Latest from the Library

Well see, there's lots of recent library stuff that I haven't yet mentioned. So here are some mini-reviews of a bunch of stuff.

Fiona Apple-The Extraordinary Machine. This is a good album, Apple's most recent. It has an interesting back story considering it almost didn't get released after a bunch of unreleased material was leaked to the web. But it did come out, and it's good. It has a more polished and orchestrated sound than her previous album, "When the Pawn..." (the really long titled one), and doesn't quite feel as edgy.

The Clash-London Calling. This is a classic British punk album, often considered one of the best punk rock albums of all time. It's just a great rock album in general. Listen and enjoy.

The Band-Greatest Hits (or something like that). This is a great folk-rock band that doens't have much recognition nowadays. But they were really influential in their day and actually pretty popular. In their early days they were the backing band for Bob Dylan. Then they started recording on their own. If you heard one of their songs, "The Weight", I bet you'd recognize it. Yeah, that's the band. Great American music right here.

Duran Duran- Pop Trash. I really wasn't into this one. I guess I've just been curious about Duran Duran from my reading, but I haven't yet been able to find any of their early work from the days when they became known in the 80's. This is a really recent album, and it's nothing special. I won't say with a wry grin on my face that it is "just so much pop trash" because I've been finding that excessively punny reviews irk me (half of the stuff on Rotten Tomatoes is like that- ie if you're reviewing a pirate movie, you have to make some snarky or ironic comment using pirate language/imagery- it gets overdone really quickly!). I also recently got "Thank You" by them which was kind of an odd compilation of covers of songs they like- also a recent album. Yes, there actually is music that I don't like!

www.indiefeed.com (redirects somewhere). This is a great site that has amazing indie music podcasts. They have several channels which you subscribe to (using iTunes or some other podcast player), and you basically get a new song each day or so. Completely free and legal independent music. Joel, if you read this, I'm going to send you a disc loaded with some of this stuff.

And if you're new to "Podcasts" (also sometimes called Netcasts), they're basically normal audio or video files that are set up to be downloaded to your computer (using a program like iTunes) on a recurring basis. It's kind of like radio, except you have complete control over what you get. The popular thing to do is download podcasts and then put them on your portable mp3 player (like an iPod, thus the name "podcast"), but you can listen to them on any computer or any device that can play mp3 files (for audio podcasts).

Okay, well that's all for now- time to head out to OIT...