The Core Dump

If you’re in the mood for some new music this weekend, may I recommend checking out two Swedish artists? Neither one seems to have any distribution in the States yet, but thanks to the magic of teh intarweb, you can still check out their videos and other samples.

First up is Hello Saferide. Quirky and sunny pop with lyrics to make you smile. There’s a video up for the current single My Best Friend. Fun stuff.

Note that the video doesn’t start playing until it’s completely loaded, at least in Safari, so just hang on. It’ll play after a while.

Hello Saferide’s single is up on the Swedish iTunes Music Store, so you can buy it if you’re blessed with a Swedish credit card, but for some godforsaken reason the album isn’t there yet even though it’s been out for nigh on a month now. Sigh. I really, really want to buy it.

Next up is Frida Hyvönen. You know she’s cool since she has rock dots in her name from birth. This is sort of Tori Amos-ish—piano-driven and a bit off-kilter. I have no idea what the lyrics are about, but in a good way, if you know what I mean.

The video for her song The Modern is a bit film-school-y† but the song is fantastic. Sadly, there’s not a peep about her on the Swedish iTunes Music Store.

Soundtrack: “In My Head” by Queens Of The Stone Age

†Oh, yeah, I’ll keep making up adjectives as I go along.

Today at dinner, Andrea wanted ice in her water, prompting me to teach her to sing the chorus from legendary urban poet Vanilla Ice’s Ice, Ice, Baby.

While this may not earn me any points toward a father of the year award, a three-year-old belting that out at the top of her lungs is indeed one of life’s more sublime pleasures.

Soundtrack: “Take Me Out” by Franz Ferdinand

I’d completely forgotten what a fantastic album is Little Steven’s* Men Without Women. Thank you, vinyl!

Going to put in a link to the iTunes Music Store, even though at this moment it carries no Little Steven. None. Which is a travesty, I say, a travesty.

Dig: “Until the good is gone” by Little Steven

*Little Steven, aka Steve Van Zandt, aka Miami Steve, Bruce Springsteen’s guitar player, all-around cool guy, and a strip club-managing mobster on The Sopranos.

Finally broke down and bought new speakers for the computer. After seeing some glowing reviews on CNET and Amazon, decided to go for the Logitech Z-2300s.

Tested them really loud with both music and the battle scene at Helm’s Deep from The Two Towers, and these bad boys do sound fantastic. They also look right in place next to the Cinema Display, an important consideration for a shallow design freak.

Keep on rocking.

Listening To: “Roland” by Interpol

Way back in 1982, Don Henley released The Boys of Summer. Part of the lyrics go:

Out on the road today I saw a deadhead sticker
On a cadillac
A little voice inside my head said, don’t
Look back. You can never look back.

Was reminded of that sentiment just now as I was watching CNN and they led in to a sports section with, and I kid you not, Head Like a Hole [happy lyrics right here] by Nine Inch Nails.

A post modern finger raised by some intern in editing, or has NIN now become accepted by the Budweiser crowd?

Listening To: Stream from Groove Salad

If you’re bored with your current diet of music and would like to try something different, may I perhaps suggest some Swedish home-made sausage?

Swedish state-operated radio has been getting into the Internet space in a pretty big way, and has, amongst other things, created a stream of only Swedish music. Some of it is great, some is middling, and there are a few tracks that are … well … not quite so good, if you catch my drift. Still, it’s all in all a pretty cool thing, and a good antidote to US radio boredom.

Most of the tracks are in some kind of English, some pretty broken and some very American-sounding, and a few are in Swedish. But since you’re no doubt the kind of hipster that loves a challenge, you’ll have a good time hearing the Swedish, deriving the Germanic and Latin roots, and figuring out what it is they’re saying. Actually, the game is most fun if you’ve studied Icelandic, the root of all Scandinavian languages, but you, dear reader, are no doubt smart enough to figure it out anyway. Or you could simply not care about the lyrics and just listen to the music. Your choice, Cha-Cha.

You have two way to listen, one of which will involve your trusty web browser and give you a live playlist update, and one which will give you the stream but without the playlist. Your call. To listen to the stream in your Real Player, click here. To get the playlist and also to get a choice between Real Audio and Windows Media Player, go to www.sr.se, then click on “webbradio” in the blue bar. This will launch a popup window, which presets to using Windows Media Player and station P1, which is sort of like NPR on really bad Quaaludes. If you don’t have Windows Media Player, click on “Byt ljudformat” and select Real Player. (No, there is no mp3 stream, because that would be a good use of Swedish taxpayer money, and that can’t be tolerated, so your only choices are WMP and Real.) Either way, at this point click on “P3 Svea” and current Swedish pop will flood your speakers.

At this point you’ll be all cool and Euro, and if you’re really talented you can phonetically memorize phrases from the songs and impress girls in bars. Don’t say I’m not here for you, ok?

Listening to: Real Player (ick!) Stream from P3 Svea.

Just watched the end of VH1’s Most Awesomely Bad Metal Songs … Ever. And the winner was … yes! The Final Countdown, by my compatriots Europe.

You can already hear that damned synthesizer riff, can’t you? Dah-dah-DAH-DAH! And now it will be stuck in your head for the rest of the day. Sorry about that.

Watching the show did bring back a lot of atrocious 80s poodle metal I had successfully managed to repress. Including Winger. Remember Winger? *Shudder*

Listening To: Stream from Groove Salad

Am I the only disturbed by the use of Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life in ads for a freaking cruise line? Not to mention The Smiths hawking econo-cars and Led Zeppelin shockingly and disgustingly providing the soundtrack for Cadillac ads.

Wrong and evil.

Yet another article in Wired News about a study suggesting that music downloads aren’t affecting record sales all that much. The article suggests that perhaps people aren’t buying that much music anymore since not very much good music is being released these days.

Another, even more crucial, factor hampering music sales has got to be the homogenization of radio. In a typical town, you have your top 40 stations, your classic rock, your country, and your R&B. Apart from the classic rock stations, they’re all playing some variation of what’s currently popular and sells well. So where is a person whose music tastes run outside the tip of the ice berg supposed to find out about which music to buy? When you’re in college you have the time and inclination to read Spin, Rolling Stone, The Face and whatnot to find out about new and interesting bands, but outside of that, or hearing about music from your friends, where are you supposed to find out about new bands?

The answer used to be radio. That venue is now closed to new and interesting music unless you’re lucky enough to live near a large university with a radio station. And if you do, the nature of the beast is that it’s very hit and miss.

Internet radio? Sure, if you can find a good station. But you’re going to have to hunt for it.

The industry has painted itself into a corner, and then exacerbated the situation with an incessant hunt for knock-off bands that sound almost like whatever trend surprised the labels this time.

You want sales to go up? Start signing on more bands and get their music played on the radio. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?

Sure, a radio station that takes risks is going to shoot itself in the foot every once in a while, and will not be the kind of safe cash cow a ClearChannel station is, but if you put together a team that actually loves music and let them share their tastes with others, you just watch CD sales take off.

Cory Doctorow has a good writeup over at the awesomely cool Boing Boing about his troubles with iTunes Digital Resource Management (DRM).

It’s exactly the kinds of issues Doctorow is going through that keeps me from spending any money at the iTunes Music Store. Not that it’s Apple’s fault, per se; it seems they did a really good job of talking the troglodytic music publishers into a semblance of a sane DRM scheme. Here’s Apple’s brief and breezy explanation of the scheme.

As a person who goes between different computers all the time and does Strange and Disturbing things to operating systems, adding the overhead of authorizing and deauthorizing machines so that I can listen to music I’ve bought is a complete show stopper.

Still loving the iTunes Music Store, though. It’s a great way to sample music. I’m just not going to buy anything from there and add DRM hassles to my life. Hopefully with time the labels are going to wake up and smell the burning vinyl.

Music: “Rise Above” by Black Flag [Opens in iTunes]