Happy President’s Day everybody! This week I’ve decided to round up a few excellent tracks that can be found free on the web. America is, after all, the Land of the Free.

Swan Lake

Swan Lake is yet another side project of Spencer Krug, lead singer of Wolf Parade. The band also features Dan Bejar of Destroyer and Carey Mercer of Frog Eyes. On paper, this sounds like an excellent combination, and for the most part it is, but I find the tracks featuring Carey Mercer’s vocals almost unlistenable. The same cannot be said for the song “All Fires,” which came dangerously close to making my Top 10 Songs of 2006 podcast (and in all reality probably should’ve). With lyrical gems like “… five hundred pieces means five hundred float, one thousand people means five hundred don’t …” it’s easy to see why this is such an incredible song.

mp3: Swan Lake - All Fires

Josh Ritter

Towards the end of 2006, I began focusing less on the rating cokemachine or pitchfork gave an album and more on the actual music. While those sites provide excellent guidance, I will undoubtedly enjoy music they hate and despise music they like. Before coming to this realization, I thought there was something wrong with me for not liking a critically-acclaimed album/group (like Deerhoof for instance). With age comes wisdom, and after moving one step closer to “old man” status this weekend, I’ve learned to just listen to the music. In spite of what the critics write, I like Josh Ritter and think you may too.

mp3: Josh Ritter - Girl In the War
mp3: Josh Ritter - Thin Blue Flame

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin

Apparently when it rains it pours, and recently I’ve been inundated by tons of quality music. After a year or so of wondering, I finally started listening to (and falling in love with) The Walkmen. Then I’m hit hard by Menomena. And as if all that wasn’t enough, I stumble upon Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, a sunny little pop band from Portland, Oregon Springfield, Missouri (thanks for the correction Josh, I was way off!). Their debut album Broom is the kind of record that can be played when or wherever. I find myself listening to them whenever I want a break from all things complicated, whatever that means.

mp3: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - House Fire
mp3: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Gwyneth

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce the first great album of 2007. I present to you Friend and Foe by Menomena.

Quite frankly, I’m obsessed. These guys are amazing. I think I’ll let their music do the talking. Start with “Wet and Rusting” to whet the appetite (enjoy the pun?). Move on to “Muscle’n Flo” and if by song’s end you aren’t completely hooked, finish with the stunning “Rotten Hell.”

Friend and Foe is cohesive and consistently excellent. Despite the band’s ability to jump effortlessly from genre to genre, the album flows beautifully. Often, the lyrics conjure up images of standing resolutely in the face of a looming conflict.

Honestly, I haven’t heard anything this inspiring in a long time. Fans of Wolf Parade (or lovers of great music) will feel right at home.

mp3: Menomena - Wet and Rusting
mp3: Menomena - Muscle’n Flo
mp3: Menomena - Rotten Hell

Fans of Explosions In the Sky already know their new CD All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone comes out on February 20th. If you followed my advice and preordered the album online through the band’s website, you may even have it now (as I do).

What you may not realize, however, is that back in 2005 Explosions released an EP called The Rescue. Only available through a limited preorder on their label’s site, the EP was part of a series called Travels In Constants. Because of the somewhat secretive nature of its release, not many people knew about the EP until it was too late. After its release, I heard it was selling for over $100 on eBay. Despite the temptation, I held on to my copy.

Those of you who missed the preorder of The Rescue aren’t out of luck. Apparently you can buy the EP at their shows (which I’ve heard are amazing). Or you can download the entire EP on the band’s site, along with select songs from their other LP’s. I’ve provided direct links to the songs below:

mp3: Explosions In the Sky - Day One
mp3: Explosions In the Sky - Day Two
mp3: Explosions In the Sky - Day Three
mp3: Explosions In the Sky - Day Four
mp3: Explosions In the Sky - Day Five
mp3: Explosions In the Sky - Day Six
mp3: Explosions In the Sky - Day Seven
mp3: Explosions In the Sky - Day Eight

I also stumbled upon another interesting find at The National website. When Clap Your Hands Say Yeah toured with The National in 2005, I remember reading concert reviews detailing how half the audience would leave after Clap Your Hands finished. The reviews then went on to mention how the people who left missed a vastly superior headlining performance by The National.

While I’ve heard a few of their live mp3’s, they did not prepare me for what I was to find at their site. A fan of the band has posted three live videos from their 2005 tour. One of the featured songs is “About Today” (from my “Late Night Drinking” podcast) and it is nothing short of amazing. An extended intro and intense final climax push the song over the 8-minute mark. The National has definitely climbed near the top of my list of bands to see (though they’re probably still behind Explosions In the Sky).

mov: The National - About Today [live]

The other two videos can be found here.

Each month, Eugene Gordin contributes VolumeSessions, a column about music, digital world, and everything in between.

I have blogged here about Last.fm. I have stated that its an extremely powerful tool. But today, I’m going to make it a bit more powerful.

There is a very short list of things that Last.fm lacks, but its important to realize that there’s room for improvement. Although I’m pretty sure that things like today’s subject will be released officially by the Last.fm, they currently are not, and since joining last June, I haven’t figured out why.

Okay. Enough dancing around it. Last.fm records almost every aspect of our listening habits - how much you listen to individual songs, artists, albums, as well as when you listened to them. This is massive amounts of information, and yet the best visual representation of all of that information is a bar chart?

Maybe as an avid computer user, I demand more than bar charts based on popularity. Maybe as an engineer, I know that more is not only possible, but relatively straightforward to implement. Its high time that we can visually see how we listen to music, how diverse our listening habits are, and how they have changed over time.

Luckily, there are a few Last.fm users who have created their own visual representations of their musical habits. Enough talk. Here’s what I’m talking about: below are three charts, courtesy of Kalu Kalu’s visualization of music listening habits.

Kalu Kalu’s tool also explains the following, in addition to providing the graphs: “In terms of artists, 38% of the music you’ve listened to came from your top 10 artists, 62% came from your top 25 artists, and 81% came from your top 50 artists. Approximately 19% of the music you’ve listened to lies outside of your top 50 artists.”

Pie charts aren’t the only tools provided by the site. The graph below shows how much I listen to my top 50 artists relative to one another.

The site explains: “Your top 13 artists make up about 50% of the 7826 times you’ve listened to your top 50 artists. Recall that your top 50 artists account for 81% of all 9704 songs you’ve listen to.”

This kind of information isn’t available anywhere else. There’s a lot more than these two graphs on the site, so if you’re interested in visualizing your music habits, I highly recommend you check it out.

However, Kalu Kalu’s site isn’t alone. Hans Christoph Hudde provides additional music tools using your information from Last.fm. His additional charts show how the number of artists in your library changed over time, as well as the best positions of artists in your library. Those tools can be found here.

I found both of these tools through the Last.fm Stats group, which wasn’t available when I first had this idea of visualizing music listening habits, but now has connected people who are interested in this subject.

The final thought I leave you with is the future, since this area of music habit visualization is still mostly untapped and new. Music listening trends can be art within themselves, and nothing is more representative of that than Lee Byron’s Music Trend Poster. Its not public yet, though Lee said he’s working opening it soon for public use. Its stunning, beautiful, and most importantly, informational. The future is now.

Eugene Gordin is the author of interesting finds, a blog about computer hardware, software, and technology in general. Views expressed in VolumeSessions are his own. Feedback is welcome at eugene_AT_gordin.net.

To make up for all the lengthy delays over the past few months, I’ve decided to post an extra mp3 this week. It’s not that I feel guilty, it’s just that I’ve been listening to lots of good music lately and need to accelerate the process.

I tend trust cokemachine’s reviews more than pitchfork’s, though both can be pretty hard to read sometimes. So when cokemachine rated For Hero: For Fool by Subtle as the Top Album of 2006, I was intrigued. Mainly because I’d never heard of them, but also because it didn’t even grace pitchfork’s Top 50.

So what gives? Who is this band Subtle? Ummm … if you want answers to these questions, you’d better go elsewhere - I haven’t listened to For Hero: For Fool. Yet.

I will shortly, however, thanks to a song called “Middleclass Haunt,” a collaboration between Subtle and Dan Boeckner, the other singer from Wolf Parade. You know, the one who doesn’t whore himself out to every band on the planet. Just kidding, I love Spencer Krug.

Anyways, “Middleclass Haunt” rocks hard. The massive drum intro helps establish that right away. From there, the song kinda ebbs and flows, ending with a beautiful passage in which Dan Boeckner repeatedly sings/asks “…what deems middle class?”

I can only hope for two things after hearing this song: (1) That For Hero: For Fool is of the same caliber and (2) That Spencer Krug decides to rejoin Dan Boeckner and Wolf Parade to record something new.

mp3: Subtle - Middleclass Haunt

I normally don’t stray too far outside the realm of music on my blog, but I’m gonna make an exception. A few weeks ago, I watched the movie V For Vendetta. Several of my friends had recommended it to me, and even though I had no idea what it was about, I rented it.

I don’t want to give anything away, but the movie is set in the future in England, where the threat of terrorism has scared the populace into supporting a conformist, Nazi-like government. A masked man named V is the only one brave enough to oppose the ‘High Chancellor’ and his fascist regime. It’s an incredibly scary movie in that I feel it could really happen in today’s society.

But that’s a whole other issue, and I should stick to what I know best: music. So anyways, I’m sitting there captivated by the film when a song starts playing during a scene with V and Evey (Natalie Portman). The artist was immediately familiar, but it took me a few minutes to realize it was Cat Power.

When the movie ended, I went online to see if I was right. Sure enough, there was a song on the soundtrack by Cat Power called “I Found a Reason”. A few minutes later, I had downloaded it with a little help from the Hype Machine.

It’s a cover of the Velvet Underground song from 1970’s Loaded. Make sure to listen to the lyrics. Anyone who’s seen the film will realize how perfectly it fits not only that scene, but also the entire movie. And Chan Marshall’s vocals don’t get much better.

mp3: Cat Power - I Found a Reason

PS - Don’t you just hate when such an incredible song is only 2 minutes long?

As is becoming routine, I apologize for the extensive delay. I think after this post I’m going back to the usual blog format. I do have a few other lists I’ve organized, but given the fact that it’s already February, I think I’m just gonna move on. 2007 has started out very strong, so I have lots of work to do (in addition to the whole grad school thing).

Anyways, I remember this being a lot easier last year. This year I could probably generate two equally-strong lists, but for the sake of brevity I’ve kept it to just one. Without further ado, I present the Top 10 Songs of 2006:

01. Rocky Votolato - White Daisy Passing
02. Beirut - Postcards From Italy
03. M. Ward - Poison Cup
04. Silversun Pickups - Lazy Eye
05. TV On the Radio - Wolf Like Me
06. Junior Boys - In the Morning
07. Bishop Allen - Flight 180
08. Band of Horses - I Go to the Barn Because I Like the Monsters
09. Calexico - All Systems Red
10. Voxtrot - Sway

Most of the tracks above have previously appeared on my blog in one form or another, so I feel like there’s nothing too spectacular about this mix. I think it flows pretty well, though I’m starting to doubt whether I will ever eclipse the pinnacle that is my first podcast.

And just in case you’d forgotten, my absolute favorite song of 2006 did not make the list above due to time constraints. I cannot recommend it any more strongly, so give it a listen!

mp3: Mono & world’s end girlfriend - Part 5

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