Music

OK, since Tuesday’s effort failed, here’s another attempt. You can download a ridiculously lo-fi MP3 from the band's website.

A cover of Joy Division's most famous song. Tuvan throat singing, acoustic guitar. Odd.

This week's offering is a change of pace in two ways - it's not a song (or anything to do with "pop music" in any sense) and it's from a "net audio" release, i.e. it's from a free MP3 release that's not attached to some commercial release available in a physical format.

EDIT 18/06/08: Sorry, turns out Komplott have redesigned their site, and this release is no longer available.

My favourite track from 1981's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was made available for download when the album was reissued in 2006. Lots has been said and written about it, but if you haven't heard of it around the time Eno was producing Talking Heads he and that band's frontman wrote an album together. It's usually described as instrumental, which is somewhat ironic given it's built around the premise of writing instrumentation around pre-existing vocal recordings.

Curious. Having won the, ah, coveted (?) Hip-Hop Chess Federation tournament last year, RZA has launched a weird online business...

WuChess

Some New Zealand stuff this week, specifically from the much maligned (fairly, in my experience!) city of Hamilton. You can get four free tracks by The Deadly Deaths from their virb page.

This week's song is available to download from Better Propaganda, which is a relatively unannoying free downloads site.

Whistling intro! Druggy-sounding boy/girl duet! ESL lyrics! Spector-ish 60s throwback vibes! Exclamation marks! I've been listening to this song for a couple of years and haven't got bored of it, which is as good a sign as any that it's worth sharing.

Punctuation in band names. It's got to stop.

OK, my incredible plan of supplying a legally available MP3 from each of my fave albums of last year is turning out to be extra special... my assumption that these days lots of people made available at least one full track from any given new release seems to be all wrong.

This is all 7 years too late, but I've been revisiting Pulp's last album, We Love Life, and felt the urge to rave about 'Bad Cover Version'. The lyrics talk about trying to replace lost love using the metaphor of bad covers to get the message across. At the time the album came out I never bothered to track down the video, but, man, it's worth it. It's one of the most nicely married-to-the-song vids I've seen in ages, both in terms of message and tone.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCKzAn0612o]

This is a bit old, but this (terrible-sounding) band The Get Out Clause played in a whole lot of public places in Manchester and then requested the CCTV footage of themselves under the relevant legislation. They edited the footage together, and, hey presto, a novelty video! Was surprised to see footage from inside a taxi!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2iuZMEEs_A]

Pity the idea is wasted on a crap song and apparently having no intent beyond being cool, bro... So it goes.