In Heavy Rotation: “Endless Flowers” – Crocodiles

Endless Flowers has been out for a while now, but I’ve only just gotten around to listening to it in the last week or so. The main reason for my delay is that it isn’t streaming on Rdio in my country (New Zealand). It’s interesting how this factor really influences my listening habits these days – if it’s not available for streaming, I am a lot less likely to give it a spin. It seems so silly in 2012 that regional restrictions are still applied to a fully digital medium – why would you not want every possible person listening to your music?…

In Heavy Rotation: Sam Cooke

It’s impossible to pin down any one album by the great Sam Cooke, and to be honest, the studio albums he released while he was alive did him little justice. His LPs tended to be collections of covers, usually of the showtune or big band variety, and rarely showcased his unique voice and superb songwriting. Nope, he was a singles man through and through, was Sam Cooke.

And boy, what singles they were.

From his first hit single, the beautiful “You Send Me” (consisting of little more than the same three word phrase repeated over and over – the second word swapped out for “thrill” in the second verse) right through the the sublime, posthumously released “A Change Is Gonna Come” (below), Cooke wrote some of the most powerful songs of his generation.…

In Heavy Rotation: Echo Lake – “Wild Peace”

I knew nothing of Echo Lake before discovering them on Rdio this week. I was initially drawn to the beautiful cover – I’m a sucker for brightly colored, psychedelically themed album sleeves: see Tame Impala, or Hot Chip’s new one. It’s a pretty good representation of the music contained within too: ultra shoegazey, with heavy psychedelic elements and just enough pop hooks to keep it interesting. For fans of: A Sunny Day In Glasgow, Slowdive, School Of Seven Bells.

Who the hell are The Nerves?

I thought I knew all of the great forgotten bands: The Replacements, with their great songs, unpredictable live shows and self-destructive attitude; Big Star, with their perfect tunes at exactly the wrong time; Nick Drake, with his refusal to tour and corresponding failure to sell records, despite their melancholy brilliance. But somehow amongst all of these lost gems I managed to miss The Nerves.

It was Rdio that finally brought them to my attention. A colleague found them through an Rdio playlist resulting in The Nerves’ compilation album One Way Ticket appearing in my Recent Activity feed – a good illustration of the power of streaming media.…

Record Store Day and the Resurgence of Vinyl

Last Saturday (April 21st) was the fifth annual International Record Store Day. Taking place on the third Saturday of every April, the day celebrates the independent record store and is accompanied by a slew of limited edition vinyl releases only available on or around the day itself.

The purpose of Record Store Day is to encourage an enterprise that for a while looked to be a dying breed: the independent record store. However, thanks largely to the vinyl resurgence, independent record stores have been slowly but steadily popping up all over the placed, while their mainstream CD-selling high street rivals continue to close in ever-larger numbers.…

Thoughts on Tupac Shakur’s Coachella appearance

So you’ve probably already heard: hologram technology has now advanced to the point where we can bring dead performers “back to life”. This week Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre’s festival-closing Coachella set featured a performance by a holographic Tupac Shakur. In case you missed it:

So do we really want to bring performers back from the dead? Especially when we’re putting words into their mouths that they couldn’t possibly have said during their lifetime.

Tupac gives a shoutout to Coachella – a festival that started in 1999, 3 years after his death.…

The Shins debut new video exclusively via handheld console

We’re all big fans of The Shins here in the MusicHype office. We’re also big video game fans, so this is kind of a cool one. The Shins recently released their first album in five years, Port of Morrow, and are debuting their latest video exclusively on the Nintendo 3DS hand held console.

“The Rifle’s Spiral” is the opening song on Port of Morrow, and the video is a creepy, Night Before Christmas-esque stop-motion affair. The full video should be made available any day now, but for now it’s the 3DS or nothing at all.…

Jack White distributes new record via helium balloon

It’s hard not to like Jack White, and with crazy ideas like this one it’s easy to see why. On April 1st, his label Third Man Records premiered his as yet unreleased track “Freedom at 21″ exclusively by taping 1000 flexidisks to helium balloons and setting them loose over Nashville.

The label have reported a 10% pickup rate, so there’s still currently over 900 of these things still out there floating around Tennessee!

This one kind of reminds me of Rocket Mail, where in the 1930s scientists and mailmen got together and decided that expensive and difficult to control rockets were the future of mail delivery.…

Knives at Noon release new EP via T-shirt campaign

Sometimes releasing your music on it’s own just isn’t enough. It’s no reflection on the quality of the music itself, but in the current internet atmosphere, sometimes you need to do that little bit extra to push your music out to people and get them to notice. At MusicHype, we’re all about looking at new ways for bands and artists to reward their fanbase and incentivize their music.

Knives at Noon have taken an interesting route for the release of their new EP “Second Skin”.…