New look and magazine!

Hello! Everybody!

In leu of senior thesis I decided to give the blog a new look and a new header.  Hope you like it!  Also, the How to Paint Sunlight magazine is officially done!  I'll be presenting it tomorrow.  I'll post the summer music playlist shortly for free download.

Stream Fleet Foxes' new album, "Helplessness Blues".

Another awesome album preview on the part of NPR.  Stream the whole thing here.

Verse for today, tunes for today.

(from poetry.org, Gregory Orr reading)

Just a short little poem for today.

"To be alive" by Gregory Orr

To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That's crudely put, but…

If we're not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

_________

Wasn't that nice?  And yeah, I know that this album and all of its songs are old news, but it seems to fit here:

New Animal Collective tracks (live, untitled).

Remember when there were reports of Animal Collective possibly going on indefinite hiatus to focus on their individual projects?  It seems like now that's not the case.  Animal Collective recently performed in Petaluma, California in which they performed a couple of new songs.  It's encouraging and exciting to hear what's now the first Animal Collective tracks since Fall Be Kind.  The second song sounds especially strange, starting off with a sound clip that sounds like it's from the film ODDSAC and then falling into what sounds like strange carnival music.  They'll surely sound different on an album, as the songs tend to change as they age.  

When Panda Bear played "Drone" in Barcelona last May there was screaming in it, when he played "Benfica" there were crazy effected samples of the crowd, and pretty much every single that was released off Tomboy sounds different than the album version.  If Panda Bear's writing process has anything to do with the band's as a whole (which I'm sure it does), than we can expect to hear these songs a year from now sounding totally different and a million times better.

Check them out here.

Just heard of 'em: WU LYF.

Here's another idea for a new kind of post: Just heard of 'em.  Whenever I hear a band for the first time and really like them, I'll post it here.  Yep, here we go.

WU LYF (standing for World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation and then eventually What Up/Loving Young Females) is a Manchester, UK band who make (like one of their songs suggests) heavy pop music.  I love the sound.  The whole thing is pretty confusing.  A bunch of these guys used to be in a band called Vagina Wolf (heh) but have since started this project up, moving some songs from the old project to this new one.  I've found most of their music pretty hard to find, which is killing me.  They've got some guitar parts that remind me of Weed Diamond and vocals that sort of remind me of old Modest Mouse.  Definitely one of the more unique things I've heard in awhile.  Here's some samples for you.  "I got them wu wu..." is my favorite so far.

WU LYF-spitting it concrete like the golden sun god from LUCIFER YOUTH FOUNDATION on Vimeo.

Listen to Panda Bear's "Tomboy" in it's entirety.

NPR's been very good about giving all of us advanced listens of the most anticipated albums recently, and this one is certainly a doozy.  The most recent album to join the club of advanced listens is Panda Bear's wildly anticipated Tomboy which is scheduled to be released on April 12th.  For those of you who have been listening to all the singles as they've been coming out, you haven't heard anything yet.  All of the tracks are newly mastered and sound fantastic.  Try not to get chills when "You Can Count On Me" starts.

Stream it all here.

New Woods track, "Pushing Onlys".

Speaking of Woods, they just released a free stream of the first track off their upcoming album, Sun and Shade, "Pushing Onlys" on Pitchfork/the bands Facebook page.  They've been playing this song live lately, but this is our first listen of the song as it will be heard on the album.  You can check it out here.