presenting the uncontested winner of Best Original Holiday Song of 2020 (emphasis on “2020”): It’s Christmas and I F*cking Miss You by Charly Bliss & PUP 🎵
Category: music Page 2 of 5
my recommendation for some good tunes this Tuesday: Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings’ Just Dropped In to See What Condition My Rendition Was In. posthumous releases can be exploitative but this collection of covers is great 🎵
I guess musicians are getting better at livestream concerts. watched Martha Wainwright tonight & it was great: low-key, but video & audio were excellent. a far cry from the crude Facebook streams bands started with last spring. not as good as live, but nice 🎵
#mbnov
some upbeat new tunes for this long-awaited Tuesday: Joan Osborne’s Trouble and Strife. standout track (and big election mood): Take It Any Way I Can Get It. 🎵
new tunes for your Tuesday: Juana Molina’s first live album came out last week: ANRMAL – Live in México. I’ve been a fan of hers for years, I think it’s great. hope you like it, too. Eras is as good a track to start with as any (ooh, here’s video of that performance) 🎵
“new” tunes for your Tuesday: some thrashy punk rock from Screaming Females: 2018’s All At Once. recommended track: Agnes Martin. turn off the news, and turn this up 🎵
today only, $20.20 gets you 77 (!) tracks from a whole bunch of cool bands (& a bunch I’ve never heard of before, tbh), plus contributes to Voting Rights Lab: Good Music to Avert the Collapse of American Democracy, Volume 2 🎵
this adorable little band from The Netherlands had an adorable little concert livestream from the UK this week, and it was great. I want to go back to cool, funky little clubs and see cool, funky little bands! 😭 Anyway. Boat by Pip Blom; start with Ruby. 🎵
new tunes for your Tuesday: Future Me Hates Me, by a new favorite band of mine, The Beths. standout track: You Wouldn’t Like Me. props once again to the Sound Opinions podcast for the tip. 🎵
is it Bandcamp Friday yet? (yes, for 12 more hours, Bandcamp will pass along their cut to artists, who dearly need it since they can’t tour) 🎵
emphasizing the “new” in New Tunes Tuesday is figurative, this week’s pick is Are You Experienced? by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. yes it has a bunch of mega-hits you’ve been sick of for years but it’s just really good. give a listen to I Don’t Live Today, loud as you want 🎵
hey, it’s Tuesday! my new-tunes recommendation: Sad13’s Slugger. the solo project of Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis, this will hold you over until her new album is out in September. standout track: Line Up. (bonus: her site’s URL sad13.horse) 🎵
for this week’s new tunes Tuesday allow me to introduce you to Porridge Radio and their fine debut, Every Bad. standout track: Sweet 🎵
another Tuesday, another “new” tunes recommendation – it’s a beautiful rainy morning here, how about the latest from Torres, Silver Tongue? “Last Forest” is a good track 🎵
happy Juneteenth! treat yourself to some new tunes 🎵 from Bandcamp and support racial justice, equality, & change:
today… and every Juneteenth hereafter, for any purchase you make on Bandcamp, we will be donating 100% of our share of sales to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund
saw this new (!) Tiny Desk Concert with the cast & musicians of Hadestown, so what the heck, let’s have that be New Tunes Tuesday. the performances in that video are good, but my real pick is the Anaïs Mitchell album their show is based on, also called Hadestown 🎵
Tuesday, time for new tunes! you may have had this recommended by a hundred people lately, but they’re all right: Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters. standout track: Shameika. 🎵
A video suggestion for New Tunes Tuesday this week: a live performance from the hallowed KEXP studio: Wussy, from July 2014. this way you can see the gang in action, including pedal steel guitarist John Erhardt (RIP). standout track: the first one, Teenage Wasteland ?
New Tunes Tuesday: Signal by Automatic. a debut with as solid of post-punk jams as I’ve heard in a while. standout track: I Love You, Fine ?
New Tunes Tuesday: Space Cadet by beabadoobee. music as fun & cool as the artist’s name. standout track: Sun More Often ?
Bandcamp Supporting Artists Affected by Pandemic – in which you’re encouraged to buy some great new music for yourself, and directly support musicians who can’t tour for a while ?
As I’ve written here before, I love Bandcamp. Artists keep 80-85% of their sales on the platform, making Bandcamp the only digital music store that I feel as good about patronizing as I do about buying a band’s CD at their show.
And today, Friday, March 20, as the world is grinding to a pandemic halt and all concerts are off, they’re helping out those artists by letting them keep 100% of their sales today. I personally will be stocking the hell up.
Now, a lot of of the biggest names in music are on major label deals that aren’t sold by Bandcamp. But there are also a lot of really excellent bands, some of my favorites of all time. A non-comprehensive selection, in no particular order:
- Sleigh Bells
- Wussy
- Moving Panoramas
- Flock of Dimes
- The Decemberists
- boygenius
- She Keeps Bees
- Los Campesinos
- Hop Along
- Courtney Barnett
- Heartless Bastards
- The Besnard Lakes
- Juana Molina
- S / Jenn Champion (new old release!)
- Summer Cannibals
- Diet Cig (preorder!)
- Gina Chavez
- Automatic
- Screaming Females
- Chumped
- EMA
- Bleached
- Torres
- Waxahatchee (preorder!)
- case/lang/veirs
- Nervous Dater
- Speedy Ortiz
- Amanda Palmer
- Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings
- Charly Bliss
- Lucy Dacus
these free nightly opera streams from the Met are really good. bonus points for their app on Apple, Amazon, and Roku (no account or login needed, just select “free preview” to watch the day’s freebie in its entirety) ?
Except for not doing about 80 of my favorites, what a great show
Sleater-Kinney @ Moody Theater ?
the masterminds of Thievery Corporation returned to Jamaican influences (and artists) on 2017’s The Temple of I & I, and it’s so good. recommended track: Letter to the Editor, featuring Racquel Jones (good video, too) ?
once again this week my New Tunes Tuesday is a concert-related recommendation. I’d never heard The Paranoyds before they opened for Bleached recently, but I like their just-released debut Carnage Bargain a lot. standout tracks: the title cut and Girlfriend Degree ?
happened to have this album on for the 1st time in a while the other day, & as great song followed great song, I actually thought: this album is a masterpiece. The Guardian thinks so, too: Why the best album of the 21st century is Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black ?
for the inaugural New Tunes Tuesday ? – Siouxsie & The Banshees’ Peepshow. I usually recommend just one or two tracks, but this classic album has a great, consistent creepy theme throughout.
Some years ago I thought I’d start posting links to some favorite music in my music library. I called this #musicMonday, and some of it was on this site, some on Twitter, it went back and forth. I had fun doing it, but rarely got much “engagement” (pardon my language) on Twitter, and so felt like it was a failure or waste of time.
In my ongoing social network rehabilitation, I’m thinking just the first part of that previous sentence (“I had fun doing it”) is justification enough. And so I think I’ll try it again, see how it goes. In honor of the weekly unveiling of newly released music on WOXY (RIP), the coolest radio station in Cincinnati back when we lived there, I thought I’d rename it and shift it a day.
Despite the “new” in New Tunes Tuesday ?, my criteria is the same as before:
Not “new” as in recently released, necessarily, but more like “new to you”. Or possibly not either of those, maybe just a pointer to some good music that you’d forgotten about.
loved the opening sentence of this As a black teenager, I loved Morrissey. But heaven knows I’m miserable now:
Dear Morrissey, I’m writing this to say, in a gentle way, thank you but no.
also liked this pragmatic assessment: “I’ve no time for him but still a fan of the Smiths.”
Jenny Lewis; what a voice, what a show.
@ ACL Live Moody Theater
