This week, I’ve been listening to Zero Hour quite a bit. They have an interesting sound that is much like Soundgarden. On this track “The Greatest” has a strong opening guitar part that reminds me of late 80s arena rock, like AC/DC. It builds slowly at first, then drops the shoe, ready to punch you in the eye.
The five-peice mixes classic rock and progressive in an interesting, strong blend that’s great for the gym or for short sprints (running or racing, your choice). The tracks on this album show a good range and variety, always centering on the story of the lyrics, highlighting the harmonies with solid axe play. It’s a really good production. New Mexico is a long way off, So I’m hoping that they tour the East Coast sometime. If you like your riffs a bit harder than what you hear in this track, be sure to listen to “Another Nail”.
ASMW — Zero Hour
ASMW — Alexa Ray Joel
I completely stumbled onto Alexa Ray Joel, and liked what I was hearing, before it started to dawn on me exactly *who* I was hearing. I have a feeling that this is the kind of thing she would prefer from new fans.
This is the first single from her second album, her first featured her own artwork, and sampled herwide range from folk/country to alt-pop, and into jazz. This track would sit gingerly in the pop-jazz area. Reminiscient of Corrine Bailey Rae and Billie Holiday, The writing has strong hooks and the arrangements are balanced.
As stated above, I got into the track for a while before finding out more about who she is. The tipoff to some of you would have been the Joel surname. She’s the daughter of Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley.
ASMW — Pulsion
This week, I was listening to a lot of tracks in the “world” section of AmieStreet, and wanted to spotlight Pulsion. The tonality and composition is almost dreamlike in the guitars. This reminds me of some of the masters of guitar intros. Check it out!
ASMW – Jets Overhead
Brought to you by: ASMW Uber Tracker
This week, I was listening to a band called Jets Overhead, who have a phychedelic, contemplative sound that combines current alt-rock with a strong nod toward the heavily folk-inspired seventies period of rock.
ASMW is revived – Archetecture in Helsinki
The plugin and meme for Amie Street Music Wednesday has been revived! This meme had been garnering players for quite some time, and its growth was stopped in its tracks when Amie Street did a site redesign that stopped the embedded player from working. Mouseclone has been working with their developers to create a slick new player, and the code has been released today.
My first post with the new player is by an Australian indie-pop band called Archetecture in Helsinki. The song “That Beep” is pretty popular in Oz, and there are several mixes and dubs already.
The beginning bit where they say “Hey kid can you wake up” seemed apropos for the revival post.
I called your doctor up
And he promised me shameless fun
Tried a little bit of moving on
It lasts for way too long
Dressed up as bubblegum
I’m stuck to your shoe lets run
Can you give me that
beep, beep, beep, beep, beep
SISAB One
I ran into this meme when reading Juliafish’s blog, and thought that the result was uncanny when thinking of album covers I’ve seen over the past (ahem, many) years.
This was quick to put together, and was entertaining. You should do one, just to see what randoms you get.
The meme goes as follows:
Create your own band and debut album cover randomly
To Do This:
1 – Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random” or click Wikipedia Random
The first random Wikipedia article that comes up is the name of your band.
2 – Go to Quotations Page and select “random quotations” or click Quotations Random – The last four or five words of the very LAST quote on the page is the title of your first album.
3 – Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click Flickr 7day random – The third picture in the top row, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4 – Use Photoshop/GIMP or similar graphics program to put it all together.
5 – Post it to your preferred online outlet with this text in the “caption” or “comment” and TAG the friends you want to join in.
Here’s the first release from my new band.
So... I started a band.
VD Epoch 13
This year is the only time that VD will be coupled with the Unix epoch rolling to sequential number. Of course, the two are a few hours apart, but hey, any excuse to celebrate dorky geek trivia *and* being a more-or-less willing target for a heavily-armed, floating infant deserves a nod.
For the geek-deficient, here’s the executive overview:The epoch for Unix systems is 1/1/1970. To these systems, this date is the beginning of our current time. When you request today’s date, the create date of a file, or the last access date of a file, the system has that info stored as the number of seconds since midnight January 1, 1970. For the most part, this number is reformatted to the date style you are used to reading in your part of the world. Programmers, analysts, and administrators often use the raw number to do faster calculations of dates without t trouble of programming around things like leap years and daylight savings shenanigans. Yesterday evening, the number reached a sequential pattern. It’s like noticing that your car’s odometer has rolled to all 2’s (like mine did a few weeks ago)
Besides that, yesterday was Friday the 13th, and we have another Friday the 13th next month.
The new Friday the 13th movie was released last night. It’s supposed to be a remake of the first three in the series, so there should be lots of room for serious cheese. Hopefully, it will have some good scary, gory parts, and probably some t&a and drugs, but definitely a lotta cheese.
Oh, and on this VD, the floral industry would like to once again thank you all for creating an incredible demand for out-of-season product. They grow them artificially in greenhouses on another continent and ship them in at a premium, and them charge a premium to you. Thanks for looking out for the planet there. What if next year, everyone buys something local and in-season? Think of the transportation savings. Even more than that, think of how much fresher the flowers will be, since they won’t have spent so much of their little bloomin’ lives in a shipping crate. And you would be helping the economy in your own neighborhood.
That said, I’m going to share a non-mushy VD sentiment.
Well, I suppose it’s non-mushy. I didn’t actually poke at it to find out.
The Average user has spoken
The preliminary screenshots of Windows 7 look just like KDE, so the guys at zdnet labs did their own take on the microsoft mojave project:
Thought I’d share.