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Music I like: Broken Bells & Gorillaz

// March 10th, 2010 // View Comments // Music

The keyword for both of these artists is Collaboration. I always love seeing great artists getting together and creating something unique that you would not see with one single artist on their own.

Broken Bells

This duo is made up of front man for The Shins, James Mercer and Brian Burton a.k.a. “Danger Mouse.” I’ve been a fan of both of these artists in some shape or form. With the The Shins, I fell in love with Mercer’s haunting vocals after hearing them for the first time on The Garden State Soundtrack. I know of Danger Mouse mostly through his collaborations including Gorillaz on their second album, Demon Days. He first jumped into the limelight in 2004 with his highly controversial mashup of Jay-Z’s Black Album and The Beatles White Album called “The Grey Album.”

You can hear Broken Bell’s full album in a couple of places for a limited time. NPR wrote an article about them and streamed their full album on their site. This may be there for a short time since their album is already out in stores. You can also listen to the full album for free on LaLa after signing up as a member. You can download one of their songs “The High Road” from the NPR SXSW Music sampler.

Below is a in-studio clip courtesy of Pitchfork.com

Gorillaz: Plastic Beach

If you haven’t heard of Gorillaz, you’ve probably been living under a rock. Their music is used heavily in commercials including ipod, motorola, and many more. You’ll never see the real people behind Gorillaz on any of their albums. That’s because the band is made up of four animated band members. The one permanent member of the band is Damon Albarn formerly of Blur. The rest of the band members are various musician from different bands.

Their latest album “Plastic Beach” has a bunch of well known artists helping them on the tracks from Snoop Dog to Mos Def to Da La Soul to Lou Reed. Take a listen to the tracks below.

Always been a fan of the Gorillaz animation as well. Check out their latest music video for Stylo.

Swell Season Performance and Interview

// January 18th, 2010 // View Comments // Music

You’re probably wondering who the hell is Swell Season and why should I care? Well if have seen the movie Once, then these are the two main characters in the movie who have started a real band together. If you haven’t seen Once, what’s wrong with you??? It’s a great little film I highly recommend it.

I watched this interview and performance on BoingBoing Video and had to share it. I love the two’s chemistry together and it makes for great music. Watch the video and take a listen. If you like what you hear, check out Swell Season’s album, Strict Joy.

You sample some of the album here:

Source: BoingBoing

U2 and YouTube Live

// October 26th, 2009 // View Comments // Blog, Music, Social Media, Video

Last night U2 broadcasted their concert at the Rose Bowl via YouTube. It was a huge event and pretty impressive show. The video quality was surprisingly good for a webcast. It seemed to be a space themed concert with an a little David Bowe “Ground control to Major Tom” to start off the show. They even had a moment where an interview played from one of the astronauts from the International Space Station played over their “Bubble Screen.”

This is yet another example of a musical group embracing technology and its many advantages to reach a huge audience. Millions of fans were able to access U2 from across the globe for FREE! You were able to experience one of your favorite bands from the comfort of your home and planted to seed for new fans in the process.

Besides just YouTube, they used the power of social media to get the word out with the help of twitter and facebook. Their page contained “crawlers” similar to other sites like ustream where people could tweet straight from the YouTube page about the show bringing in a global audience. I know this because I watched this twitter crawler go across the screen as I watched and noticed people from Israel, Japan, Mexico, Philippines etc posting in.

It was a great concert. Alot of the favorites were played along with songs from the new album. Don’t worry if you missed the live broadcast I’m sure it will be rebroadcast at least another day. I can’t wait to hear the stats on how many people were reached worldwide when YouTube stops the rebroadcast and we tally all of the status updates from Twitter and Facebook. I’m sure some records were broken last night.

U2 is already a huge worldwide band but they maintained or increased their elite status. I hope that more artists follow this path of broadcasting live for free like this. It won’t replace the act of really being at the concert but its a great complement and a good way to build followers and increase music sales.

Below are more pics and screen captures from the YouTube stream:

Music Picks for August 25, 2009

// August 25th, 2009 // View Comments // Music

Here are my top 3 picks from LaLa.com of music coming out today. You can preview their albums with the widgets below.

1). Matisyahu – Light

2). Imogen Heap -Ellipse

3). Collective Soul [Deluxe Edition]

SouthEast Texas Tweetup

// January 27th, 2009 // View Comments // Music, Social Media

If you saw in a previous post, I have moved away from big city lights of the Dallas Texas Area to the small town of Lumberton Texas. I have been here for a little over 2 months now and I needed something to connect me with this new area and the people in it. I looked around online for organizations like I frequented in Dallas, similar to the DFW WordPress Group and nothing really popped out at me. Well I happened to see someone post on twitter about a Tweetups in different areas of the country and thought that would be something interesting to bring to the SE Texas area.

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Radiohead Reckoner Remixes

// September 25th, 2008 // View Comments // Internet, Music, News

I received this email yesterday from the Radiohead mailing list:

After the insane response we got from the Nude remix stems and the site that was dedicated to your remixes…

Unique visitors: 6,193,776, Page Views: 29,090,134, Hits: 58,340,512, Bandwidth: 10.666 Terabytes, Number of mixes: 2,252, Number of votes: 461,090, Number of track listens: 1,745,304

…we thought it only fair to do the same with a tune that at least is in 4/4. You can get the stems (the different instruments/elements) from here

Radiohead is basically saying “here is all of our instruments from this song go and have fun!” God bless Radiohead! I could shed a tear right now. They have also launched a site for you to upload your remixes and have the public vote on the best ones. You even get a HTML widget you can put on your blog, myspace, facebook, etc. I think Radiohead is the only band out there that knows their audience and willing to go against the mold.