Built to Spill and Modest Mouse at UPAC
All posts tagged: MUSIC
New Jersey Punk
New Jersey had an incredible punk rock, ska, and hardcore scene in the mid/late-90s. Breakout bands like Lifetime, Thursday, Bouncing Souls, Bigwig, and Midtown got their start playing in the basements of northern New Jersey’s American Legions, Elks Lodges, VFWs, and fire houses.
Some kind, old punk rockers have archived many of those basement shows on YouTube. You can probably spot a teenaged and bleached-blond Paul somewhere in the crowds.
This is a clip from Outline…not a terribly popular band in our scene at the time, but they were fronted by future-megastar, Taylor Swift-collaborator, and member of Bleachers and Fun, Jack Antonoff.
New music: Pedro the Lion’s Phoenix
David Bazan’s first album as Pedro the Lion since 2004. It’s very Bazan-y and very good.
The Walk of Life Project
Even if you don’t know the Dire Straits song “Walk of Life” by name you’ll recognize it immediately when you hear it. Fun fact: It’s the perfect song to end any movie.
At least that’s the contention of the Walk of Life Project, the brainchild of Peter Salomone, a freelance video editor and writer. And I’m inclined to agree with him. Slap “Walk of Life” to the end of any movie and it immediately becomes 400 percent better. That’s just science.
Run The Jewels & TV On The Radio
“Tonight’s guest is so hip, their back-up band is TV On The Radio.“
AirSonos
I’ve really enjoyed my Sonos wireless speakers since getting a couple Play:1s earlier this year. They sound wonderful, and there’s just something really neat about walking around the house and having music follow you from room to room. We’ve been listening to a lot more music together as a family, as a result (the kids’ recent favorites: The Beatles, and regrettably, Pitbull—although my three year old singing Timberrrrr at the top of her lungs is amusing).
But while the hardware is great, I find the Sonos apps largely frustrating to use—they’re only lightly-integrated with iTunes, and overall are just poorly designed and unintuitive to me.
Enter AirSonos, a Node.js project that adds Apple AirPlay support to your Sonos devices. You’ll need to install Node and the AirSonos package, and run the whole thing from the command line—none of which is particularly challenging (I got it running in about a minute)—but once that’s done you should be able to broadcast to Sonos natively from any of your devices.
For The Record
John Roderick, David Bazan (aka Pedro the Lion), and El May joining Kathleen Edwards on For the Record.
So good.
The Roots!
via Instagram
The Soft Bullet In
Pitchfork has produced a documentary on the Flaming Lip’s classic album, The Soft Bulletin. The first part is embedded here, and the rest are available at Pitchfork.tv.
“New Low”—Superchunk
Yo La Tengo – Sugarcube
I had no idea a video even existed for this song, let alone one featuring David Cross and Bob Odenkirk.
Dip. Bom. Giddy.
Inspired by Dan’s Beach Boys Hit Song Topics pop-cultural chart, I dumped the lyrics from every song in his chart into Wordle.net just to see what that would look like.