A few years ago, I saw this guy Meric Long opening for my friend's band, who were opening for another band, at a club, in front of about 15 people. He made guitar and vocal loops live, then added more guitar and vocals on top of them, and he blew me away. I watched his Web site. He (and his drummer) changed their name to The Dodos and pretty quickly started getting a lot of buzz on various indie rock blogs. Their album Visiter was well reviewed and their latest album, Time To Die, came out this year. And who knows -- maybe they'll actually make it big...
The new CD is great. Lots of good folk music, my favorites being the songs that showcase Long's outstanding fingerstyle guitar skills. Here is, I think, the single off the album, Fables...
Here are a few things to check out over the weekend, the good, bad and ugly:
MagicMinis will be at The Fantasy of Lights tomorrow Saturday (12/5/09) from 3-5pm on Union St in San Francisco. Come say hi and get a holiday balloon!
The Love Language are from North Carolina, and these days that's almost enough for me. Seems like I love all the music coming out of North Carolina.
Somehow I missed these guys when they came to town, can't remember why. Too bad, because this song Lalita (from their debut album "The Love Language") must be great live. I can imagine the singer really hitting the "LA-li-ta" to start the chorus.
Unfortunately, this is one of many horribly lo-fi indie recordings this year (definitely a bad side effect of the ease of creating and releasing music these days -- badly engineered & mixed recordings). Still a great rocker...
As always, Stephanie Ernst, Change.org's Animal Rights blogger, is a font of useful information. This time it's a holiday gift (and charitable) giving guide that all vegan, all the time.
Guess what? It's that time of year again, when all the lists of Bests come out. It's already December and I've gotten a lot of great new music recently, so I have to get going with my Songs of the Year. After all, this being 2009, of course there have to be year-end lists and decade-end lists.
And now, my first pick for 2009's best songs, and this might be the best of them all.
Don't ask me how to pronounce their name, but the band is Vetiver. I have no idea if anything else they've done is any good. (OK - I just checked out Tight Knit, the album this is on. Pretty good, but most of the songs are a bit too mellow.) I got this song in a free sampler from Amazon (a Sub Pop sampler - see image below). They played the Treasure Island festival this year, but Noah and I were too cold and didn't want to lose our seats on the bleachers, so we didn't walk over to the other stage to hear them.
Nonetheless, this is a great song. It's light & bouncy and if it doesn't make you happy, I don't know what song would. Enjoy...
Recently the NY Times published an Op-ed by Gary Steiner from a truly vegan point of view, not the sort of half-assery usually published by folks like Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman.
Check out my personal blog where I did a very comprehensive review of Alicia Silverstone's The Kind Diet and a mini-review of Tal Ronnen's The Conscious Cook.
Sigh.
No, not yesterday's Thanksgiving meal, but some great vegan meals I've had lately, sometimes in unexpected places.
