To reassure my older readers that they’ll still find songs here, I’m posting some this morning. This is just collection of music I’ve been listening to recently, and it’s really pretty random. I started to add Metallica’s “Fade to Black”, but then realized Lars might sue me, so nevermind. Instead, I’m sharing the following with you today:

1. Neil Finn - Wherever You Are
2. Fleetwood Mac - Songbird
3. Film School - Activated
4. British Sea Power - No Lucifer
5. Smashing Pumpkins - Lucky 13
6. Tom Petty - Breakdown
7. Band of Horses - No One’s Gonna Love You
8. Tapes n Tapes - Conquest
9. Chris Walla - Everyone Needs a Home
10. Crowded House - English Trees
11. Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb
12. The Pretenders - Back on the Chain Gang

I hope you enjoy it!

download the zipped file here

The other day I got a real treat; The Mugs sent me a copy of their upcoming album Here Tomorrow, and it’s just incredible. I’m already a fan of the Mugs and wrote about them in the previous incarnation of this blog (you can find their free ep Daisy Cutter here, I highly recommend it). While I loved their older work greatly, I have to tell you, they’ve really stepped it up on this new album. It’s more polished, it’s bigger, and it’s even more beautiful and amazing. I like it so much, I had a really tough time picking the songs I wanted to share with you here! I finally narrowed it down to these:

• The Mugs - Woman Opens Man
• The Mugs - Clover & Wine
• The Mugs - Sinister Six

You can preorder Here Tomorrow at the Mugs website here. Check out a few more songs from the album at the band’s myspace.

Here are a few other things I’ve gotten my hands on recently that I really dig a lot:

• Jens Lekman - A Postcard to Nina
• Jens Lekman - The Opposite of Hallelujah
• Akron/Family - Lake Song - New Ceremonial Music for Moms
• Ra Ra Riot - Each Year

Tomorrow I’ll be back to posting about Billy Corgan; specifically, about some new (old) zwan tracks that recently surfaced, which are infinitely better than any of the songs on Zeitgeist (and I like Zeitgeist, so these tracks are REALLY good…) stay tuned.

The basic idea is to shoot a sort of stop-motion animation of some of my friends, (i haven’t figured out what they’ll be doing just yet, I’m still in the planning stages), then superimpose a handdrawn animation of the band performing, using photoshop. Of course, this will take roughly forever to complete, but I think it will be a fun little project.

So far I’ve completed a test-run on the animation portion. I drew 80 little pencil illustrations of Billy Corgan performing, then put the scanned images into iMovie, backed it with a clip of one of their new songs (the new album, Zeitgeist, is out today by the way…. I won’t bother with a review, as this blog is more about recommending music I love than it is critiquing said music…). The sound doesn’t match with the animation yet, I was just seeing how I would go about doing this sort of traditional style of animating, to see if i could get it to work. So far I’ve only got a 10 second clip (which took nearly 4 hours to make!!). Here it is:

I’ll continue to post updates as I go along, until I unveil the finished product. Any comments or suggestions are welcome!

Sometimes I go actively searching for new music. I get tired of the stuff I’m listening to every day, and I’ll just peruse the music blogs or myspace hoping to find something that really gets me going. And other times, the music finds me, takes me completely by surprise. This is the kind I like best, because it reminds me of being a teenager in the late 80’s, discovering new bands via friends, college radio, or the greatly missed 120 Minutes on mtv. There’s something wonderful about finding something that moves you when you didn’t even see it coming.
Such is the case with Sleepy Demons. There I was, posting a bunch of ridiculous crap on Netphoria*, like I do pretty much every day, when I decided to check the profile of another member of the board who’s posts always seem to intrigue me. Upon seeing that he had a myspace page, I clicked the link to see more. Turns out this guy (Jonathan McArthur) has a band, and whaddya know, they’re fantastic! Sleepy Demons hail from the lovely land of New Zealand (I call it lovely, though I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting; however, photos and video show me a lush, green, amazing place). Much like fellow New Zealander’s Neil and Tim Finn, Sleepy Demons have a knack for crafting the perfect pop song. Catchy hooks, infectious vocal melodies, a great singer, and excellent musicianship. How about you listen to one of their songs?

• Sleepy Demons - Dog Days

If you like that, please head over to Sleepy Demons’ myspace page to hear four more songs, and send them a message begging them to put out something we can buy!

*netphoria is a smashing pumpkins forum. i’m a nerd, okay?