It’s Friday. It’s electronic. Let’s go!

What a nice coincidence. Just as I get done reading Scott Plagenhoef’s excellent 33 1/3 book on Belle and Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister, in which he makes the claim that the band mostly lost it after that album until the Trevor Horn-produced Dear Catastrophe Waitress, voila! eMusic receives Dear Catastrophe Waitress. (And all its [...]

I love the Fall* and the Country Teasers and the A Frames and the Black Lips and so, naturally, I also love the Intelligence, whose new album went up today, called Deuteronomy**. It’s spastic trash rock played lo-fi/sloppy stylee, the kind of songs that can even make teetotalers feel drunk they’re so woozy and out [...]

This picture has been cropped for your protection.
Even if it’s not true, it’s a great story. Stuart Braithwaite receives a tape, listens to it a ton, finally realizes what he wants his nascent band to sound like. His band releases a genre-defining full-length called Young Team. Too bad the timing doesn’t quite line up. But, [...]

Regular readers know that Manchester band the Answering Machine + Me = HUGZ GALORE!, and make that HUGZ X 10000000000 after listening to their latest single, “Lightbulbs,” which you can hear at their MySpace page here. These kids need to be signed. And come to the US. And play shows in my living room. Single [...]

Photo by EightJs
Not a Tuesday to write home about…

If you’re as confused as I am about the Polaris Prize winner last night, you can also get familiar with Patrick Watson today. (Don’t worry, I’ve never heard of him either. Or is that just me? Don’t answer that.)
From eMusic contributor Paul Moody’s recent review of the album:

Patrick Watson may be a piano man at [...]

Wow, it feels a little bizarre (in a good way) to be posting on a blog that I’ve been reading for so long. The past few weeks have been a whirlwind — getting settled in my new job as Audiobooks Store Manager, learning new eMusic lingo, finding the coffee machine, preparing for launch. The normal [...]

A colleague of mine at Stylus Magazine started a recent review of Guy Gerber’s Late Bloomers album thusly:

Israel, huh? The most contentious country on Wikipedia is rapidly becoming a new hotspot for talented producers in techno. Considering the effects of the internet, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Amateur DJs and musicians have [...]

I spent the better part of two years trying to track down a copy of Where’d You Learn to Kiss That Way, the incredible two-disc compilation of underrated UK group the Field Mice. It was the early ’00s and I’d somehow missed its brief lifespan on the record shelves, and so now I was relegated [...]

Recent electronic arrivals, reviewed!

On Tuesday, eMusic unveiled two big additions to the site: audiobooks and the new download manager, eMusic Remote. Unfortunately, some problems with the 1.0 release of eMusic Remote have caused headaches for some iTunes and Mac users. We apologize for this, and our first priority right now is a patch to enable eMusic Remote and [...]

Sounding like an unholy union between LCD Soundsystem, Mr. Oizo and Todd Terry, Trickski’s “Move Me” has pretty much ruled my week so far.

We’re very excited today to introduce a new service: eMusic audiobooks. You asked for it and you got it — in a recent eMusic poll, more than 49% of you asked us to sell audiobooks. Typical of eMusic, however, we’re doings things a little differently: our audiobooks will be MP3 files. This is a breakthrough [...]

While I’m by no means implying that other days around here are merely ho-hum, today is kind of a big deal at eMusic. Not only do we have a whole host of exciting new releases — Beirut! Kevin Drew! Les Savy Fav! — but today also sees the launch of our new audiobooks service. We [...]

2 for 2, huh? After the gypsy fervor of Gulag Orkestar, I didn’t think Beirut had it in him to get another win, but The Flying Cub Cup is exactly that. And he did by doing a lot of the same things – in a completely different style.

Psst! Just got word that a certain, highly touted new release scheduled to come out October 9 will, in fact, be available on eMusic tomorrow. Save some extra downloads. And let’s not forget that other big announcement. Holy Tuesday!

So much to talk about. Let’s do this:

I spent the better part of the weekend walking around New York’s various fantastic parks, taking some much-needed time out to both read and catch up on a few records that had been languishing unplayed on my iPod. Unfashionable though it may be, I still have a sizeable soft spot for Bruce Springsteen, and I [...]

Sometimes lost in the constant electronic and indie rock talk on 17 Dots is the awesome jazz collection that eMusic has. This week, our catalogue got a nice little injection with the arrival of the Monterey Jazz Festival imprint.