downloads

    About twenty-four hours ago Sigur Rós posted their new album, in it's entirety, online for everyone to stream. After listening to it pretty much nonstop at work yesterday and today, I'm willing to say it's pretty good. I'm not sure where it ranks in the grand scheme of Sigur Rós albums yet, but it's good... real good. My favorite track so far has to be inní mér syngur vitleysingur, the second track. Links to download the album can be found after the break.

    Machine Gun is a track off of Portishead's most recent album, Third, which came out about two months ago. I've listened to this album about two or three times a week since it came out and I'm still a little unsure about how good it actually is... As you may or may not know, this album marks the band's return from a decade long hiatus. So expectations were pretty high to say the least. I can say I was pretty satisfied with the album after the first couple of listen throughs. Third sounds like a Portishead album, it reminds me of why I liked Dummy and the self titled album back in the day. What this album doesn't do is give me reason to start liking Portishead all over again.

    I came across Vampire Weekend a number of months ago. I thought the songs off of their first album were pretty good. They're all pretty up beat and light hearted but with the occasional obscure historic reference thrown in, like so much The Decemberists. Vampire Weekend's style is hard to describe, I guess I'd say it's a harmless blue-blooded-campy punk take on New England beach music, if that makes any sense... Listen to a few songs and you'll know what I mean. After seeing a few videos of these guys it made perfect sense, they all look like the types of East Coast douche bags that wear sweaters and collared shirts in the summer time, and dockers, always with the dockers. These guys look like they walked right off the pages of a yacht catalog, or a brochure for tours at an apple orchards, you know - one of those places white folks will go to and watch the leaves change color. Anyway, they make enjoyable songs. My favorite would have to be 'The Kids Don't Stand a Chance' which I've linked to below. It's worth a listen.

    From Ólafur Arnalds' debut solo album, the song '3055' is by far the best on the album and definitely worth a listen. The music is labeled as "Neo Classical" mostly because of the use of strings and piano throughout the album. There is even a little synth, hence the 'neo.' The songs on Eulogy for Evolution are simple and light while staying whimsy-free. 3055 (all of the songs on this album are four digit numbers, I have no idea why...) starts off slow and builds to a sweeping, but brief, crescendo after four minutes. This is one of the few tracks on the album where you'll hear drums.

    Hulu.com does video on-demand correctly. For what it is, it's nearly perfect. There is plenty to criticize Hulu for, but there is so much more that it does well. For those who don't know, Hulu is NBC and Fox's answer to Youtube... sort of. Remember back when Youtube was mostly a collection of SNL skits? Well, those are all on Hulu now for the most part. NBC, like all of the other media corporations, like to make money when their content is shown online.

    It all started in the summer of 2006. For me at least... Podcasting has been around for a while before that but I never got into it. In 2006 I was living in Bamberg, Germany; I had no TV service and I had better things to do than read websites all day. Don't get me wrong, I had plenty of free time. A large amount of my time was spent in transit, either between classes, between towns or between countries. At first I thought I'd take a book or two with me and catch up on a little reading, but let's face it, books are dead. I had a Dell laptop with me but I didn't feel like lugging it around, especially because this was the summer of the exploding laptop batteries. One gadget I didn't mind taking everywhere with me was my iPod Mini. I've since upgraded to a Video iPod Nano, which would've been nice to have way back in 2006. My iPod was only 4gb so a few months after moving to Bamberg I was ready to listen to some new crap.

    HD DVD seemed like it'd be a winner... It had many advantages over Blu-ray, HD DVD discs are cheaper to manufacture than Blu-ray, the players are also cheaper and HD DVD offered more functionality and interactivity (initially). The largest hurdle to overcome for a new format has got to be the cost of new hardware. If you can't justify the cost of a new format then no one will be interested.