iLike, youLike, weLike...take a gamble!!!

Quick post tonight as I feel decidedly under the weather and possibly about to share in an illness the rest of the world is dealing with right now (least I won't be alone).

Anyhoo - (I've got that into a blog twice now...and maybe that's starting to sound a bit retarded??) - there's a stack of wierd and wonderful tools out there designed to help you find decent music if you want it. Some of my favourites include Music-Map which is pretty damn smart, Pandora (which has been brutally taken away from the UK), Hypem and of course iLike.

Now alot of these are highly subjective so I tend to take them all with a pinch of salt. That being said Pandora is, in my opinion something extremely clever and the pursuit of good music is somewhat made more difficult without its very presence.

iLike is a bit of an odd one really. I have the iLike sidebar installed in iTunes and it throws up most of the time an odd array of unsigned artists or live versions of songs. Tendency on my part and I'm sure everyone elses is to ingore what you don't know or maybe to get a bit adventurous listen to a couple, get bit bored then move on.

Tonight I felt brave so I hit the play button against a couple of bands and to my surprise found a couple of real potential gems, one of which is a band called The Wilcot. Don't ask me to fill in the facts, I genuinely haven't got a clue about who they are, where they are, even how many of them there are....actually that's just displayed a total lack of effort on my part because a 3 second scan of their myspace page shows 4 guys from Joplin, Missouri. Anyways I've heard a couple of tracks and like an increasing number of emerging artists they have released 6 songs on a gratis basis. I've given them all a spin once and whilst they're not setting the world alight at this stage, they have some talent.

So the messages of tonight are, 1, don't judge a book by it's cover....I can post much longer blogs than I say...2, you have to work a bit harder with iLike than some other music finding services but it's worth it and...3, when blogging, spend that extra 2 seconds to research the subject so you don't look a total twat.

And with those thoughts I'll leave you with one final tidbit...My iPod is still stuck on Augustana. I have tried for a few days to resolve the problem but it just seems unable to move. In other words, I cannot put the music down, it is seriously good. I can't get enough of All the Stars and Boulevards, in particular Sunday Best, Boston, Mayfield and All the Stars and Boulevards. It's so fresh, so vibrant and so well produced and just damn amazing music.

Time to crash, let's hope the pigs don't come spread their germs near me!!!

Something exciting and new...

I haven't blogged for about a week, mainly cos I just felt I had nothing exciting to want to say to the world and then well then that all changed about two days ago when I made no no that's not true, I researched something which appeared to be of potential interest.

So right across America this Summer there's a tour going down. Labelled at "The Saturday Night Rebel Rockers" playing the "Traveling (should be a second L in that word but that's Ameriglish for you) Circus and Medicine Show". Sounds like some sort of a freak show but features my absolute favourite band Counting Crows (have I mentioned that I like them before - haha) and an up until the other day unknown-t0-me band called Augustana.

So now I know who Augustana are in a very BIG way. My Ipod is for the first time in what seems an eternity playing something fresh and brilliant. I'm smitten at the moment with their album "All the Stars and Boulevards" and there are some beautiful, deep, angst ridden, heart wrenching tracks on there as well as a some great ballads and some fresh and challenging music and well that's all I want to say about the matter really. Apart from you absolutely must go and check them out at all costs, without fail and if you don't well you're just a complete mentalist or a bit of a retard really. I can't yet comment on their most recent album because my Ipod won't allow me to play anything else just yet apart from at peripheral scan level but it too sounds great.