Duck & Cover :: Indie rock music writing from Arcade Fire to the Zygotic Minci

...Yacht, the great and fun summertime anytime fun band that is a little bit of an offshoot of The Blow has a channel on better than YouTube competitor Vimeo? Neither did I! Until now! And it's real great! http://www.vimeo.com/yachtstuff So go check it out, 'cause I am! Also, spend some time at Vimeo.com, because the video quality on the site is really, really stunning, as is the user interface. Also, none of those nasty YouTube commenters telling everyone that they "sukc!11!!1!" or "youre a fagggut"; nope, none of that at all. On Tour Forever: w/ Dirty Projectors from Jona Bechtolt on Vimeo .

Here at Duck and Cover we love love love Destroyer and Dan Bejar, and all those crazy Canadian bands and side projects. Goodness, to tell the truth, sometimes we have serious trouble keeping track of who is in Wolf Parade, or Frog Eyes, or the Handsome Furs, or who's shooting a Porno, or Hustling, or Broken down or whatever. We just know that we love them. We especially love Dan Bejar and his tres brilliant solo work as Destroyer. I, for the longest time, have told Jamie (nay, beaten Jamie over the head) that 2006's Destroyer's Ru bies is one of the hands down best records ever (UPDATE: Jamie says, "It's true. I hated Destroyer first time around, but have grown to like the band, although I hesitate to use the word 'love'"). That's right. Ever . The lush instrumentation and sixities pop sounds always made me think that this is what it would have sounded like if Globe of Frogs era Robyn Hitchcock had written a rock opera with the Beatles. How would s...

Qtrax? More like "few tracks." Oh! Burn! A few days ago, the blogosphere was buzzing with the news that Qtrax, an MP3 download site, had signed a deal with all the major labels to provide free downloads on everything in their catalog. Wired loved it, and rightly so ( read their updated article ). ReadWriteWeb had even posted (arguably, it was a good post) the pros and cons of such a deal . However, all was not as Qtrax had claimed. On the Reuters wire today is the rebuttal from the labels , who collectively grunt, "nuh-uh." EMI Music, Sony BMG and Warner all previously had agreements with Qtrax, which was testing a paid music download service. Sources say those agreements expired in the last year and did not cover the new free, ad-supported model now being promoted by Qtrax. This denial not only totally burns Qtrax, but it also shames some of the blogs who repeated the story considering many of them are so self righteous when it comes to pointing the finger at trad...

Techdirt has a good rebuttal to an article from PC Magazine editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff. In the latter, Ulanoff claims--according to his interpretation of free market economies--that taking DRM out of music will kill the music industry (DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is the nastiness that iTunes uses to make sure the music you pay for can only be played on a limited number of computers. DRM can also restrict what type of device you can use to play, I reiterate, the music you have paid for ). Well, nearly as soon as the article was published, flags went up around the blogosphere. It seems, perhaps, Ulanoff may rely too heavily on Wikipedia for his information. When Ulanoff asks if the world has gone mad for wanting free music, Techdirt gently pats him on the head and explains, No, Lance, the world hasn't gone mad. The world (or, at least, much of it) has simply started to understand that basic economics still applies to infinite goods -- and if the marginal cost is zero, th...

It may be the chill that has crept into the air as of late, or perhaps that coupled with the surprisingly clear weather in the South Sound for the past week or so, but something is drawing me, nay, pulling me to the embrace of Antony and the Johnsons. Which record? Oh, all of them. I have a particular affinity for "Cripple and the Starfish", the second track off Antony's 2000 release; a song that, like the popular "Fistful of Love" from 2005's near flawless I Am a Bird Now , romanticizes, begs for, domestic violence. I am happy, so please hit me; I am very, very happy, please hurt me Such is the way with Antony and the Johnsons; pain and memory (though what is memory, if not, so often, pain?), sweet nostalgia, plaintive cries for love, of love, for violence, of violence. It's heartbreaking, and breathtaking, and uplifting and inspiring' all of this delivered by Antony's deep yet reedy vibratto laid over piano driven, distinctly non pop music. Th...

If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, but sounds like Elvis Costello, it's probably from China Chinavasion electronics is not the most reputable place to buy gadgets. It also has some hideous novelties screaming for attention, like the heart-shaped digital camera necklace. To be honest, much of the site reminds me of the Buy-From-Home catalogs I used to find on my doorstep when I was a kid. They were filled with trinkets and back-shed inventions claiming to fill a need I didn't know I had, like giant plastic bags to fit around a full leg cast to keep it dry while you bathe. Yet Chinavasion has one thing going for it: the Cassette MP3 player. Where many MP3 players are trying to look and act like the iPod, this one looks and acts just like an analog cassette. You can play MP3s on it as you would expect, but get this: you can play it in a tape player, too. Just pop in the cassette, and it reads your MP3s. Neat! I would happily part with $22.95 just for the "check...

I haven't been this happy to be sad since I first listened to Carissa's Weird Okay, I admit it: I liked The Murmurs' first album. Just let me get that right out in the open. There's just something about girls singing high harmony that just melts my black heart. So charge your glasses, my friends, because tonight we toast to the sweet and easy. Indie rock in 2007 seemed shadowed, to me, by a forest cluttered with timbres of math rock nouveau (Battles) and Brian Wilson wannabes (Dirty Projectors, Panda Bear, Animal Collective). Filling albums with complex overtures, changing time signatures, and discordant melodies, many songs could be described as little more than controlled chaos; more complicated than complex. So it is refreshing to hear bands, like Au Revoir Simone, who write music rooted in simplicity. I use the word "simplicity", here, as a compliment, not to suggest the music is boring or limited. True, Au Revoir Simone harmonize on the major scale. Howev...

Faster and easier than Napster ever was The ethical debate surrounding free music rages. Yet in the background, behind all the posturing and arguing, little companies around the world are creating products that make downloading and sharing increasingly easy. Whether they are creating more havoc or pushing the limits of an industry in flux is a touchy issue. But the fact is they're there, and they are winning. I remember when Napster was in the midst of their legal wrangling. I commented to a friend that we were living in the golden age of the internet, that soon everything was going to be regulated. Well, I was right and wrong. The RIAA has proved that it loves to alienate its audience by suing them. And certainly there are many more (and bigger) pay-per-download sites than there used to be, but for every iTunes there are two Songbeats . If you used and loved SeeqPod (we used, we liked, but we did not love), then you are going to wet yourself when you try Songbeat, which is a littl...

That's one exclamation point for Yahoo!, and one for me shouting The developers at Yahoo! have been ever so kind to the web community, of which Dakin and I (collectively known as Duck & Cover, for you newbies [although I was never certain who was Duck and who was Cover. Maybe I was meant to be the ampersand.]) are proud members. You may recall a while back I posted our grief with SeeqPod , which we had been using to construct mixes of musical magic for our dedicated readers/listeners. Well, Yahoo! came to the rescure by developing a JavaScript-driven mp3 player. I emphasize JavaScript here to note the differece between this new player (which you may have noticed by now on the left) and previous, Flash-driven players. People need to download Flash, you see, and even though most internet users already have it, requiring readers to download software just to see your blog is not a nice thing. Not only is the Yahoo! player accessible, it's also free--which is a very nice thing...

Please let this be the year Milla Jovovich returns my calls Hi. Let me be the (insert number here) st/rd/th to wish you a lucky and prosperous 2008. As years go, 2008 is shaping up to be a fine one, indeed. While Dakin was freezing his nuts off in Kansas (chuckle, chuckle), I was driving around New Zealand's south island. There were naps on the beach, swims in glacier-fed lakes, lunches of fresh crays, and much much dancing. Did I mention it was hot? Oh, sorry, am I rubbing it in? :-) And during my excursion south I thought long about bands, musicians, and the role of music in contemporary society. However, considering I was on drugs most of the time, I will spare you this lengthy diatribe. Instead, I'd like to introduce you to the first new Duck & Cover playlist for 2008. Consider the playlist, if you will, to be like a yawn on the morning you knew, without doubt, that you were really going to get away with it after all. Because this year you are going to do very well. I p...