Jen Robinson

RIP MCA Billboard - Shepard Fairey (Sunset / Las Palmas)

Via rollogrady

Exitmusic - Passage

Another great Secretly Canadian band dropped its debut album last week. Exitmusic follows their 2011 EP with the full length Passage. I’m blown away by this title track. Dark but delicate, quiet and crashing. Feels like blasphemy, but I gotta say: this is what I wish the new Sigur Ros were. 

Hey LA. Uberhipness is coming to Hollywood this weekend. 

prtls:

In just 2 days PORTALS will be making its mark on LA with PORTALS Traveling Showcase - Los Angeles, CA w/ 6bit. Check out the setlist and details below. See you there?

Saturday, June 2nd 2012. Doors at 1 PM. Show from 2-10 PM.

At Space 15 Twenty
1520 N. Cahuenga Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90028

⇒ RSVP HERE ⇐

⇒ Purchase Tickets by clicking the showcase images on the side-bar &/or footer of this PORTALS post ⇐

Setlist:

Tuesday Glass: 2pm – 2:30pm

Honeydrip: 2:45pm – 3:15pm

StaG: 3:30pm – 4pm

Mirror Lady: 4:15pm – 4:45pm

Eliot: 5pm – 5:30pm

Different Sleep: 5:45pm – 6:15pm

Slow Magic: 6:30pm – 7pm

Dreams.: 7:15pm – 7:45pm

Mister Lies: 8pm – 8:45pm

TV Girl: 9:05pm – 9:50/10pm

Gossip - Melody Emergency

I love the new Gossip album. Beth Ditto has never sounded better, and producer Brian Higgins may have outdone Rick Rubin’s effort on their last album, Music for Men. The lurching “Melody Emergency” is the opening track that sets the scene for a varied LP that shifts from firey 80s pop (anyone else here “Eye of the Tiger” in “Perfect World”?) to straight up disco to slow jamz and back again. This is my early favorite. Don’t miss “Move In The Right Direction” either. 

Jeff Buckley - Lover, You Should’ve Come Over (Live on KCRW)

Jeff Buckley died 15 years ago today. He recorded this stunning version of “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over,” from the now-famous Grace, at KCRW in the early 90s. Incredible.

Well I feel too young to hold on 
And I’m much too old to break free and run 
Too deaf, dumb, and blind to see the damage I’ve done

Lover, you should’ve come over
‘Cause it’s not too late

Hat tip New Music Tipsheet for the pointer to this set. 

Stand By Me by Ben E. King

Happy birthday, Dad.

shared from exfm

Willie Nelson - Just Breathe (Pearl Jam cover featuring Lukas Nelson)

There are a couple excellent covers on Willie Nelson’s new album, Heroes. We heard his take on Coldplay’s The Scientist a while back. Turns out there’s an even better one. I just love this version of Pearl Jam’s Just Breathe by Willie and his son Lukas Nelson. It’s pretty true to the original, but that harp adds a lot and Willie sounds amazing. 

Florence + the Machine - Try A Little Tenderness (Otis Redding cover)

I have two great cover songs this week, so here’s one a day early. This recording is from Flo + the Machine’s MTV Unplugged session. “Try A Little Tenderness” — first performed in the 30s but made popular by Redding in 1966 — has been getting a lot of love lately. You may remember another subtle tribute that sampled Otis’s version. Ms. Welch, whose music is often called indie soul, puts her spin on a classic here. 

Lupe Fiasco - Around My Way (Freedom Ain’t Free)

Chicago’s Lupe Fiasco has announced a sequel to Food & Liquor — one of my favorite albums of the last decade. I’m gonna hope and pray for some classic “Kick, Push” and “Daydreamin’” caliber awesomeness from Lupe. This first single is a step in the right direction (even if Pete Rock doesn’t like it). Food & Liquor II is due in September. 

The Walkmen - The House You Made

The new album from The Walkmen is pretty great. This is the first track that jumped out at me. It’s sort of Pulp Fiction meets Brooklyn. Love the bass section about 3 minutes in.

shared from exfm

Music For Your Morning: NPR Music is streaming Sigur Ros’ Valtari and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ Here and Saint Etienne’s Words And Music By Saint Etienne and The Walkmen’s Heaven and Regina Spektor’s What We Saw From The Cheap Seats.

Via nprfreshair

sigur rós - Varúð

The long anticipated new album from Sigur Ros drops a week from today. The band held a global listening party last week, and it’s now streaming on-demand via NPR and The Guardian. It goes without saying that I’m in love at first listen. 

Preorder at http://www.sigur-ros.co.uk/

Shearwater - You As You Were

I’m wrapping up two weeks on the East Coast today. lacartaajena and I left Brooklyn about a week ago with no plans and only a vague notion that we wanted to visit Maine. We ended up in Bar Harbor this weekend and spent yesterday in Acadia National Park. What a place. 

We listened to Shearwater’s Animal Joy en route to the trailhead of our epic hike. Shearwater’s sweeping, melodic pop is known for invoking the natural world and exploring otherworldly themes. It always makes me think of J.R.R. Tolkien. Animal Joy is a little less obscure than the recent trilogy of Palo Santo, Rook, and The Golden Archipelago, but still touches on the same concepts. An amazing soundtrack for a trip through coastal Maine — a place of astonishing natural beauty. 

The Golden Filter - Age of Consent (New Order cover)

From MOJO Magazine’s January edition. Happy Friday.

Rural Ghosts - Rural Ghosts

I find myself in Portland, Maine this morning listening to local artist Rural Ghosts. This self-titled track opens the self-titled debut EP, which Erik Neilson self-released in March. It’s a safe bet that this song captures the essence of the project, which Neilson describes as “Sparse ballads of death, love and regret, set against the thick & mysterious ambiance of Maine’s North Woods.” If that line conjures images of the good winter in northern Wisconsin, you’ve got the idea. 

The opening lines talk of being followed by ghosts “down wooded paths and by docks on crumbling piers.” Powerful imagery — especially as I trapse through Maine with no plans and little direction. Give the EP a listen on Bandcamp, and also check out the limited edition, handmade physical copy on Etsy.  

The Tallest Man On Earth - 1904

This new track from Sweden’s The Tallest Man on Earth hit the airwaves yesterday. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Kristian Matsson said “I wanted to build something that didn’t sound like a rock band, but wasn’t super minimalistic. I wanted a sound that had that brittle [quality], that feeling that it might just fall apart.” He achieves that brittleness very nicely here.  

There’s No Leaving Now is out June 12 on Dead Oceans. 

Via whitneymcn

Cloud Nothings - Stay Useless

When an album hits the hype cycle and an artist is suddenly everyone’s SXSW pick and everyone’s band of the moment, sometimes I can’t even listen to it. I’ll admit that I steered clear of the new Cloud Nothings album because the swells of praise were too loud. 

Well, that was a mistake. This is probably the best album of the year so far. Perfect pop punk that invokes both the Strokes and Minor Threat. You wouldn’t be wrong to call them brethren in arms with Japandroids and Fucked Up. Attack On Memory is raw and alive. Even “Wasted Days,” at almost 9 minutes, is driving and urgent with the repeating chorus “I thought I would be more than this.” It’s hard to listen outside the context of today’s political and socioeconomic shit show.

“No Future/No Past” is straight out of the Slint playbook, and is the first track that drew me in. But “Stay Useless” is the centerpiece, so I’ve shared that here. 

Attack On Memory on Spotify, Amazon, iTunes.  Also check out their performance on KEXP. 

Daniel Rossen - Golden Mile

Daniel Rossen, of Grizzly Bear and Department of Eagles fame, dropped a solo EP last month. It’s quite good, as you may expect.

Insound Vinyl

Pomplamoose - Mrs Robinson (Simon and Garfunkel cover)

Happy Mother’s Day to my mom: Mrs. Robinson!

I don’t think she was much like The Graduate’s Mrs. Robinson when I was in college. And if she was, I don’t want to know. But this song is, naturally, a family favorite.

shared from exfm

Jim James & Calexico - Goin’ To Acapulco (Bob Dylan cover)

An oldie from the “I’m Not There” soundtrack. I’m shocked to see that, when I first posted this video a few years ago, I wrote that I wasn’t a huge MMJ fan. What!? Must have been a momentary lapse in taste. 

The world’s awesomest gift pack arrived at my door yesterday courtesy Cypress Grove Chevre. In a nutshell, the good folks at Cypress Grove didn’t like the look of a wheel of Humboldt Fog I Instagram’ed last week. So they sent me a replacement PLUS a sweet selection of their other cheeses, a rad tshirt and a very nice note. As Rebecca said upon tearing into this last night, “thank you social media!” 

I’m a big fan of Humboldt Fog, but had never tried their other cheeses. The Lamb Chopper and Truffle Tremor are delicious, and I expect the other three to be just as good. 

Thanks, guys! Way to kill it at customer service. 

Also, thanks to lacartaajena, the rightful owner of the original cheese, to Jacob for the gift, and to Shipyard Brewing Company for making the Smashed Blueberry that accompanied our cheese-out last night.

“Same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

—barackobama 

“I’m President Barack Obama. And I too want to slow-jam the news.”

Via barackobama

thepittsburghhistoryjournal:

On This Day in Pittsburgh History: April 1, 1954

WQED, PBS channel 13, begins broadcasting as the first community-sponsored television station in the nation, and the city’s fifth TV station. [Wikipedia; Penn State University] 

saladfork:

What a great idea

Truth. Via ilovecharts.

caterpillarcowboy:

“A full report is below, but here a few highlights from our findings: Pinterest is retaining and engaging users as much as 2-3x as efficiently as Twitter was at a similar time in its history. Pins link to a tremendously large universe of sites. Etsy is the most popular source of pin content, but it only represents about 3% of pins. Over 80% of pins are re-pins, demonstrating the tremendous virality at work in the Pinterest community. To contrast, a study done at a similar time in Twitter’s history showed that only about 1.4% of tweets were retweets. The quality of the average new user (as defined by their level of engagement and likelihood to remain active) is high but declining. Users who have joined in recent months are 2-3x less active during their first month than the users that came before them.”

— Pinterest Data Analysis: An Inside Look (via jryu)

An open call to Instagram: Figure out how to enable network effects while protecting users’ expectations of privacy. It’s probably as simple as adding an opt-in flag.

Paul Graham on the death of Hollywood and SOPA

I take a less contentious tone on disrupting the entertainment industry, but Paul makes a good point. 

dankantor:

Yesterday Facebook got into the “Listen With” game by announcing a new feature that allows people to click a button and listen to what their friends are listening to along with them. I haven’t tried it yet but it does look pretty nice.

Of course, as soon as they announced it, everyone cried “they are stealing from Turntable.fm”. Techcrunch even ran a followup post where Billy Chasen the founder of Turntable.fm said he was flattered Facebook was copying them.

Here’s the thing: Facebook is not copying Turntable. Not only are the features pretty different, but the idea of listening with friends is as old as, I don’t know, say, music.

As listening moved online, one of the promises of that was the idea that we could now network our stereos and listen to music with other people regardless of physical location. I’ll argue that no one has nailed it yet but clearly we are getting close. I believe the way to do it right is to study how, why and when people listen to music and then shape these tools to support that behavior. We (exfm) have some interesting ideas around how to do this, but are not ready to roll anything substantial out yet. Judging from the comments on those TC posts, it looks like there are a bunch of sites out there trying as well.

So to sum up, no Facebook is not copying Turntable.fm. Listening with friends online is a pretty old idea (see my 2004 grad school project Awaire). A bunch of sites are also doing this (see Tomahawk). And in my opinion nobody has gotten it right yet. Oh and if you really want to Listen With in exfm, ok fine, you can do that right here.

Meme mixing on vcmemes. 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Just finished reading. Wow.

Business school 101.

teachingliteracy:world-shaker: thedailywhat: Endless Origami

Sam and I rode motorcycles from SF down Highway 1 through Big Sur to Paso Robles this weekend. Rebecca and Sam’s wife drove the gear truck down to meet us for the weekend. It was an unreal experience. It had been a while since I rode a big bike and we did some really technical riding along Skyline Blvd, so I spent a lot of the first day being freaked out. But once we settled in, it was the ride of a lifetime.  More photos here. 

Sam’s brother is a hot shot winemaker, so we got the family treatment and spit-on-the-floor barrel-tasting experience in Paso. It’s a nice way to travel if you have the in. 

Next up: San Diego to Cabo. Life is good, folks. 

Part of tonight’s costume.