volume 14 is up!

Allrighty! We’re trying something new, as musicwebtown is no longer a free service.

To the upper right of the page should be the box.net ‘widget’. You should be able to play and download from there, and I’ll leave it there until volume 15 comes out.

Most of these tunes should be familiar from recent posts. A quick recap/rehash:

New Girl may, indeed, be a pseudonym of sorts. If you Google the title and artist, you find djeddieo.com! I heard it on Passport Approved, which is the only (other) place to hear it, to my knowledge! “Grinding Halt” is on the excellent new Cure tribute, Perfect As Cats. PSAPP sounds like a Sesame Street band, but they’ve been on Grey’s Anatomy (I don’t watch; I heard them on internet radio). “My Love” is, thankfully, NOT a Paul McCartney cover, but a song I read about in the Boston Globe g section last month (the band gave me permission to post the song)! Frank Turner is huge on BBC6, and rightly so. Cut Off Your Hands should have been on volume 13….I forgot! Fight Like Apes ROCKS!, and they were really nice to me via email. Ida Maria, a Passport Approved favorite, is worth investing in her whole CD. CSS is a band I should have been listening to long ago, and I’m trying to make up for lost time. The Ettes: been around since 2004 and true to their mission…pure raw garage, female style. Animal Collective is audio acid, like Fleet Foxes, only good. “Trash” by The Whip: write this down: “the song of the summer!” (I can always edit that out if I’m wrong) Johnny Foreigner sounds totally different that that title would lead you to believe. Thank you Indie 103.1! Morrissey has a new CD out, but you don’t need me to blog about that; instead enjoy this Moz sound-alike, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart. Oh, and Lily Allen’s BACK!!!!!

Well, that’s not what I meant, butt…..

Matt and Kim are another Passport Approved find. My friend Charlie inspired me to unearth the Santogold(it’s over a year old) which somehow I’d passed over while posting “Say Aha” and “Shove It”. Ra Ra Riot, a five-piece featuring a cello and a violin will stick in your head (read their history on Wikipedia) ….and the M.I.A., which is from Slumdog Millionaire, has been in my head since seeing that terrific film some months back. The Music For Animals CD won’t be out for a month or so, so I hope i don’t get in trouble for leaking it. My lovely wife says the Calvin Harris jam sounds like Flight Of The Conchords. I think she means that as a dis, but I really like FOTC! And be honest, you readers that are friends of mine never heard of Peter Bjorn And John till I put “Young Folks” on volume 8 in January 2007, months before Boston radio (or TV commercials) picked it up.

Anyway, that’s the “short” story on volume 14. Enjoy, and comment, please!

Oh, BTW, we’re now on…..

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Back from vacation, Volume 12, Lykke Li, etc…..

Still very busy with that dreaded day job, I’m giving myself 20 minutes to make this post!

Howland Beach, Westport, MA

Before we headed off to Westport (shhhh! well-kept secret perfect summer vacation destination), I hurried together a CD compilation, as is my custom, to serve as a soundtrack for the trip. Since I’d be with the family, I tried to relax my “new, new, new” obsession, so old faves like Aimee Mann and Beck get mixed in with recent “discoveries” like Duffy, Estelle, The Ting Tings, and more. While this “final” version differs somewhat from the CD we actually had with us, they share a couple of the new discoveries that got the thumbs-up from the family.

Some highlights follow……

First up, Lykke Li:

She’s someone I discovered after our return. New York magazine raved about her, so I immediately played a bunch of her YouTube videos on my cellphone, and she satisfies that craving I have for Swedish girl-pop. Expect “Little Bit” and “I’m Good, I’m Gone” to be big radio hits in the months to come, and enjoy “Dance Dance Dance” on my compilation. (MySpace; Website)

Next is Gabriella Cilmi:

I Googled the phrase “new Amy Winehouse” to see if I could find the latest neo soul star (or latest train wreck, I guess), and, while the post I found was about Adelle (who I already love), one poster on that blog urged us to check out Gabriella, who was characterized as a “16 year old from New Zealand”. Never one to care about (or check) the details, I found the song, “Sweet About Me”, and I and the family love it. Alas, it’s not like anything else on her Myspace page or Website, but I’m a singles kind of guy.

Next, The Singhs:

I had read a Boston Globe article about Brother Cleve, a member of this band, and his mysterious illness. While my heart goes out to Brother Cleve, I was equally intrigued about the band, formerly known as Dragonfly. My rip of “Supersaturated” has some noise, as I had to use audio capture. Maybe a bunch of you will go out and pay real $$$ for it, then I can get their label to justify a promo copy for me! (MySpace/Website)

Listen to, or download the whole thing HERE. Or, 15 of the 18 tracks are available as an iMix at the iTunes Store, as djeddieo.com #12.

In short, the remainder:

Aimee Mann’s been a fave of mine since she fronted the punk band Young Snakes and sang “I Wanna Be Like You”, a paean to Nina Hagen! I once made her a cup of tea backstage at an Elvis Costello show (get your own blog and you can name-drop too). Estelle was a big hit with the fam on the St Martin CD, which featured “American Boy” with Kanye. This one’s a slow reggae groove. M.I.A. is someone I felt I had missed the boat on, as she was huge among the hipper bloggers a couple of years ago. Again, the vacation CDs give me a little relaxed attitude, and wife and daughter like her. The Ting Tings have been on these pages before, but Steve Jobs scooped me with the better song, so it’s on this set. Beck? I remember when I saw kids with his first CD; I thought it was Jeff Beck! He has continued to amaze me, mostly with his choice of samples, all from unheard sources. Duffy, we’ve covered here…what’s not to love? Jens Lekman…another missed boat, I recently heard his “I Met Her At The Antiwar Demonstration” from 2005 or something and was hooked. He’s like Jonathan Richman crossed with Morrissey! Albert Hammond Jr? I read somewhere that maybe we’ve be watching the wrong Stroke! I concur (hey, did you realize that Albert’s dad —minus the Jr—gave us the classic “It Never Rains In Southern California”? I hadn’t made that connection till this week)

The Airborne Toxic Event, who I’ve mentioned before, have a great promo person. She read my post about them and has since been very communicative about a number of other acts, like Chemical Brothers, The Silent Years, and….wait for it: Glen Campbell! By now, you may have heard of this CD, “Meet Glen Campbell”, a collection of newish songs, covered by the rhinestone cowboy himself. It might bring to mind the Johnny Cash CD, from which Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” was the big hit, but I’m reminded more of a Dwight Yoakam album, “Under The Covers”, from 1997. When I heard Dwight’s version of “Train in Vain” while wandering through Tower Records, I thought, “I knew that The Clash weren’t the original artists!” I was (momentarily) convinced Dwight’s straight country version was some long lost original. While I’m not quite so easily deceived nowadays (at least by recording artists), Glen Campbell’s version of Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” has that same air of sincerity, legitimacy, and originality. I love a good cover; one that takes a song in a newish direction, a la Talking Heads “Take Me To The River” or Amy Winehouse/Mark Ronson’s “Valerie”, and I have high hopes, believe it or not, for this Glen Campbell CD!

Streams for “Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)”

high, WMP

high, Quicktime

low, WMP

low, Quicktime

PS: 20 minutes has turned into 2+ hours!

Coincidence, or kismet?

There was the briefest of mentions in the Globe the other day of The Gremies “There’s No Surfing in Dorchester Bay”, which, of course, led me on a Googling frenzy to hear it, along with a bunch of other surf-punk tunes. Within about an hour, I get a phone call from old friend and surf-lunatic Jeff Moss of Boca Raton, who I haven’t spoken to since August 2006 when he was just back from Bali (like I said, surf lunatic). Anyway, Jeff’s been traveling the world with surfboard and Panavision camera and wanted to talk about music for his surf film…….eery, huh? So I go bact to web to find MY favorite surf-y song, Perfect Wave by Boston 80s icon Peter Dayton (of La Peste fame). I’ve searched before, but this time I found it (coincidence you say?) Check it out here:

While you’re at it, my most favoritest Peter Dayton Band song from BITD, Love At First Sight:

Jeff and I will put our heads together in April or May and hopefully come up with some “not your average surf movie” music.

As long as my head is in the 80s, I’ll mention that I finally started watching The Future Is Unwritten, the great Joe Strummer documentary. I generally have a hard time even thinking about Joe Strummer without tearing up (wife loves that…. NOT), but, so far, this has been relatively painless, with a great soundtrack selected mostly by Joe himself, courtesy of tape of his great radio show. Trying to pick a Clash song to link here is a challenge (Charlie Don’t Surf….little too obvious?), but in a half-hearted effort to make this somehow current, let’s go with Straight To Hell, so deftly sampled in the hottest song on the planet right now, M.I.A’s Paper Planes. Remember in 1990 when Soho sampled How Soon Is Now for Hippy Chick? Believe it or not, there were people that would hear the opening of How Soon Is Now, then be shocked when it turned out not to be Hippy Chick. I guarantee there are those that will think that the Clash has sampled M.I.A.

M.I.A. “Paper Planes”

The Clash “Straight To Hell”

Soho “Hippy Chick”

The Smiths “How Soon Is Now”