I’ve had The Album Leaf in heavy rotation for the past few weeks. If you live in the SF Bay Area, check them out at Mezzanine on Saturday (I will be there). If you haven’t heard them before, think Sigur Ros with some beats and piano mixed in. Go here for a good profile and some mp3 goodness.
One of my favorite new bands is Band of Horses. Check them out on Hype Machine. If you haven’t used Hype Machine before, just click on a song title and then click the play button under Listen.
Here’s their video for Great Salt Lake.
I saw them play at the Independent in SF back in March…
The video of Obadiah Parker’s acoustic cover of Outkast’s Hey Ya was posted on YouTube over two months ago. Yesterday the video was featured on Digg’s front page and the popularity of the video has sky rocketed overnight. The video has been viewed 139,707 times as of today and the band (currently unsigned) was mentioned today on Spin magazine’s blog.
8/22 Update:
Here’s another example of the power of Digg. Someone uploaded a video called Slowest Man on Earth to YouTube. After two months of decent traffic (about 8,000 views), the video’s popularity went through the roof after it was dugg to Digg’s video front page. As a result, the video was featured on Good Morning America.
Last night I saw one of my favorite bands from the 90’s - Toad the Wet Sprocket - at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga. I’ve seen Glen Phillips a couple of times in the last few years but I had never seen Toad play live until last night. Overall it was a great show. The band sounded great and the venue was perfect.
Here’s some VERY rough audio from the show, recorded with the voice recorder on my digital camera:
I saw Imogen Heap play tonight at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Great, great show. One of those shows where everyhing felt right: the right artist at the right time in the perfect venue. Click here for some amazing photos from this show by Gordon Lai.Set list:
Here’s a great cover of Wild Horses by Iron & Wine + Calexico. This is from their 11/30 show at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. You can stream the entire show at the NPR web site.
All of these great year-end music lists got me to thinking that subscription-based music services like Rhapsody are totally worth it if you like to listen to a lot of new music. All but one of the albums on the Gotham Gal list (the Bright Eyes album) are available on Rhapsody. I dumped all of the other albums from her list into a Rhapsody playlist and - bam! - just like that, I’m enjoying all kinds of new tunes for less than the cost of a CD.