Leaps And Bounds

03
Jun
2009

While My Air Guitar Gently Weeps – The Beatles Rock Band

It’s long been in the works, but this week we got our first glimpse at the Beatles Rock Band video game, at the E3 conference in LA. They are the latest in a long line of bands to have custom branded Guitar Hero or Rock Band games. Significantly, it’s the first time that the Beatles have finally realised it’s no longer 1995.

The trailer (after the jump) blows our mind. We’re not the biggest fan of these type of games, but this one looks great. Unlike AC/DC and Aerosmith, the Beatles were a band where every member shined. You’re not just fighting over the guitar. The graphics, all over the trailer, look great. From the Ed Sullivan show to the Rooftop Concert, they pick the right eras for each song.

The technology has also improved, with this edition of Rock Band the first to support harmonies. The graphics do justice to the band who had such a strong visual image. The song selection, 41 songs in all, is flawless. Best yet, you can buy custom Beatles Rock Band instruments, including Ludwig drums, a Hofner bass and an awesome looking Rickenbacker Guitar.

The Beatles are one of the most merchandise-d bands in the world. There will surely be a lot of people waiting to get their hands on this one, and they will no doubt love it. The game comes out 9th September, the same day as the Beatles reissues.

Links, images and game trailer after the jump.

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03
Jun
2009

Wednesday Web: All Music

categories: Wednesday Web

All Music. The daddy of all music sites. Formerly All Music Guide, and celebrating it’s 18th year, it is an authoritative and exhaustive database of band bios and music reviews. All cleverly linked to each other and (mostly) superbly written, it is by far the one website that has turned us onto more music than any other.

There are many things we love about this site.

1) The database is huge. Just about any band, no matter how small has a page. For the bigger bands, all manner of import compilations and obscure live albums are listed. Also, most different editions of the same albums get a look in. It’s huge.

2) By no means all, but there are thousands upon thousands (we would not be suprised if it’s over a million!) reviews, band bios and stories to read. Most are superbly written. Being written just for the web, some of the reviews can be quite long as the physical limitations of the printed page are thrown away.

3) The album ratings system. Want to know where to start with the Kinks? Let All Music tell you. We often use if for compilations – a bigger mine field. What’s the best Chet Baker compilation? The man has dozens of collections. All Music has an opinion – and you’d be wise to listen.

4) Similar artists. Every band page has links to similar artists, followers and influences. So when you find a new sound you love, you can read about the band, their older albums, and see what else is like that. Yes, there are plenty of recommendation search engines out there, but this is more of a literary context rather than audio match ups.

5) The front page has improved immensely over the years. We particularly like the new reviews on the right side – that reminds us what is out and read more about them, and the left column of recent recommended releases.

In teh end, we come back to the quality fo the writing. Even for big bands, like Dylan and the Beatles, we loved how All Music has written about them and framed them. But it is for the obscure stuff as well. We just read a review on the new Marshall Crenshaw album, and it made us check out what albums we don’t have, and used the rating system to decide which is the next one we should check out.

Reading reviews is not for everyone. But for those who do, you could waste the rest of your life on All Music.

http://allmusic.com

03
Jun
2009

Why Pearl Jam are on Target

categories: Retail

Pearl Jam are copping a lot of criticism the last few days. It has come to light that their next album, rumoured to be called ‘Backspacer‘, will be an exclusive release at Target stores (in the US only). This rings false against the band who publicly fought off Ticketmaster, pioneered recyclable CD packaging and are generally, lets face it, hippies. But look further and we think Pearl Jam are doing the right thing.

The press is focusing on the Target story, they have missed the caveat. The agreement with Target allows Pearl Jam to release their album in “a number of smaller, independent stores” (according to Digital Music News). Is that not the prefect solution in this day and age?

Where some press have taken the indie store additions as an afterthought – they are no competition to Target – we think it’s the main piece here. Pearl Jam are far too big to release their albums in just Indie shops. But that’s the world they come from, they are not leaving them behind. It’s only in the arena of big box chains that Pearl Jam are having an exclusive. Are PJ fans and the Indie Police really against Pearl Jam‘s decision to not have their records in Wal Mart or Best Buy?

For us, it hits all the right buttons. Music lovers can support their local music store. Casual fans of Pearl Jam, who number the millions, can go to Target. They were never going to walk into a record store anyway. And Target will pump advertising and marketing into the album for the exclusive – exposure that the indie stores will benefit from. Of course, there will be a digital version that you can buy from your couch.

This is very different from AC/DC, who screwed indie retail over with their last album. You had to go to Wal Mart. No other choice at all.

This type of retail exclusive has not branched out of the US yet. The US is more it’s own island. Europe with so many countries around make this model almost impossible. We don’t like it, and we hope it’s a trend that will pass. But somehow we don’t think so.

And back to the music…we love Pearl Jam and wait patiently for the record. They are out of contract with Sony now. They are such progressive, forward thinking fellows. We can’t wait to see what they do now that they are one of the biggest independent bands in the world.

Pearl Jam official site – http://www.pearljam.com

We love Stereogum, and they broke the story – http://stereogum.com/archives/pearl-jams-fixer-to-debut-in-target-ad_071831.html

02
Jun
2009

Tuesday Tunes: The Dead Weather – Treat Me Like Your Mother

categories: music, Tuesday Tunes

The Dead Weather certainly come with a decent pedigree. The most visible member of the band is Jack White. We love old Jack. We think people will still talk about him in 30 years time, unlike a lot of his contemporaries. It’s band number three for White since he broke into the public eye (not counting the Loretta Lynn collab or the Alicia Keys duet). We love the White Stripes but we’re probably in the small camp that loves the boys-club-prog of the Raconteurs even more.

Jack Lawrence of the Raconteurs joins this party on bass. Dean Fertita of Queens Of the Stone Age is on guitar. They are fronted by Alison Mosshart of the Kills, a band that has always threatened to break through in a major way. Maybe now is the time for her.

The traditional questions of ‘is this a side project or the real thing?‘ go right out the window when White is involved. He just makes his own rules up, doesn’t he?

Is the proof in the pudding? It’s growing on us. It’s hard not to compare to the members’ other bands – but it sounds most like the White Stripes. There is plenty of guitar riffery. That healthy wallop of blues and attitude mix it up with a huge, dark, menacing sound. And that album cover – looks very Goth-y to us.

Get your track for an email addess –http://thedeadweather.warnerreprise.com/

29
May
2009

Aerosmith – Lotteries and Imposters

categories: games, music

Aerosmith - trying to make sense of it all

We get pretty excited when we think about Aerosmith. Definitely one of the most decadent bands of all time, they turned it around in the 80s, cleaning up and became one of the biggest rock bands in the world – a promptly stayed there.

It was the first sign that these louts had some balls – and were willing to work hard and take risks for their music and their careers. It led to the groundbreaking ‘Walk This Way’ with Run DMC. We want to shed a tear and do the devil symbol just thinking about it.

The digital era has been funny to Aerosmith, but by no means bad. They signed onto the Guitar Hero franchise well before any other Johnny come lately. They have a new record due out, and rumours are they will follow the Eagles, AC/DC, Guns ‘n’ Roses and others with a retail exclusive (possibly with Wal-Mart).

But two things have really tickled us about Aerosmith lately.

First is the Aerosmith branded lottery scratchie. Yes, really.

The scratchies come with your standard chance of winning a million bucks, but some of the consolation prizes include tickets to shows and backstage passes. All tied in with Aerosmith‘s songs and images. Brilliant!

Full story from Billboard here – http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/aerosmith-hits-jackpot-with-branded-lottery-1003972115.story

The second is lead singer Steve Tyler‘s futile attempt to sue anonymous bloggers. Apparently Fake Steve Tyler has gotten around, posting on forums, Facebook and Youtube, talking about Real Steve Tyler‘s private life. So Tyler decided to sue, as is the American way. Funny thing was, the anonymous bloggers decided to stay anonymous and the court day came with no one turning up.

Techcrunch has the best summary we could find – http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/22/cryin-aerosmiths-steven-tyler-fails-to-sue-anonymous-bloggers/

This second bit is way more interesting than the lottery story. Fake celebs are everywhere, especially on Twitter. People like Tina Fey and Seth Rogen have to take a hard line to say they are not on Twitter, although you can find fakes of them on that service. Good on Tyler for trying something. Maybe Darth Vader will sue this site.

We bring all this up, not to poke fun at all the crazy things Aerosmith does, but to make a point that it must be confusing to be in a band these days. All these side deals, imposters, new technologies, games, retail exclusives… how can a bunch of rockers from Boston keep up?

The world is getting more and more confusing. We hope Aerosmith keep rocking right through the madness.

29
May
2009

Spotify/Cloud Computing – it’s our forecast

categories: Apps, Digital

Spotify, a European streaming/subscription service, has been making quite a bit of noise in the last year. Still in Beta, it’s been greeted with critical acclaim. We’ll discuss it in more detail in one of our upcoming Wednesday Web columns. This week, Spotify announced their latest innovation – their first App.

It does everything you’d expect. You can access music from your phone, streamed. It has all your preferences saved, including all your playlists. Also, the thing looks great.

Currently demo’d on a mobile phones that runs on the Google Android OS, an iPhone version has long been in the works as well. We can’t imagine it’s too far behind. Neither are available yet.

The ramifications are clear. As phone data services gets better and better, smartphones becoming more ubiquitous and more music becomes available online – you can almost see that sci fi world where anyone can listen to anything, any time, anywhere. The ultimate music library.

Which brings us onto cloud computing – THE buzz idea for the internet this year. People are holding less and less on their computers, and more in the mythical cloud. The Spotify App is a big win for those who believe this is the future. We are almost in that boat ourselves.

That ties in nicely with the biggest model for could computing there is – Gmail. Gmail (and Yahoo Mail and Hotmail et al) keeps all your emails online for you to access from your phone, your home computer, your work computer, your friend’s phone, the free net access at the library – just about anywhere. And ever so slowly, we’re moving our music, videos and documents into this cloud.

Gmail‘s owners are of course Google. It’s Google‘s I/O conference in the last few days that have sparked off all this news. And today they added some of their own – Google Wave. It’s almost too big for us to digest. It’s mail, it’s Twitter, it’s IM, it’s cloud computing – and it’s blowing our socks straight off into the washer. We can’t wait to see the real thing next year.

Find out more about Google Wave here – http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave/

Video demo of Spotify App after the jump.

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28
May
2009

New Zune HD – US only

categories: Gadgets

We don’t hate the Zune. Actually, more accurately – we don’t want to hate the Zune. But Zune don’t make it easy for us. Firstly, they don’t make the thing available to us.

According to the press release this week for the latest one called Zune HD, the 7th model in 3 years, looks like they are sticking to American shores.

Giving it a chance, lets have a look. The new hook is the touchscreen. It’s Zune‘s challenger to the iPod Touch. Throwing in wi-fi capabilities and a browser is a good move. The final touch is the HD functions – access to HD radio and the ability to output HD video to other devices (like your TV). No word on capacities, but we assume 16 or 32GB. We’ve not heard on price either but Zune has a habit of following Apple here too.

It’s an interesting match for the iPod Touch. But we don’t think it’s enough to beat it, or even dent it. The big one is the radio function. But HD radio is small beans. And will it be enough to tear someone away from Google maps, or the 40K apps that are available to Touch users? iPod Touch‘s message these days is all about the apps – the funnest iPod ever. Zune have not announced anything in terms of games, but one can assume they will.

We like the iPod Touch design better, but the Zune doesn’t look too bad either. We could go either way depending on the functionality. Price is the big unknown. If Zune undercuts Apple significantly in this economy, it could finally get Zune into the game.

It’s all a moot point as outside of the US Zune is a joke and will continue to be. There is no excitement, no vibe. And if Zune continues to simply try to match, rather than exceed Apple, then they are going to lose. There is no vision. Nothing to be excited about or to believe in. A joke.

Slightly more interesting was the announcement that Zune is selling videos internationally on the Xbox platform. This could mean big things if they could follow it with music.

We’re not writing the Zune off just yet, but they have a long way to go.

Official Zune HD site – http://www.zune.net/en-us/mp3players/zunehd/default.htm

28
May
2009

MySpace’s latest CEO speaks

categories: Digital

All Things Digital has been covering the D7 conference, one of the big digital business conferences. Our hero Walt Mossberg has been putting up some great interviews. He’s such a cool old coot who can get away with saying just about anything. “People are buying iPhones despite of AT&T”.

But we thought we’d quickly post this. An interview with the two new heads of MySpace – News Corp’s Jon Miller (ex Facebook) and MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta.

Click on the image to watch video - we couldnt embed. — Click on the image to watch video - we couldn't embed.

Very interesting things in the first couple of minutes where Mossberg reveals the result of his polling (and ambushes his subjects). And then around 6 minutes in when they finally talk frankly about music, how they ever hope to make money, and how they feel about MySpace.

More cool videos here – http://video.allthingsd.com/

27
May
2009

Wednesday Web: Aquarium Drunkard

categories: Wednesday Web

When one mentions the ‘blogosphere’, one imagines a badlands full of noise, colour, bluster and little value. The thousands of thousands of unsolicted opinions, all posted up for the world to see, or get lost in. The blog world has made few superstars, and are mostly the same. Some like Perez Hilton may get canonised. But for every Hilton there are possibly ten thousand nobodies, doing very little that is creative.

Enter Aquarium Drunkard, a role model for blogs everywhere.

Lets talk about what AD is today. Based out of LA, it’s a blog that slants towards to roots and country side of music. But they adore new music, and support it wby sponsoring gigs. They do exclusive interviews with the acts they love. They write passionately and thoughtfully about classic records. There are regular columns and contributors. Buckets of fantastic Mp3s. There is also a radio show version on Sirius. It’s not Perez Hilton, but it’s the digital age version of the cool indie roots rock record shop.

This wasn’t always the case. AD grew from a Blogspot site, and then took it to the next level. It built a solid audience. And the writing – utterly fantastic. We came across it early, and followed it as it started sponsoring gigs. It got it’s own URL. The bands being interviewed were the big bands. But they never forgot about the small ones either. The fantastic Off the Record column started. We can’t find where the quote was from, but we read somewhere that AD lifted the bar for music blogs – and we agree.

What kills us, with frightening regularity, is the writing. Two that still sticks with us – a great, personal look at 80s indie that sent us back to Flying Nun records and Grieving Angel -where the writer makes a claim for the death of the golden age of alt-country (marked by both Whiskeytown’s reissue of Strangers Almanac and the death of the No Depression magazine).

This is miles above your regular “OMG new single by so-and-so”.

Above all, we have discovered much great music, on this site. From tasting a track or two on a classic artist we have heard of but never known, to fantastic bootlegs, demos and unreleased material and, of course, new awesome bands. Which is what a music blog should be all about.

Aquarium Drunkard is a big inspiration for this site. In the strange world of blogs, it’s good to have something to aspire to. We wish we could say that AD was one of many blogs that operate so well, but the truth is we can not think of another like it. Maybe we’re not looking hard enough – we would love to know what we’re missing. But in the meantime, when blogs are still considered something of a joke, at least one site is making something seriously great.

http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com

26
May
2009

Tuesday Tunes: Ash – Return Of White Rabbit

categories: Tuesday Tunes

Even those most hardened Ash fans would admit it’s all about the singles. They started at the time of grunge with the sparkling, timeless Jack Names The Planets. They survived Brit Pop with a strong of hits from their 1977 album. And even if some of those later albums were a bit uneven, the singles like Burn Baby Burn still ruled.

So Ash may have come up with a solution to those uneven albums. They are giving up on the album completely, and will only release singles from now on. Even more ambitiously, they will put out 26(!) new singles this year. The first taster is now free on their website. It’s called Return Of White Rabbit.

This Tuesday Tunes column was a challenge from the start. Could we find a new song a week that was offered for free and legal? It hasn’t been a problem so far. In fact, the last column was for a full album. But with bands taking risks like this, we don’t think it will be a problem now.

The experiment starts in September with True Love 1980. And then there is a new song every two weeks. Surprisingly, a CD version will be released alongside a digital and vinyl version.

The song itself is a bit of a departure. It’s got a strong leaning towards Depeche Mode style dance beats. It’s not our favourite Ash song but maybe it will grow on us. If not, we’re going to have a lot more music for them to make it up to us.

You can get the free mp3 from the official Ash website – http://www.ash-official.com. Price of admission is an email sign-up.