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

As it's Friday, we like to round up a few of the stranger music-related stories and share them with our beloved readers. First, there was the TechDirt article about bands (or the labels who represent the bands) who pull their songs from iTunes after said songs have become popular. Apparently, they think it will force people to buy more CDs, which is kind of like selling tires, then shutting all the stores and telling people they have to buy cars to get the tires they want. TechDirt reacts with the appropriate "WTF". Moving on, we find a lovely post about the "peculiar pocket trumpet" from Trumpet Instruments. Finally, there's this: a homemade hurdy gurdy built from circut hacked Furbies, appropriately named the "furby gurdy."

Guest blogger Drew Zackary needs a day off. We wonder where he finds time to send us his guitar player's pick each month. The underground eats the years, breaks all your E strings; spits out death, obscure city workers, and suburban gardeners decades after the cocaine and long hair. . . I Digress. Robert Buras. 1975-2007. Found dead in his apartment in Oslo ( here's an amazing video of his band with him as the corpse ). Lead guitarist for Mudugrada. Lead singer and guitarist for My Midnight Creeps. I loved Mudurada for years before I understood it. Buras had the secret down. He played his soul through his right hand, man. Typically, when we watch the guitarist on stage, we focus on his orher left hand. But the soul-- the damn soul comes from the right hand . We can all marvel at the hyper speeds that the best players finger; the frets, pentatonic minor scales forward and backwards they play with their eyes closed. But it's those staccato upstrokes; the hard pounding; t...

Sounds Like: It's 2am on a clear, early autumn night and your friends say, "let's go to a club;" the song that pops into your head. RIYL: The Presets, Riton, Human League, Depeche Mode, LCD Soundsystem Personal Response: The invitation is white with red letters reading "Dance Hall, Rm 16", and the outside looks familiar enough: iron door, dark facade, bass you feel in your feet--your stock standard dance venue, you say to yourself. You knock on the door. Woodhands answers wearing a black tie, white oxford shirt, and black trousers. "Meh," you think as you saunter past. You begin to get settled into a run-of-the-mill room full of boogie tracks when Woodhands shuts the door behind you and starts re-arranging all the furniture. What follows is a twisted, dark scene from Dragonball Z: You watch Woodhands's face go from average to pleased-yet-slightly-creepy. "That's right," says Woodhands. "You thougt we were just ripping off ...

They're calling it "the Firefox of media players." Which is catchy. A lot catchier than "what iTunes could have been were it not linked to the evil that is the iTunes Music Store." Although both descriptions have their particular charms. But not as charming as the Songbird mascot, which appears to be a flatulent sparrow. If you want a good description of the features (built-in Last.fm scrobbling, custom add-ons, concert ticket link) then I suggest reading the article on Webmonkey . But if you were the kid who played the game before reading the instructions, then here's the link to the download on the Songbird site . You'll notice that the player is still in beta. This is just geek talk for "we're not done yet." Personally, I enjoy the graphic of the Songbird player (on both Webmonkey and the Songbird website). It displays a library filled with the likes of Fugazi, Fruit Bats, and Gary Numan. What does that mean? It means the developers list...

Contributor and friend of D&C, Nick recounts the worries and glories of searching for beer in a new country. When Nick is not recovering from bouts of drunken debauchery, he whiles away the hours as a kick-ass User Experience Designer in London. You'll have to excuse the short break between this and the previous post of mine about beer. I've been testing my Spanish while hanging out on the beach in Spain. "Dos cerveza por favor” will get you two beers (why settle for just one) delivered to your table. I’ve also been climbing mountains in the South of France, which is where I discovered perfection in a bottle – a 9% Leffe! There is a god! There could be many but my recent discovery of this elixir means there should be at least one. There are probably two because surely another one needs to exist in order to explain the perfection that is Charlize Theron (thank you Lord). I’m not prone to stalking beers on the web but I perhaps should have been as the bottle I came acros...

Arms is on tour with Vampire Weekend. That's as interesting at it gets. Sounds Like: A band who has found their sound . . . wait, they just lost it . . . no--there it is . . . nope, gone; it's gone . . . RIYL: The Strokes, Kings of Leon, Silver Jews Personal Response: I went to college with a guy who didn't know he was funny. Yet some of the quips and observations that came out of his mouth were sometimes so side-splitting hilarious, it was sublime. The problem was that when he realized he's said something amusing, and that we were all laughing, he would try to continue the joke; only he didn't know what the joke was. He was simultaneously the funniest and most drole human I've ever known. I thought of him while listening to Arms because they approach music in much the same way. You will hear key changes inspired and passionate followed by hackneyed riffs that are downright boring. It's as if they trip accidentally over brilliance, but like my friend from...

Drew Zackary, citizen of earth and Old Denver, fights sleep to jot down his thoughts on Motel Motel's debut LP, New Denver. Sounds Like : New wave hipster psych- folk Americana with neither's existential terror or humor . . . and C-grade story-telling skills. Recommended if You Like : Eunuchized Nick Cave, Squirrel Nut Zippers on Bezodiazepines and PBR, or open mic night for folk-lovin' hipsters . . . and sleeping. Personal Reaction : Few bands practice and have visions of large orchestrations. And few bands of any experience level have such a grasp on what the arrangements should sound like recorded. This album is a great recording: great vocals, a keen understanding of the chordal structures of the lost traveling americana from the 20s, and a good mix of stringed intrumentation and other under-used instruments in rock. It's perfectly recorded and well thought out. Obviously made by people skilled in playing and passionate about making music they love. Yet for the gen...

Smashing Magazine has a lovely list of 35 beautiful music album covers . And while we at Duck & Cover Music disagree with some (for example, Appetite for Destruction, while certainly iconic, would not rank among the beautiful) and would definitely add one or two (In the Aeroplane Over The Sea, for one), we found scrolling through the list a joy.

In an update to last week's review of Light Pollution's enjoyable new EP, we, the editors of Duck & Cover Music, asked the band the hard-hitting questions. Read on: D&C: Do you have a favorite pair of shoes? LP: Boots! D&C: Is there a song you never get tired of hearing? LP: Evil Woman by ELO D&C: Were any of Light Pollution in the high school marching band? LP: Matt (our drummer) was in the marching band. Heather (viola) was in Orchestra, but that's not as cool. D&C: Any plans to play out west (specifically Seattle/Vancouver)? LP: We've been to Seattle, but never to Vancouver. We would love to go in the near future. So there you have it. Big thanks to Light Pollution, and to Brooke for getting us in touch with them.

Just when you thought modern music had lost its soul . . . While New York City churns out dance pop, Seattle cries tears of indie rock goodness, and Los Angeles provides us with all our Garage Punk needs, Chicago keeps relatively to itself: an introspective tinkerer, dabbling in the dazzling. From Chicago we get Steve Albini, Touch and Go Records, Cap'n Jazz, and now Light Pollution. The press release I received states that Light Pollution is, "never stagnant, and constantly expanding their musical horizons. [The] music is a kaleidoscope of sound, encompassing everything from backward tapes to dissonant piano rolls to even crunching leaves." In short, a band that is doing something interesting. And we like that. We receive a lot of music here at Duck & Cover, but Light Pollution stood out. As it played through we all sat back on the couch, put our hands behind our heads, and someone muttered, "Ah. Real musicians playing real music. So rare these days." Indee...