My Thermos

Be sure to check out Power Pop Review. This is a blog I found a while back but had slipped out of memory until a nice chat via Twitter about The Act and other faves of mine brought me back to it. Full of all sorts of tasty Power Pop goodness, you can't help but feel good perusing its pages.

I particularly appreciated the post about the Vinyl Resurgence which is literally music to my ears. That photo of the used bins brought back great memories of hours and hours at The Record Swap in Homewood and miscellaneous other shops in Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins whose names elude me right now.

There are a lot of music blogs out there but very few make it into my reader, this was a no brainer.

Which music blog would you recommend?

Via our friends at Music Memoirs, our mission today:

Its a week of recommendations;

Recommend to all the other players this week, one song, album and band that you think that they should take notice of.

Well, my first thought is that I would toss in some Gov't Mule here as I do believe they are atrociously under appreciated - but then it occurred to me that if you haven't taken a minute to check them out after the couple hundred other mentions I've made, one more isn't going to make a difference.

And then I realize I do this sort of thing a lot anyway, so I'm going to just go with first thoughts on this one:

Song

"Play Something We Know" - Adam Hood

A song obviously influenced by his many years of playing in bars and clubs, rattling off crowd favorites and frequent requests. From the brilliant 6th Street EP

Continue reading "Tuesday Tunes - Week 60" »

I hadn't considered the dual meaning of the title of this post when I chose the topic earlier today. At first you might think that Slacker is descriptive of me, having gone a full 11 days since my last post here, and, well - you would be right.

But it's also the name of a very cool web radio service that I just (re)discovered. Apparently I had signed up for it ages ago and dismissed it but an email from them alerting me to updates prompted me to give it another look, and I haven't stopped listening in days. Continue reading "What A Slacker" »

I meant to post this yesterday on release day, but am just now getting around to listening to the new Weepies release Hideaway. I've been looking forward to it since I first heard Say I Am You back in February of '07 so was psyched to see it available on Yahoo this morning.

You may not know that you know of The Weepies, but you likely do. I guess they were featured on Grey's Anatomy as well as in a JC Penny commercial.

I'm about 1/2 way through and so far it's just brilliant. Once again the harmonies are just amazing and the songs are really strong. I obviously need to hear the whole thing a couple of times first but this is my first real contender for best LP of '08.

You can listen to the album on their iLike page and download a free track while you're there.

And here is a cool clip of them in Chicago circa 2006 singing I Gotta Have You



Enjoy!
SB

Regular readers of My Thermos will know that I love me some youtube for the musical treasures that can be found there. I'll occasionally post a video that catches my eye and enjoy spending some (way too much) time browsing through the archives there.

The problem with that though is that for every treasure, there is some crappy 18 second clip recorded on a cell phone by someone who thinks the world will cease to exist if I don't see their muddy nausea inducing clip they took from 200 yards away.

Sorry, I digress.

So distilling all that is available to just the stuff that's good can be difficult. That's why I was thrilled to discover Clark's Picks on Entrecard. Clark seems to have the same feelings about youtube that I do

One day I was cruising YouTube, playing videos of various guitarists and I said to my wife " I'm just amazed that I can be sitting here watching Doc Watson's fingers for free." It dawned on me that it would be a valuable service to share these gems with other people.

Right - but he finds much cooler stuff than I do. Duke Ellington, Joe Pass, Bob Marley, Johnny Cash, fantastic stuff really.

Check it out - it's well worth the time you'll spend there, and the journey it will take you on with the related clips and such. I'd block out a couple of hours.

Enjoy!
SB

(fyi - this isn't a paid review, I don't do paid reviews, I just love this site. It's a shame I need to mention this)

Heard the new Counting Crows song this morning and it turns out that it is streaming from their website as well. I know I'm a bit late with the news but figured others might be as well. I don't like the autoplay guys but I'll give you a pass this one time.

Be sure to also grab the Digital 45 Featuring "1492" and "When I Dream of Michelangelo" from the site as well. Listening now and give all three a hearty My Thermos recommendation.

Counting Crows is one of those bands that I don't necessarily think of when I think of my favorite bands, but when I look at what I listen to - they are right up at the top. The new single is great and I'm looking forward to the new album Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings set for release on March 25th.

On a side note, think it's hilarious that Geffen uses an affiliate link on the official site when sending folks to Amazon and iTunes to buy the new single. Talk about double dipping. I've always resisted using affiliate links for stuff like this but if they can do it... what do you all think?

Cheers!
SB

As I mourn a musical loss today, I wanted to counter that with a bit of new music that I have been really enjoying recently. I find most of my new music either on Yahoo Unlimited or on Sirius. I don't really seek it out or follow charts or trends or anything but occasionally I'll hear something that I really like. A few months back it was The Weepies and recently it has been Band of Horses.



This is the first song of theirs that I heard and I really enjoyed it. I played both of their albums (on Yahoo) and dug around online to find their website. Turns out they were in Chicago just the night before I found them - talk about bad timing.

The discovery of this band will lead me on a little musical journey and the chance to discover even more stuff that I might like. A bit of reading about Band of Horses and I discover that they did a previous stint with a band called Carissa's Wierd, and that one of the guys left to focus on a band called Grand Archives. I don't know anything about these other bands yet, but I'll read about them and give them a listen, and see where that takes me.

This ongoing discovery process is part of what makes me love music so much. Following a trail like this is something I've done hundreds of times before. Linking people together and learning these types of relationships has led me to discover some of my favorite artists - Gov't Mule, The Grays, Storyville, The Act, and loads more.

So I'm enjoying the new tunes, hope you enjoy it as well.

SB