Out the Other

New Doves track - "Jetstream"

Excellent news from my inbox today - following last week's announcement that the new Doves album, Kingdom of Rust, will come out in April, the band has decided to release the first mp3 from the record.

You can download "Jetstream" by heading to the official band website and registering for their mailing list.

Do it. Right now. It's amazing.

January 26 show preview

So before this blogging streak subsides, just wanted to point out that you should tune in to Out the Other tonight for another hour-long dose of what's going on this week.  That means:  new releases (Franz Ferdinand, Loney Dear, Cotton Jones, etc) and bands playing in Nashville this week (The Virgins, Silver Jews, Tallest Trees, etc).  The featured album of the week will be Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, because I love it, and I'm hammering out the rest of the playlist right now.

Tune in at 7!

The Rural Alberta Advantage - "Don't Haunt This Place"

In an effort to be better about keeping one of my general new year's resolutions/goals ("do it NOW," which is something I struggle with on a daily basis as a near-professional procrastinator) I thought I'd share this shiny, peppy little diamond of a song before I go off and waste time trying to conjure up a "Two New" post.  Because trust me, this is worth hearing right now:

The Rural Alberta Advantage - "Don't Haunt This Place"

From the band's website:

The Rural Alberta Advantage play indie-rock songs about hometowns and heartbreak, born out of images from growing up in Central and Northern Alberta. They sing about summers in the Rockies and winters on the farm, ice breakups in the spring time and the oil boom’s charm, the mine workers on compressed, the equally depressed, the city’s slow growth and the country’s wild rose, but mostly the songs just try to embrace the advantage of growing up in Alberta.

I literally only heard about them this morning, so I can't tell you much else, except that the other free mp3 on their website is excellent as well (go listen here), and their album is available to download on eMusic.  In fact, I would be listening to it right now, but I'm grounded from new music until I pick out the last few song's for tonight's radio show. 

Playlist - January 19

Okay, it's totally about time I got back on board the playlist-posting train.  Work's been busy, blah blah blah - hopefully you're still tuning in to the show, though - and if not, hopefully you've been checking out the archive.

Last week's show was the first real celebration of new releases, and I kicked it off by featuring what is thus far one of my favorite albums of 2009 - Andrew Bird's Noble Beast. I plan on posting about the album sooner or later this week, with additional mp3s, but in the meantime you can hear three tracks off the record if you go ahead and:

Stream the January 19 edition of Out the Other

This link will be good until tonight's show ends - then I'll have to figure out what the permanent link is and update it.  And I promise I will. 

Also "hitting the racks" last week (isn't that a funny phrase?  These days, it's more like "hitting your favorite online music retailer," although I hope you're still shopping at places like Grimey's) we had new A.C. Newman, Bon Iver, J. Tillman and Animal Collective.  The rest of the playlist drew from bands that played in Nashville last week, but 3/4 of those were local, so fear not cause they'll most likely be hitting your favorite venue again soon.

1.  Andrew Bird - Masterswarm (Noble Beast)
2.  A.C. Newman - The Heartbreak Rides (Get Guilty)
3.  Hotpipes - Rattle Cats (Hotpipes)
4.  Prabir and the Substitutes - Trains (Five Little Pieces)
5.  Bon Iver - Babys (Blood Bank EP)
6.  Andrew Bird - Not a Robot, But a Ghost (Noble Beast)
7.  J. Tillman - Vessels (Vacilando Territory Blues)
8.  Tommy and the Whale - Blackout (Shot for the Moon)
9.  Kyle Andrews - Call and Fade (Real Blasty)
10.  Animal Collective - Lion in a Coma (Merriweather Post Pavilion)
11.  Andrew Bird - The Privateers (Noble Beast)

Lake Fever Session: The Privates

And speaking of things lots of people have already written about - I'm still playing a bit of catch-up on the local front, and I would be remiss if I didn't point out the launch of Lake Fever Sessions, an idea that has been in the works for oh... a year and a half or so now?  Absolutely worth the wait, if this first session with The Privates is any indication, and I look forward to checking out more sessions as my favorite studio in town continues to release them (it's also the only studio I've ever been in in town, but hey, it's awesome, and they're great guys, and they come up with stuff like this):

(and by all means click through to watch them bigger)

The Privates "I'll Be Honest" from Lake Fever Sessions on Vimeo.

The Privates "Misery Business" (Paramore cover) from Lake Fever Sessions on Vimeo.

The Privates "You Never Take Me Dancing" from Lake Fever Sessions on Vimeo.

Keep an eye on the website for more sessions soon.

Out the Other - new Spring timeslot!

Just a quick PSA - WRVU just released the Spring schedule to the DJs, and Out the Other will now be on every Monday night from 7-8 p.m.!  That's just an hour earlier than my last timeslot and still pretty perfect - you can tune in while you're home eating dinner, getting ready to go out, on your way to somewhere exciting, or just kicking back on a Monday night.  That also means I'll continue to bring you a look at the week ahead in terms of new releases and shows happening in Nashville.

While you're waiting patiently for next Monday, you can go ahead and listen to last night's show by clicking on the icon on the sidebar to the right - I did a preview of all the excellent shows happening at the Mercy Lounge this week for their 6th anniversary celebration. 

Two New - Here We Go Magic and Phosphorescent

Here We Go Magic - "Tunnelvision"

I'm not sure whether to call this artist Luke Temple or Here We Go Magic (which, by the way, is a name that makes me want to cheer "here we go magic, here we go!"), but I'm definitely ready to add my few sentences of praise to the piles of hype already making their way around the blogs.  Here We Go Magic is a wonderful album, if a little drone-y toward the end, and you can bet I'll be playing quite a few songs from it on the radio show when we get closer to the February 17 release date.  This one grabbed my attention the second time I saw it posted (it didn't impress me the first time I listened, for some reason), and hopefully it will grab you as well.

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Phosphorescent - "Reasons to Quit"

I'm falling madly and deeply in love with Phosphorescent's new record To Willie, which will be out on February 2, and it's really not surprising considering how head over heels I was for Pride.  I was actually planning to hold off on writing about the album until closer to its release date - particularly when "Reasons to Quit" spread like wildfire across most of the blogs I read, and I didn't want to throw my hat into the ring as well - but what really surprised me is that for the past week or so, this song is always stuck in my head.  Like every time there's a quiet moment, *pop* - there it is again, with its gentle harmonies and strolling beat and melody that's as addictive as the coke and booze in the lyrics.  I'm pretty sure it's going to be my gateway drug into deep Willie Nelson love and appreciation, and that's a drug I certainly don't plan to quit.

Three Things: Ben Kweller, The Sunshine Underground and Indieocrity

• Daytrotter has a new session with Ben Kweller up this week, featuring three new songs from the upcoming release Changing Horses, which is due out February 3 on ATO.  The new stuff has much more of a country slant than his earlier indie-shuffling - it's chock full of pedal steel and cowboy swagger.  Kweller will be in town to play the Mercy Lounge with the Watson Twins on Wednesday, March 4, so mark your calendar if you dig what you hear.


• File under "It's About Damn Time" - The Sunshine Underground are in the studio working on the follow-up to 2006's Raise the Alarm.  They're recording for the next three weeks at Chair Works Studios in Castleford (yeah I have no idea where that is - close to Leeds I think?), and they've posted a demo on bassist Daley Smith's blog Climbing the Walls.  Check it out: "Intro (demo)" Promising stuff, boys.  Hope it doesn't take another three years to finish the album and get it out.


• I've been missing Andrew J.'s local blog A Star to Sail Her By since its daily dose of rock and snark quietly disappeared (what, a few months ago?), so I'm psyched to say he's back at it with a new blog - Indieocrity.  It's all there - local stuff, indie stuff, "five things you didn't know about Jon Burr that may or may not be true," and other stuff that makes me laugh.  Subscribe.
  

Under the covers with Paul Simon

(Get your mind out of the gutter, this is a covers post)

So today a new Deer Tick cover of Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years" is making the rounds.  Since I'm a sucker for a Simon cover, I thought I'd post that one along with a few of my other favorites:

Deer Tick - "Still Crazy After All These Years"
Delta Spirit - "Duncan"
Jens Lekman - "You Can Call Me Al"
Spoon - "Peace Like a River"
Peter, Bjorn and John - "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard"

Sometimes it takes a bar jukebox

... to remember how great something sounds.  Or at least to let some long-forgotten feelings of love bubble up to the surface.  If you had asked me yesterday afternoon to list 5,000 of my favorite songs, it would have taken me a long, long time to remember that this song belongs on that list.  But it does:

Cake - "Shadow Stabbing"

5,000 is probably pretty excessive - if I had to hazard a guess, "Shadow Stabbing" is probably in the top 1,000 at least.  But the point is that until last night I had mostly forgotten that. 

I tend to forget that the rest of Comfort Eagle, and Cake in general, is fairly excellent, though while I think I'm going to love this band for quite some time, they're one of those I really have to be in the mood to listen to.  There's something really quirky/playful about their music - which of course, is the reason I love them in the first place, but it's also a reason why they have never really been the first thing I'm in the mood to listen to.  I'm revisiting a bit of their catalog today and while some of the songs border on timeless, most of them are just fun. 

The closest the band came to perfection was 1998's Prolonging the Magic (1998?  I know, that's when I was in high school and all, but it seems crazy that the album is more than ten years old now), when they knocked it out of the park with an album that included "Mexico," "Never There," "Guitar," "Walk on By," "Sheep Go to Heaven" AND "Let Me Go."  I know it was a different time, and I listened to music in a different way, and I was much more impressionable, but still - I can't imagine feeling quite this positive about anything I've heard in the last year a full decade from now. I will never, ever believe that the best music I'll ever hear is in the rear-view mirror, but I do believe that my best music-listening years are behind me.

Then again, who knows - Vampire Weekend may sound spectacular on a bar jukebox in 2018.

Cake - "Let Me Go"