The Walkmen are “Stranded”
A band with a fervent but small following to date, this may all change if Stranded, the gorgeous first brass-assisted single from the band’s forthcoming sixth album Lisbon has anything to do with it.
Listen at Everybody Taste

Guards
Not much is known about Guards save for their brand of 70s-inspired psychedelic rock music is available for free download and features fellow blog-buzzers Cults and Chairlift on guest vocals. Oh, and it’s really, really good.
Free download from Bandcamp

Baths
Will Wiesenfeld is a producer from Los Angeles steeped in the Brainfeeder electronic scene that spawned Flying Lotus and Daedelus. His album Cureleanhas been amassing blog love recently.

http://www.myspace.com/bathsmusic

Dead Elvis was a Irish record label which was active between 1994 and 1999 and put out releases from Wormhole, Rumble, Alan Lambert, The Sewing Room and Jubilee Allstars amongst others. Eamonn Doyle, Marc Carolan, ‘Og’ Crudden and Eamonn Crudden ran the label and Eamonn Crudden recently began posting up songs, memories and multimedia from that time on http://deadelvisarchive.tumblr.com.

The blog is a great resource for reminiscing about the bands playing around Dublin during the 90s but also serves as an insightful history lesson into that period. It all started when Crudden attended the 40th birthday party of a member of one of those bands – Female Hercules earlier this year. “I was prompted to start the blog by the unexpected wave of affection and emotion I felt meeting many of those who contributed in many ways to the quite subcultural scene that Dead Elvis was a part of,” Crudden says.

The reaction so far has been positive. “What has been amazing about the response is the way in which quite a gang of people have started to help me gather material and kind of reconstruct various events of the time,” Crudden explains. “I’m firmly convinced that a lot of the stuff I’m searching out and making available from Dead Elvis bands and their contemporaries is great forgotten treasure.”

Even if you are unfamiliar with the music, the blog’s posts outline an interesting time which involved running a club night called Crush in Fibber Magees, recording in a basement studio in 147 and the various difficulties of running a label without the ease of ubiquitous internet usage. As Crudden says in one of his blog posts accompanying the audio of Rumble’s Chips – Dead Elvis was a “phonecalls from coinboxes and post-office operation.”

“There’s no greater pleasure than gifting music you love to others – known and unknown,” says Crudden”. “It’s so easy now compared to then. We used to wish that we could find a way of giving the music we were recording away. That wish has come true!”

If you have any Dead Elvis-related stories, releases or photos to share, get in touch with the blog deadelvisarchive.tumblr.com or via Twitter @deadelvis_blog.

5 Essential Dead Elvis songs

• Wormhole – Riotman
• The Jubilee Allstars – Better Than I Know Myself
• The Sewing Room – Tidewater
• Rumble – Star Wars
• The Floors – No Excuses

Related archival Irish music links

• http://diyirishhardcorepunkarchive.blogspot.com
• http://bluntrecords.blogspot.com
• http://www.freewebs.com/ringsendblues/
• http://dublinopinion.com/category/great-irish-bands/

Newport State of Mind
“One hand in the air for a taxi / Fifty quid if you’re sick on the back seat..” The Welsh town gets its own parody tribute, in the style of Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind.

Baby eating a watermelon
Not just eating a watermelon, but eating a giant one while inhabiting it and gnawing at it from the inside. Cute.


Boats*Cars*Dollars*Girls*Helicopters*Jewellery*Skylines

It might be 14 years since The Roots clevery captioned their What They Do video to highlight rap video clichés but Thomas Traum’s video montage of cars, rims, bling and helicopters set to Mahler’s 5th Symphony proves nothing’s changed.

Why most bands make very little money touring. http://bit.ly/whytouringsucks

The Joe Duffy Soundboard..oh dear. http://bit.ly/duffyboard

Cinema’s top 20 music geeks. http://bit.ly/geeks20

A million dollar record deal is probably not what you think it is. http://bit.ly/rcrddeal

An American Backstreet Boys fan has started a blog to listen to all of the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. She currently has listened to over 340 albums. Follow her progress.
http://www.1001albums.com

How Secure Is My Password?

Pretty self-explanatory but comforting to it would take “a quintillion years” for a desktop PC to crack your chosen password.
http://howsecureismypassword.net

Quarter Inch Collective

A small Irish label of “weird and beautiful music” who release cassette tapes and online mixtapes.

http://quarterinchcollective.com

The happiest DJ in the world
As one site said about this viral hit, this man is joy in human form. We want to party with him.

Russian boy band viral
Face it, most popular boy bands have nothing on these Russian dudes.

Old Spice guy video responses
Not content with two of the most watched commercials in recent memory, Old Spice have been using social media and Youtube to produce funny video responses in near real-time to user and celebrity tweets. Responses were directed at Perez Hilton, actress Alyssa Milano and regular tweeters, one of whom asked his girlfriend to marry him through actor Isaiah Mustafa’s character. She said yes. More here.

Since that time, starting a record label is cool again, judging by the number of music bloggers who are now doing so. In many ways, a blogger starting a small independent label is a simple extension of their modus operandi with the blog – to promote music they are interested in.

Popular alternative Texas-based music blog Gorilla Vs Bear started Forest Family Records along with fellow blogger Weekly Tape Deck three months ago. Far from acting as an MP3-selling hub, the label releases limited vinyl releases from bands they love. So far artists like Cults, Gauntlet Hair and Dent May have been lined up with the first two releases selling out quickly.

Popjustice – the UK pop music blog with discernable taste has struck a deal with Virgin/EMI to launch their own imprint called Popjustice Hi-Fi which will release the Robyn-esque pop of Rosanna in August. There were accusations that Perez robbed his music recommendations directly from Popjustice so it’ll be interesting to see how this UK major label partnership fares.

It’s mostly small DIY blogs though who have gotten in on the physical music-releasing game like BigStereo, My Old Kentucky Blog, White Guys With Beards, Chocolate Bobka (both cassette releases) and Catbird Seat.

Blogs are niche and they know their audiences very well. At the top of the pile, Perez feels the pressure to break acts internationally while the smaller blogs have no such worries. Most of them are selling around 500 copies of each record only. Technology has now empowered them to sell, not just share. It makes competitive sense as well. Many labels sign bands after reading about them on blogs so this just cuts out the middle man, at least at the start of an artist’s career.

Meanwhile, a host of independent music blogs were recently snapped up themselves by the larger and more popular boy in the class, Pitchfork. The Chicago-based influential music site launched Altered Zones, a sister site consisting of 14 blogs who will be highlighting creative and adventurous small-scale new artists on Pitchfork’s dime. It’s an interesting development as rather than try to ratchet up into the mainstream, Pitchfork has gone the other way, appealing to the even more niche group of people who like pychedelic, drone, new-age and lo-fi music. It seems niches really are the new mainstream.

After going on a Twitter tirade (twirade?) against his manager, UK grime MC Wiley uploaded over 200 songs onto the net for fans to freely download.

http://bit.ly/wileyzips

New Cut Copy

The Australian three-piece played Tripod in Dublin on Tuesday, after releasing a new taster Where I’m Going from their as yet untitled new album.
http://www.cutcopy.net

Sankt Otten

Fans of instrumental cinematic music will love German duo Sankt Otten, who’ve actually been going for four albums now. Their latest Morgen Wieder Lustig is a great ambient album to aid an hour of chillout.

http://www.myspace.com/sanktotten

Fight Like Apes
The best indie-pop punk band sans guitars in Ireland return with Hoo Haa Henry, a sarcastic and caustic song about a boring friend.

http://www.fightlikeapesmusic.com

Awkward Stock Photos
Where the world of baffling and meaningless stock photography goes to die.
http://awkwardstockphotos.com
Hippy Kitchens
Vintage photographs from the kitchens of yesteryear.
http://hippykitchen.tumblr.com

iTunes’ advert spots from five years ago helped launch the career of Feist and others into the mainstream. Corporate patrons have tangible benefits and many more musicians and artists are increasingly comfortable with corporations and brands funding their creativity. Most collaborations are accepted by fans. The exception to the rule, are venerated rock stars whose fanbases can’t marry the blatant commercialism with supposed legendary punk spirit – see Iggy Pop flouncing around for a car insurance company or John Lydon advertising butter.

Despite the uncomfortable relationship between art and commerce, there has been some great examples recently of engaging online campaigns that straddle both successfully. Here are four:

1) The Creators Project – thecreatorsproject.com

A collaboration between Intel and cool bible Vice, The Creators Project kicked off in NYC last month, calling itself “a completely new kind of arts and culture channel for a completely new kind of world.” Basically, this allows the organisers to get in the coolest bands around (M.I.A, Sleigh Bells, The Rapture, Die Antwoord), revered film directors (hello Spike Jonze), art installations and more. Cram them into large warehouse spaces and you’ve got a hot event taking place in London, Seoul, Sao Paolo over the coming months. Even if you can’t make any of the events, the website has tons of original content to peruse and is genuine in engaging the art side of your brain.

2) Three Artists, One Song – converse.com/music
The sneaker company Converse got three disparate artists together in 2008 to make a original song. Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, Pharrell Williams and Santigold all collaborated on a superb track – My Drive Thru which was given aways as a free download on the website. The concept is back for 2010 with rapper Kid Cudi, Vampire Weekend’s Rostam and Best Coast collaborating on All Summer.

3) 8 Songs, 8 Weeks – adultswim.com/promos/201005_kia/

Cult cable TV network Adult Swim released eight singles in eight successive weeks – all quality, from artists steeped in blog buzz like Cults, Washed Out, Black Lips, Holy Ghost! and Madvillain.

4) Dr. Martens is 50 – 50.drmartens.com

Another shoe brand already closely aligned with youth culture, Dr. Martens has asked ten artists like Noisettes, BRMC, The Raveonettes, Dam Funk and The Duke Spirit to cover a cult classic song. An original video is made with a notable video director and the song is given away as for free.