“I don’t really like this song.” She achieves in six offhand words what took Robert Smith most of the last two decades to accomplish: I realize that I’ve made a terrible mistake.
This girl – working as a waitress… not in a cocktail bar, but at the local IHOP – is short, blonde, cute. Nice, fun to talk to. I buy her a scone at Panera Bread. She brings her laptop, shows me pictures of her dog. We trade in gossip, forgotten secrets, and YouTube videos. She is a mystery as yet unfolded and I am a meek sojourner just looking for a friend.
But then, as always, comes the painful truth… She doesn’t like “Just Like Heaven” by The Cure.
If you had told me in the early 2000s — when I was still in high school and saving my summer job money to buy new CDs — that indie bands would one day pay fans to listen to their music, I would have thought you were crazy. Bands make music, and we spend our hard-earned scratch to listen to it, not the other way around … right?
Well, it’s 2010, and artists are so desperate to squeeze their product through the ear buds of trendy scene influencers that they’re actually paying the cool kids to check out their new tracks. A UK pop duo called The Reclusive Barclay Brothers has put their first single “We Could Be Lonely Together” on iTunes, and downloading it enters you to win £27. That’s like 40 bucks (or two and a half CDs, if you’re a high school-er in the year 2000).
Eyes Set to Kill:
Are Eyes Set to Kill sisters, Alexia and Anissa Rodriguez still the two hottest girls in metal? That’s what the media was saying about them last year. BlankTV had a fun little chat with them and the rest of the group about being banned from Finland and their plans after Warped Tour.
Getting signed is at the top of a lot of bands to-do lists. It marks the pinnacle of their careers, a sign that you’re really ‘making it.’ But with things the way that they are in this digital age, the whole industry structure of record labels, who historically found bands and other artists, signed them for a (sometimes) nice advance, then released, promoted, and distributed the album (or at least oversaw all of this happening)… has changed.
When was the last time you sat down and made a mix tape, eh? Was it for someone special? Someone who caught your eye? Was it for yourself? For a friend? For that mile long walk home or that far away road trip? When was the last time you got a mix tape someone else made for you? Are you one of those who has no clue what a mix tape is, too young to remember the heyday of tape and its decline to the CD… only to be replaced once again by digital files?
As I was working out feverishly at the gym the other day, to an aggressive drum ‘n’ bass tune by the outfit Concord Dawn, my heartbeat racing, wrapped intrinsically in with the million BPM’s of the track’s drumbeat, a question occurred to me that I have never in my life really thought long and hard about.
I recently stumbled across this band from North Wales called We Are Animal. What I love about their sound is their use of unconventional noises and lo-fi overall sound. It sounds a bit like Arctic Monkeys did something dirty in a back alley with Queens of the Stone Age and had an android baby.
