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

Because what else are you doing right now? Wow, is it midafternoon already? Looks like it. What in god's name are you going to do with yourselves for the next several hours that you will be "working"? I know, how's about some classic indie pop videos? Today, Jamie and I realized that if Built To Spill were a child, it would be in middle school, and that was a horriffying thought indeed. (Read: we are the olds.) In any event, here are some videos from back in the day (and current, too!) favorites. Superchunk :: Hyper Enough Pavement :: Carrot Rope Cat Power :: Cross Bones Style Yo La Tengo :: The Summer

The start of Festival Season is always signaled by the announcement of the Coachella Festival lineup, the annual Better Than Burning Man And With Better Music three day bacchanal in the California desert outside of Palm Springs in Indio, CA. If you study the Coachella lineup carefully, it tends predict the bulk of festival acts for the summer, and this year is no different. "So what?" you say, "Coachella was announced a MONTH ago; go back to reblogging Pitchfork!" Oh really? Out here in the Northwest, what really matters is not Coachella (too far, too dusty, and too expensive), but Sasquatch. Sasquatch, which is hosted at The Gorge in George, WA, started in 2002 as a one day kinda hippy festival then evolved to showcasing the best and the brightest of the indie, transitioned into a two day event, and, this year, offers us three whole days of amazing music. Not only that, but the lineup was officially announced yesterday, which, while we may be a day late, we are sti...

Blogger does not like lists, ordered or otherwise Music recommendation tools, or discovery tools, are not new, but as the web gets bigger, they grow in number if not in quality. I remember a little plugin 8 years ago that let me to "discover" Atom and His Package (though I forget the name of it) that worked on a simple Like it / Hate it modality. If you clicked the thumbs up button, you'd hear the song more often; thumbs down, and you wouldn't hear it as much (but it would still crop up every now and again). Today, the systems are more complex and more numerous. So we here at Duck & Cover Music have taken it upon ourselves to rate seven of them. Seven is a good number. A lucky number. In many cultures, a holy number. It's also all we could find. We based our rating on four qualities: Accessibility : How many plugins do you need to use it. The higher the number, the lower the rating. also, does it work on all browsers? Accuracy : How close were their furthe...

"I woke up thristy / the day I died" I'm a little behind, considering this album was released in 2006, but I only found out about Islands a few months ago. Besides, I'm restless, and the album is worth writing about--it's accessible, but troubling. Perhaps it's my liberal arts background, or perhaps it's that I'm currently reading Rushdie's Satanic Verses , but its difficult to ignore the tones of reincarnation lingering throughout this album. Its title alone conjures common death/rebirth motifs: the ancient mariner, baptism, Odysseus--that irrevocable notion of returning to some salty silence, real or imagined, only to emerge once more; to return to return, etc. And when the parenthetical addition to the title track is "Life After Death," well, it becomes a little obvious there's more here than a few quirky tunes. The songs also toy with the metaphor of joining, and on many tracks there is a logical collision in verse between I/you/w...

Sure, there are 3 million records, but they're only a buck a piece! Bargain! I have a pretty decent music collection, as does Dakin. Our combined physical albums (cds, vinyls, cassettes) would equal about 1500 pieces. Count the digital alums, and it's closer to 2,000. Yet this pales in comparison to a collector who's just put his entire library up on Ebay : 3 million albums, all going for a dollar a pop. Of course, you have to buy the whole thing. The seller, claiming to have the "undisputed" largest personal collection in the world, is looking for a nice home for his milieu of musical millions. From the auction, From Thomas Edison to American Idol, this is the complete history of the music that shaped and defined five generations. 3 million records and 300,000 CDs containing more than 6 million song titles. It's the undisputed largest collection of recorded music in the world. About half of the recordings are new and never played, and every genre of 20th cen...

It's like SeeqPod, except it works ALL the time There's a new internet-trawling, free-streaming service out there, and it's name is Songza . Actually, the site was launched in November 2007, so by internet standards, it's only newish. Songza works like SeeqPod and Last.FM's scrobbling method. You type in the band or song (or both) you want to hear, and Songza sends it's spiders out into the web to pull back anything that matches. We like it here at Duck & Cover because we're given the chance to listen to all the fantastic new music being made without spending whole weekends at the record shop (however, to be honest, I haven't spent whole weekends at any record shop since I left Ireland, and only then because I was waiting for the pubs to open. So the 2008 analogy would probably be more like "whole hours sifting through people's personal favorites on Last.FM" "whole days waiting for imeem to something that resembles working.")....

Just when I was getting used to hating Pitchfork, they go and publish something wonderful Today in Pitchfork, writer Mike McGonigal introduces a series of responses by various artists. The artists, including Kevin Barnes (Of Montreal) and Randy Randall (No Age), write their reactions to arguably one of the best albums of the 1990s , Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane over the Sea . While Pitchfork can be accused of pushing quantity over quality, this article is a gem, due in part to McGonigal's comprehensive and humorous intro. His remark, "I've always joked that David Karsten Daniels and Colin Meloy would each do well to send partial royalty checks to Mangum", made me spit coffee. From the article: For all the ways the album has influenced so many people, I wish more would take this away from it-- that it's OK to examine, and be nakedly emotional, about stuff aside from the lint in your belly button. Aeroplane's radiant weirdness works, and is so oddl...

When I first saw Cat Power, it was when she was promoting her Covers album. I had been a huge fan since MoonPix (again, I have to credit Dakin with introducing me), so Dakin, Magpie, and I piled into the Jetta and drove to Lawrence, KS (all the good bands played in Lawrence). This would be my first Cat Power experience. We studied hard on the drive up, learning most of the words before we got off the Turnpike. We yearned for heartbreak, for poetry. What we got was Chan Marshall on stage murmuring into the mic, "I'm such a stupid fuck. I'm such a fuck." We were understandably shocked. I remember Magpie saying to herself, "Oh please don't kill yourself. Not right in front of everyone." Dakin had a more humorous approach, getting some folks to shout "We love you, Chan," but deliberately pronouncing the hard "ch" instead of the soft "sh" as it it supposed to be pronounced. The sarcasm was lost on most people, but the point was t...

Soulful, indie folk. Listen to it quick before it ends up on Grey's Anatomy Isolation and creativity is a marriage known to artists for centuries. From Rainer Maria Rilke, who holed himself up in a castle on the Adriatic to produce his Duino Elegies, to The Bachelorette, the Kiwi keyboardist who shut herself in a small cabin on the coast of New Zealand's north island; artists know that removing yourself from civilization for months on end leads to inspiration and, sometimes, poetry. Without distractions taking up all the thinking space, one's imagination is allowed to stretch it's legs. In the case of Bon Iver, those legs are very long. Bon Iver (a deliberate misspelling by singer Justin Vernon, apparently, of the French bon hiver ) could easily be mistaken for an acoustic TV on the Radio, especially on songs like Skinny Love , and The Wolves , the latter sounding like it's haunted by the ghosts of gospel. Thankfully, that comparison dies a slow but lasting death as...