TMI alert: I met my girlfriend for the first time on our way to a Lightning Bolt show. I shoulda known from that moment that she was the one, eh?

Lightning Bolt puts on pretty much the best live show in the history of mankind. They play loud. They refuse to play on a stage (instead, they set up on the floor of the venue and start almost immediately after the previous band has finished). And their drummer wears a mask so that he can put a contact mic inside to take care of the band’s vocal duties. The first time that I saw them, the band picked up their gear in the middle of their final song (while continuing to play it, mind) and moved it across the room. Yes, this also included a full drumset.

For most bands, the live show to record divide is too much to bear. For my money, there’s nothing like seeing My Morning Jacket live. But their records leave me completely cold. And while LB’s first album was awful, they got it almost right with Ride the Skies (the epic “13 Monsters”…download it NOW) and exactly right with Hypermagic Mountain (”Riff Wraiths” ain’t a bad place to start here), but “Bizarro Zarro Land” isn’t far behind). If you like No Age, dirty punk rock, noise music, experimental music, Taekwondo, or Jell-O do yourself a favor and check out these guys. You won’t be disappointed.

It’s up! This morning we have begun unveiling poll results from our member survey a month or so back, and if you click that link above, you’ll see picks 100 through 81 on the US site. (You can get to the UK, Europe and Canada results through that page as well.) There are quite a few surprises already in those twenty picks — some albums might seem low, others might seem high — and it’s a fair taste of what we have coming up this week. Any thoughts so far?

How happy am I? We just go the new Beck album! Well… we got the new Beck album if you’re a European user. And I am a European user, so I’m happy - although it’s a selfish kind of happy.

I’d sort of let Beck fall by the wayside a little. Odelay was the sound of my sixth form common room and Midnite Vultures filled my student union bar, but after that, despite catching the occasional track on the radio, I’d filed Beck away in a box with ‘My So-Called Life,’ vintage slip dresses and other things I was fond of in the 90s. But this Modern Guilt? It’s really good.

He’s been working with producer Brian Burton, better known as Danger Mouse, and the result is a sort of lo-fi psychedelic folk-funk that sounds effortless. “Orphans” is classic Beck, the slouchy music belying the confusing intensity of the lyrics. “Volcano” is sad yet satisfying and “Gamma Ray” initially seems an almost flippant little bit of throwaway surf, but stays running through your mind long after the lights go out.

I’ve only had chance to listen to it a few times, but I have a feeling Modern Guilt will get more intricate and interesting the more attention I give it.

Hi everyone! Just a quick word on a couple of upcoming features at eMusic. Tomorrow, we will begin unveiling the 100 Best Albums Ever on the US site (in the UK, Europe and Canada, these will be Top 50 lists, also beginning tomorrow). The results will be posted bit by bit, with the winners not being announced until next Monday. I hope everyone enjoys the results, or at the very least has fun complaining about them!

Also coming up on July 22nd will be the Best Albums of 2008… So Far, these picked by the editors here. We’re still working at cutting down the list (we’re at something like 658 albums now), but it’ll be ready to roll then.

Until then, I’d love to hear from everyone on their guesses for what will make the top ten of the Best Albums Ever poll, and also for your votes for best of the year so far. Thanks!

First, eMusic is celebrating our tenth birthday this year. Ten years of leading the industry in selling unencumbered MP3s. Ten years of focusing on the innovative music made because someone has something to say, not because they have something to sell. Ten years of giving you, the consumer, better value in exchange for your willingness to explore and try new things.

We’ve added some of the most exciting music in years – Radiohead, My Morning Jacket, the Kompakt catalogue, our eMusic Selects picks – with even more great independent music on the way. Our audiobooks catalog has doubled in size in the last six months, and we’ve signed every major publisher except one. While MTV and Yahoo have closed down their music services, eMusic has grown by more than 60% over the past year. In the face of Amazon’s entry into the space, we have grown our market share to more than 10%.

Most importantly, you should know we haven’t slowed down. As a company we’ve worked harder on our website and our business this year than ever. So get ready - we have more new site features rolling out in the next four months than we’ve shipped in the last four years! We’re already busily preparing for a blockbuster holiday season.

So, I hope you’ll share some pride with me during our nation’s birthday celebration and Independents Day. You, more than any other music retailer’s customers, understand the value of music that transcends rules, boundaries and commercialism and we appreciate your contribution to the success of the world’s best independent music retailer. Thanks so much for making this possible.

Have a great holiday weekend.

Respectfully,

David

Can’t get enough of eMusic Selects artist Deastro? Same here! That’s why when he asked us if he could craft some liner notes to Keeper’s, we readily agreed to host them anywhich we could. You can download the PDF file (3 MB) right here.

More Deastro art after the jump…

Not only is Randolph Chabot a talented musician, but he also designs band flyers, logos, and all sorts of cool stuff. Below is a sampling of some of the stuff he’s worked on…

Back when I was in high school, perhaps as some kind of tactic to get a bunch of dis uninterested first-generation slackers excited about literature, our English teacher spent several lessons discussing ‘Shakespeare’s Bawdy’ — the dirty jokes Shakespeare built into his plays to coax roars from the lower-classes (and maybe a few of the upper-class, too). When I heard we were going to be getting the collected works of Shakespeare on the site, my mind went the same place it usually does: the gutter.

We got in touch with Dr. Pauline Kiernan, who wrote the terrific and hilarious Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Most Outrageous Sexual Puns, and asked if she’d be willing to submit a modified, PG-rated version of some of the bard’s naughtier quips to the site. You can read the result here. Some of ‘em I’d heard before (most of the ones in Hamlet get repeated pretty regularly), but some of them — like, say, the ones in A Midsummer Night’s Dream — were new to me (and more than a little surprising). It’s I guess a little comforting to know that even the great Shakes was not above a bit of blue humor. Hopefully when you’re done with this, you’ll be completely satisfied, grinning from ear to ear.

That’s what she said.

For more than five years I was an overworked and underpaid book editor at Simon & Schuster. And I loved every minute of it. Truly. So it thrills me that a bunch of titles from the S&S audiobook catalog are now available on eMusic. You can find some of the most notable titles here. In particular, I think S&S has some incredible pop culture offerings that translate beautifully into audio form.
My faves below:

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: Chuck Klosterman has a way of making the lowest forms of brain cell-killing pop culture topics sound incredibly smart. Which makes my horrid obsession with The Real World feel a teensy bit more respectable.

Born Standing Up: With the publication of his endearing and surprisingly sincere memoir, Steve Martin proves that he’s not only funny–he’s also wise as hell. And nice. When you’ve finished listening to Steve tell his story you will swear that you guys are BFFs.

21: Bringing Down the House: Forget the mediocre movie that came out a few months ago. The book version of 21, about a group of card-counting M.I.T. students who set out to make a killing at the blackjack tables, is as exhilarating as the luckiest of lucky nights at a Vegas casino.

Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea: Chelsea Handler skewers celebutards on her popular E! talk show, but in this collection (as in her previous book, My Horizontal Life) she turns her razor-sharp wit on her own life.