I stumbled across two different opportunities to download some rare Jonathan Richman recordings (see below) and got locked into a massive Richman listening session, including revisiting one of my favorite albums of all-time, The Modern Lovers, which I had ignored for way too long. Here’s what I think is an unofficial video for the song “I’m Straight” from that album and three rare live music video that perfectly capture what makes the childlike Richman (and his shows) so special. Enjoy.
I found out yesterday via the awesome roio audio archive (bookmark it! bookmark it!) that Beck has started hosting a “Record Club” at his official web site where he gets together with friends like Wilco, Devendra Banhart, MGMT and Feist to cover some of their favorite albums in their entirety. The first album he tackled with his pals (including actor Giovanni Ribisi on glockenspiel on this track) was the classic The Velvet Underground & Nico album. You can download the entire effort for free here via roio. It’s definitely worth owning if you’re a fan of VU, Beck or both.
p.s. If you’re interested, roio has also uploaded Beck’s take on Songs Of Leonard Cohen.
This is the Mahotella Queens first single from ‘64 on the Motella label and it has never been released in digital format. Now you can grab it and 29 other rare South African jive tracks for free, courtesy of collector Nick Lotay, via the phenomenal music blog matsuli music. About 3/4 of this amazing collection of hard-to-find recordings titled “Mavuthela - The Sound of the Sixties” has never been released on CD and some of them were lovingly culled from original 78 shellac discs. If you are a fan of any of the Soweto comps (notably The Indestructible Beat of Soweto) like I am or Paul Simon’s Graceland, you need to grab this now (matsuli expires downloads after an undisclosed period of time). Make sure you check out Nick’s extensive “liner notes” while you’re there. Enjoy.
Tom Waits’ new album Glitter and Doom Live, including “Trampled Rose” and a bonus disc of nothing but Tom’s spectacular stage patter, is coming out on November 24th and to promo the release they’re giving away the first eight songs from it for free here. Go get ‘em.
Okay, I lied. It’s Micachu and the Shapes. Their new album Jewellery saved me after an interminable subway commute (fuck you G train, you horrible, horrible thing!) from Queens to Brooklyn last night. I lost count of how many times I listened to the mangled semi-acoustic stomp-ditty “Eat Your Heart.” Hands down my favorite song so far this year. You can check it out and download it (and two other songs) here.
p.s. BTW, if you were bummed that this really wasn’t a Susan Boyle video, here’s a discovered recording of her singing “Cry Me a River” for a charity CD in ‘99. Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.
Fish & Roses EP—Organ-fueled, long-out-of-print underground art skronk from ‘87 ripped from vinyl for your enjoyment. “Booth” is just plain beautiful, “Screwed’s Crude, Screwed” is a blazing jazzbo stomp, and off-kilter oddities like “Have A Nice Day And Fried Rice” are as smile-inducing as they are aurally lopsided. Bonus points: One of the best live songs I’ve ever seen in my life occurred when Fish & Roses joined Yo La Tengo on stage in a strip mall bar in Naugatuck, CT (home of Naugahyde) and utterly blew the Velvet Underground’s “What Goes On” through the roof and up into the stars. I wish you all could have been there.
Get Your War On—“Sarah Palin and the Rape Kits” ... biting satire done right.
The BigO’s Bootlegs—The navigation’s a little screwy on this site from Singapore, but check out the left sidebar for some great free bootleg downloads of everyone from Bob Dylan to Elvis Costello to Neil Young to underrated sax master David Murray to Pink Floyd.
Sarah Palin’s Debates Made Easy 101—“At the insistence of the McCain campaign, the Oct. 2 debate between the Republican nominee for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin, and her Democratic rival, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., will have shorter question-and-answer segments than those for the presidential nominees, the advisers said. There will also be much less opportunity for free-wheeling, direct exchanges between the running mates.”
If anything else is floating your boat this Sunday, drop a link in the comments. Now excuse me while I go convince my lovely wife Chris what a colossally bad idea it would be to go to Ikea this afternoon. Pray for me.
Just found out about this at TBogg’s joint. I’ve been on a pretty huge Replacements run since Rhino re-released and remastered their Twin-Tone stuff, so this is pretty great news (and, from the sounds of it, a pretty wise business move on Westerberg’s part). You can only get it here (I looked), but I’m listening to it now and it’s worth it (yeah, I know, 49 cents, but you have to install Amazon’s ridiculous MP3 downloader and time is money, yo).
UPDATE: 49:00 is a jumbled, cross-hatched mess (which I really like) and for that reason I’m going to label this my favorite Westerberg solo album yet. Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash is my favorite Replacements album, so your mileage may vary.
Gorgeously-rendered esoteric comps like these are hard enough to track down for top dollar, so you’d damn well better go download them for free from the always excellent Egg City Radio:
[T]his three-disc Italian exploitation film soundtrack collection [Nate Thompson] made especially for his blog is too good to let fade away into the ether. Nate sez:
“Given the huge amount of great film music never commerically released in any format, I decided to cut together a series of suites of some outstanding titles that deserved some notice; here the spotlight turns on some of the great (well, in most cases) Italian composers whose work has often never gotten the credit it deserves. Taken from a variety of sources (video, M&E tracks, or whatever’s handy), these have been tweaked to sound as good as I can make ‘em; hopefully you’ll discover a few new gems in this three-part collection, entitled ‘Italian Blend’.
The Dixie Hummingbirds—“Christian Automobile”—playing 6/26 at Celebrate Brooklyn
HARRY NILSSON DOES POPEYE— I don’t know what’s weirder, the fact that I really like the Popeye soundtrack (probably never making it to CD) or that there are actually demos available ( and they’re even better than the final versions). Drink your spinach.
FISA HOLD ‘EM—I’m pretty much in the same camp with John Cole. Steve M. has it right, too.
THE BEATLES’ GET BACK—I’ve always had a soft spot for the Beatles’ Let It Be, which I’ve enjoyed a lot more than, say, the bloated ‘n’ silly Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (there, I said it) and this Glyn Johns mix, appropriately titled Get Back and replete with studio chatter, makes it even sweeter.
MATT TIABBI’S “FULL METAL MCCAIN”—“McCain is perhaps the first candidate in history to stump against two bills bearing his own name.”
I’m going to check out Medeski, Martin & Wood and Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog at Celebrate Brooklyn in Prospect Park tonight, so I got a hold of MM&W’s latest release Let’s Go Everywhere and was surprised to find out that it was children’s album. I’m a selfish, childless bastard, so that wasn’t what I wanted or needed, but the good news is that it’s a damn fine children’s album and something every parent of youngish thingees who reads this blog should look into snatching up. You can listen to four of the tracks at their MySpace page and I highly recommend you start with the FUNky “Where’s the Music?”, which just may be the best kids song ever (I can’t stop listening to it) and will surely worm its way onto my next mix CD.
MORE: You can download two MP3’s from the album, including “Where’s the Music?”, from here.
Sorry for the lack of blogging. I took a huge and tragic spill on a hill I had no business skateboarding down back when I was in college and, as a result, I occasionally throw my back out, so I’ve been laid out flat for the past two days. Here’s a quickee post for you to enjoy and then I’m going to crawl back on the couch.
Guitarist extraordinaire Gary Lucas hosted a “Beefheart Night” back on April 9th at the Knitting Factory here in NYC. Gary played with his fantastic all-instrumental Captain Beefheart cover band Fast ‘N’ Bulbous (their CD Pork Chop Blue Around the Rind is highly recommended) and several fans and friends of Don Van Vliet spoke in between the band’s two sets. David Lynch sent in a cool little video of himself reading “Pena,” too. The highlight was a surprise appearance by the legendary Robyn Hitchcock at the tail end of the evening, who performed three songs with Lucas accompanying him on the steel guitar. A few weeks ago I uploaded my video of them doing “Sure ‘Nuff ‘N’ Yes I Do” to YouTube and yesterday Lucas contacted me to let me know that both he and Hitchock really enjoyed seeing it, so I uploaded their version of “China Pig” today (unfortunately, I didn’t record their last song “Click Clack”). Enjoy.
“Faith Healer” from Big Dipper’s Boo-Boo, quite possibly the best EP ever released
Thank god I thumbed through the latest Time Out New York this morning or I wouldn’t have known that two of my favorite indie pop bands of the 80’s, Big Dipper & Great Plains, are playing tonight at Southpaw in Park Slope. Boston’s Big Dipper released their first three exceptionally solid pop masterpieces in the late 80’s on the legendary (and long-gone) Homestead Records label and Merge Records was recently kind enough to re-release all of that out-of-print material and a slew of great bonus material on an insanely cheap 3-disc box set called Supercluster: The Big Dipper Anthology. Columbus, OH’s Great Plains were under-appreciated fractured pop masters, churning out smart n’ snarky clingers like “Letter to a Fanzine” (chorus: “Why do punk rock guys go out with new wave girls?”), “Dick Clark” and “Martin Luther King/Martin Luther Drinking”. Old 3C’s wonderful 2-CD retrospective Length of Growth 1981-89 is unfortunately out-of-print and fetches $99 or more online, but you can obtain a CD-R version of it from the label and apparently MP3 downloads are still available via eMusic and iTunes.
ATTENTION NYC MUSIC FANS: Might as well shoehorn this in here ... Rumproast will be giving away a pair of tix for the May 1st show featuring I’m From Barcelona & Thao Nguyen at the Masonic Temple in Brooklyn in the very near future. If you want to go (or know someone who does), keep an eye on this blog for details.
