more money actually goes into the promotion and publicity of an album than making it. That's what this money will be used for. With your help we can get this album to people that may have never heard of Five Times August before. We will be able to afford a publicist to help spread the story of Five Times August, and also do major promotion so we can bring a lot more awareness to this album. Your pledge will also help us while on the road this fall, enabling us to promote our upcoming tour better than we have ever done before, while still keeping gas in our tank, food in our bellies, and not so many nights sleeping in our van, hotel rooms are nice every once and a while! The great thing about your donation is that you will be rewarded tenfold!

With every donation there is a prize in return. This can range from signed advanced copies of the album (so you can hear it before anyone else does!) to a full on weekend camping trip with me, some friends, and our guitars around a campfire! There are different levels of pledges, a lot of really cool prizes, and the more you donate the more you will get in return! However, if we do not raise the full $20,000 by August 16th I will get nothing, you will not be charged and do not get your prize, and all will be lost! Without your help "Life As A Song" might not be released!

And, here is my own pledge to you... If we do reach the full $20,000 before August 16th I will donate HALF of all my album sales for the rest of the year to various charitable causes. Over the years I have been a part of some really cool organizations and I've always believed in giving back to the community when you can. So let's do this together!

I believe in you! I wouldn't have made it this far in my career without your help and now it's time to take Five Times August to a whole new level. YOU are my record label and together we can change the music industry forever.

Thank you so much for your support,
Brad w/ Five Times August

Go to KickStarter.com if you want to help.

Here's his progress so far (this will automatically be updated):

idiomag is a constantly changing music magazine catered to your individual needs. How exciting!

Unfortunately, you do need to give it some prodding in order for it to find out your requirements and interests, but you can do this fairly easily. Especially if you use Last.fm to log your listening. (My Last.fm page)

I've written many times about how useful Last.fm is for finding out about new music, but it's the third party uses for the information that really make the plug in useful. In this case, idiomag take your Last.fm profile and find articles about the artists you listen to. My most current mini-magazine is shown below.

Helpful, huh?

The New Standards are an American group built up of John Munson (Trip Shakespeare and Semisonic), Chan Poling (The Suburbs) and Steve Roehm (Billygoat, Electropolis).

They are a trio of bass, piano and vibraphone - which sounds like it shouldn't work, but my God it does!

They've been around a good while, since 2005, and perform their favourite songs in their own style - a sort of jazzy, rock soul thing.

Their albums, The New Standards and Rock and Roll, are totally fabulous and well worth a listen to. Some tracks are available to hear on their site (linkage). Stand outs are their arrangements of Hey Ya by Outkast and Britney Spear's Toxic.

Below is a YouTube video of The New Standards playing Trip Shakespeare's Snow Days at their 3rd Annual Holiday Show at The Fitzgerald Theater 2008.

Beyond excellent.

Save Christmas from the God-awful, snorefest that is the X Factor.

Last.fm, my favourite music based social network [my profile page], are behind a campaign to stop anything that's rubbish getting to the Christmas number one. I'm thinking their main reason is because the public doesn't have a great track record when left to their own devices with these things...

In 1987, the Pet Shop Boys performed Always On My Mind on an ITV special commemorating the tenth anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. Propelled on by the TV show, it beat "Fairytale of New York" by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl - and you find me a better contemporary(ish) Christmas song.

The less said about Cliff Richard's Mistletoe And Wine, in 1988, the better.

I meant to write something deep, meaningful... profound even. But it really just isn't in me at the moment.

I have a couple of drafts that will appear eventually. But they'll be less relevant to my life at that time.

Me and December do not get on.

The Christmas season for the year has well and truly kicked off. I have sung a few songs, holiday and otherwise, at various times recently. I guess specifically the Christmas carols I've sung have filled me with joy and hope. They usually do.

The carols are like the greatest hits of western music: only the best and most beautiful have passed the test of time, and when I sing them, I often think of the many, many generations of people who sang them before me.

All of these songs share the same message of peace and joy.

On a very long, dark, winter night, all of the people got a glimpse of a great light, which filled them with hope.

Peace, heavenly peace, is the refrain and quite a good one at that.

[some thoughts via Dan Wilson]

It was a well known fact, commonly stated in recent weeks due to the death of its creator Ronnie Hazlehurst, that the theme tune to Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em (which is horrible to type due to the apostrophes) incorporates the show's title in morse code in its opening bars. The BBC has published this image proving it:

It's not the only show that does this of course. Another famous one is the tune for Inspector Morse - however, Barrington Pheloung included names that either revealed the killer or threw people off the scent apparently.

[via BBC News]

Now then... last month I went to see a TV show being filmed at the mighty Leadmill in Sheffield. Said programme was Mobileact Unsigned, a hunt for the best unsigned band in the country. The episode was shown last Sunday on Channel 4 and I was thankfully unseen in the final edit. Yay!

I only knew about the thing because of the band, Envy & Other Sins, who I first saw way back in 2006 when they supported OK Go in Leeds. Anyway, I joined their email list from their website and they keep me in touch about all kinds of things, including this TV show.

Mobileact Unsigned is a bit like X Factor, but with credibility... there are three regular judges - Jo Wiley (Radio 1), Alex James (bassist in Blur) and record label executive Simon Gavin - and one guest judge - Calvin Harris (some dance music bloke).

The point is that each band plays one song and then gets judged on their performance and whether they go through to the next round or not. Three of the four judges needs to like them and the overall prize is a one album record deal. Bargain.

Anyway, Envy & Other Sins got voted through along with three other bands that day and, to be fair, thoroughly deserved to be as they were the best of the seven bands that I saw being filmed. There was a wide range of musical styles on show that day, from indie to screamo, from metal to folk-jazz pop stuff. Eclectic I think is the appropriate word!

Back to the point of this post, which was to bring you a video the band have made for the song they showcased on the programme, Highness. When you watch it, you'll see why I've rambled on about the X Factor and stuff...

"We made this video for Highness in July, we were saving it for a rainy day, and since the gargoyles were spewing this morning, today's that day..." - Envy & Other Sins, 17th October 2007.

It's brilliant!

Links (open in a new window):
The website of Envy & Other Sins
Highness video on YouTube