Wednesday Web: Elbo.ws

Elbo.ws

It’s hard to keep up with vast, random wasteland that is the ‘blogosphere’. With thousands and thousands of voices all going at it, how can you both tell what’s going on and find what you’re looking for? In the music world, we have an imperfect solution in Elbo.ws.

It’s essentially a blog aggregator. It pips competitors like hype machine for us with some very important features. One is the list of most talked about artists that lives on the right of the front page. There’s also the latest articles feed, which makes all these music blogs feel like one big blog. Most importantly of all, the tracks feature means you can drill down to a specific track, even if it was posted many years ago.

In the last few years, Elbo.ws has taken off in a big way. You can tell this by the fact the ads have gotten bigger. It’s also skewered towards American indie. But at least now, when  someone says ‘the blogosphere is going wild for …. ” you can actually check for yourself.

Oh and the name of the site sux.

Check out Elbo.ws here – http://elbo.ws

Tuesday Tunes: Youth Group -Two Sides

Youth Group - The Night Is Ours - out now

We are so happy that we can tell you about this song, this band and this album. Youth Group are from Sydney, Australia but are now mainly based in New York City. Their last album, The Night Is Ours, only came out in Australia and it was our album of 2008. In 2009 they have secured a US release on the world’s Fair label.

If anyone outside of Australia has heard of the band, it maybe due to their music being used in US indie shows like the OC (their cover of Alphaville’s Forever Young was used in a key scene), and touring with the same sort of bands like Death Cab For Cutie.

They have also just announced a run of shows with a reunited Get-Up Kids. To celebrate, they are giving away the first single from the album, a track called Two Sides.

The Night Is Ours, their 4th full length, is a thoughtful, moody dark album. It was recorded on a ship in S6ydney harbour, and touches on the isolation and loneliness that was so expressed by other Australian bands like the Triffids, the Go-Betweens and Nick Cave.

That mood is not immediate on Two Sides, one of the more uptempo and rocking songs on the album (although it’s hardly rock). The 2009 version of the record also has a much better album cover. The Night Is Ours is out now.

Get the track at their site – Youth Group – http://www.youthgroup.com.au

Link is also on the World’s Fair Website – http://worlds-fair.net/news/2009/06/24/youth-group-to-join-the-get-up-kids-on-their-fall-2009-reunion-tour/

The Great Leap Forwards Top Ten Of 2009 (so far)

Lily Album - It's definitely her

We are a blog after all. So lets make some lists.

Top 10 albums of the year so far

1. Lily Allen – It’s Not Me, It’s You
2. God Help the Girl – s/t
3. Jarvis Cocker – Further Complications
4. Bell X1 – Blue Lights On the Runway
5. Rhett Miller – s/t
6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – It’s Blitz
7. Wilco – Wilco (the Album)
8. The Mummers – Tale To Tell
9. Neko Case – Middle Cyclone
10. Bob Evans – Goodnight, Bull Creek!

We’ll leave the full babble for the end of the year. But Lily Allen’s new, confident, mature, nasty, fun record has topped our list so far, with Stuart Murdoch’s new project God Help the Girl coming in a very close second. Jarvis Cocker starts all over as a British Nick Cave figure. So far a wonderful year for music and so much more to come.

So many albums only just missed out. Here’s our top 10 songs not on our top 10 albums list.

1. Phoenix – Lisztomania
2. Yves Klein Blue – Getting Wise
3. Regina Spektor – Dance Anthem Of the 80s
4. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – A Teenager In Love
5. Casiotone For the Painfully Alone – Natural Light
6. Franz Ferdinand – Katherine Kiss Me
7. Doves – 10:03
8. Camera Obscura – You Told A Lie
9. Gomez – Airstream Driver
10. Jason Lytle – Yours Truly, The Commuter

Wednesday Web: Entertainment Legends Revealed

legendsrevealed.com

Harry Nilsson’s coffin was lost? ‘Dirty Diana‘ was about Diana Ross? Superman was a spy? All this and more is answered at Entertainment Legends Revealed. It’s poorly named, badly designed and cumbersome to navigate – but the STORIES are great.

This site started as a column at Comic Book Resources called Comic Book Legends Revealed. It’s been running for years now, and is currently up to column 212, and a book version called ‘Was Superman A Spy?’ is out now. Recently, it’s expanded to include movies, music, TV and even paintings, opera and board games.

We thought we knew our share of trivia, but the writers behind this site have dug out some fantastic stories. And they explain the stories from scratch, introducing the players and images galore to help illustrate the situation. They go for great/weird stories over people who are famous. How else would you explain a whole week of music legends dedicated to the Lovin’ Spoonful? It’s still a great read even if you don’t know who they are.

We are surprised what we’ve learnt. Deep Blue Something’s one hit ‘Breakfast At Tiffanys’ was actually inspired by ‘Roman Holiday’! KISS’s logo is different in Germany for a very touchy reason. Graham Nash wrote one of his biggest hits on a dare. The comic book stuff has fascinated us for years. We are learning new stories about films and TV now, on a weekly  basis.

Again, we love a site that is well written and constantly updated. It looks a bit ugly but hopefully that will be fixed. Even if you are the biggest know-it-all there is, there will be something here for you.

Entertainment Legends Revealed – http://legendsrevealed.com/entertainment/

Or hop straight to Music – http://legendsrevealed.com/entertainment/2009/04/19/music-legends-history

Ideas Graveyard #1: The Walkman

Sony Walkman - 30 this year

A new, irregular column where we remember ideas in music and technology whose time has come…and passed.

We’ve been wanting to do this column for quite some time. Some brilliant journalist at the BBC just gave us the excuse we needed – they asked a 13 year old to compare a Walkman with an iPod. The article is great (“It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape”) and well worth checking out. We wont repeat it here.

But how about the Walkman then? It does share one very important similarity with the iPod - it became so ubiquitous that the brand name became the product name. Just as people call most mp3 players ‘iPods‘, most portable cassette players are “Walkmans“, despite it being the name of Sony’s version of the ‘Personal Stereo’. The one from our youth was an Aiwa.

That BBC article uses a very old version of the Walkman. By the time it was in it’s last years, the Walkman looked pretty cool – and still does today. Check out the WM-EX170 as an example. And there were plenty of pretty colours as well, and lots of great designs.

A cool, later era Walkman

The most groundbreaking thing about the Walkman was not the Walkman itself. Sony also pioneered the headphone buds, getting rid of the big ear enclosures. We have a pair of those things in our ears right now. These new lightweight, portable headphones were sold with the Walkmans (seems so obvious now), making them instantly accessible. So in 1979, Sony Japan released it’s masterpiece. Although it wasn’t an immediate hit, it caught on and 50 million were sold by Sony alone in ten years.

(The iPod has sold almost 200 million. Crazy.)

Suitcase record players and boom boxes aside, the Walkman was a truly portable music player. Later versions easily fit in a pocket, or at least a school bag. It opened up new possibilities for this format called the cassette. It was also sturdy – people could and did jog with Walkmans. Sure, it doesn’t fit the same number of songs, and other silly points. But how we used the Walkman is pretty similar to how we use the iPod today. Casual portable listening. And hey, our (Aiwa) Walkman could record. That durability didn’t last into the iteration – the Discman. That spinning CD just couldn’t handle bumps.

The Walkman continues as a brand. It’s Sony’s line of mp3 players. It’s one of the most popular mp3 players in the world after the iPod, iPhones, Zunes, Creative ZEN, Sandisk and about 10 others. It’s a good idea to reuse the name, but a Walkman will always be about cassettes for us.

A great history and museum of Walkmans can be found at Pocket Calculator – http://www.pocketcalculatorshow.com/walkman/history.html. Well worth a read, if only to see how tough it was to sell the name ‘Walkman’ outside of Japan.

Walkmans at Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman

A Question of Fidelity: Spotify Goes CD Quality?

Spotify - as good as a CD

We adore the Spotify service. It still has a way to go, but it’s getting there. For those in the dark – it’s a streaming service. There’s a free version with ads scattered across your listening experience. Then there’s a paid version with no ads, exclusive albums, pre-release stuff and, just announced, CD quality streaming.

The word is Spotify are finding it tough getting people to upgrade to their premium service. Offering albums before release date and exclusives will help. It’s already at a good price. But will CD quality streaming convince anyone to make the switch?

There’s a bigger question of sound quality here – if it matters – over convenience. It’s been a dog fight from the beginning. Vinyl sounded great, but it got damaged easily and was hardly portable. The cassette brought great portability but the sound quality was terrible, and cassettes snapped easily. The CD had a nice middle ground, and the war stopped for a while. Until DVDA and SACD came in, beating it’s chest about it’s 5.1 surround sound. It was around that time that the mp3 took over as the main way people listen to music.

So, are people going to care about CD quality streaming? With today’s headphones and computer speakers, it hardly seems worth it. But there is a niche consumer who can hook up their computer with a nice home stereo. But that person will no doubt have surround sound and high definition – something Spotify isn’t offering. It’s the CD all over again, a bit of each without being much of either.

Spotify are growing. They will hit mobile phones this year. Their catalogue continues to grow. We have faith. And we like the risks they are taking. We’re just not sure how many people are taking a risk on them right now.

NME covered the story quite nicely as well – http://www.nme.com/news/spotify/45507

Tuesday Tunes: Son Volt – Down To the Wire

Son Volt - American Central Dust - Out July 7th

Son Volt were one of the kings of the mid 90s alternative country scene. Son Volt frontman Jay farrar formed Uncle Tupelo in his teens with old friend Jeff Tweedy (later of Wilco). When Tupelo fell apart, Farrar recorded under the name Son Volt and released the masterpiece Trace. Trace is still considered by many to be one of greatest alt-country, modern country, No Depression, roots rock or whatever tag you want to put to it – it’s still one of the best albums of that type.

A few solo album asides, Son Volt are set to release their 6th studio album. They’ve lost none of their Everyman style when they called the album American Central Dust, and the record hits July 7th on Rounder records.

The track is good, solid Son Volt. Their last album was experimental, with soul and jazz creeping in. This track seems to be back to straight up heartland rock.

You can find a free, legal download for Down To the Wire on RCRD LBL, an amazing free mp3 site – http://rcrdlbl.com/2009/06/18/download_son_volt_down_to_the_wire

We Follow: Finally making sense of Twitter

Wefollow.com

Wefollow.com finally does what Twitter itself should do – make sense of all the information it’s holding. It’s essentially a Twitter directory – neatly tagged and easy to use.

Almost two months ago, we crawled through Twitter to see who the biggest music stars on Twitter were. We pretty much had to guess and check. With Wefollow, we can just jump to the music section and see who the stars are. Sadly, it’s up to Twitter’s users to register themselves. So the number one music star, Britney, is not listed. Taylor Swift is also missing from the top 20. But looks like we forgot 50 Cent and MC Hammer.

It’s a start, but really, Twitter should be doing this. We like Twitter - but it’s too niche. It’s too cumbersome as well. Even to see the twitter updates of peole we know we follow, we would rather use Google than the Twitter search engine (let alone browsing).

That’s not the least of Twitter’s problems. The growth is slow, and the numbers are not there. Having a large number of followers crowds your page. And there is far too many spammers and porn.

Yet, micro-blogging (as this is called) seems to clearly be the future. With the lines between phones and computers being blurred, and short burts of information being the way we digest news, micro-blogging seems a natural. But Twitter could well go down as the MySpace of the scene. Facebook has already switched itself to be more micro-blogging focused. Google have been cooking up a grand plan in the meantime.

So, Wefollow can definitely help you enjoy your Twitter experience. Because Twitter isn’t going to help you.

Check out Wefollow – http://wefollow.com