Available now for your streaming pleasure.

Sea Of Cowards

In exchange for your email address, the generous and gracious Pixies are giving away a free live EP in celebration of the twentieth anniverary of their “Doolittle” album. If you hadn’t heard, they are the latest in an increasingly growing number of groups who are playing entire albums in concert, and this year they’ve been playing “Doolittle” front to back live. So, if you’re a Pixies fan, do yourself a favor and head over to the link.

I always forget that Amazon chooses 50 mp3 albums to offer for $5 every month, unless they send me an email about it. They just did, and there are, as usual, some good choices in several genres. I need to set up a reminder or something so I’ll remember to check in every month to see what’s on offer. (I need to do the same thing with Blu-ray discs, but that’s neither here nor there.) Anything else I should be checking out?

Some notables this month:

	Phoenix Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix Amazon MP3	I haven’t heard much Phoenix myself, but a lot of people whose musical taste I trust have been raving about them. Plus Metric is touring with them, so they must be decent, right?
	Elizabeth and the Catapult Taller Children Amazon MP3	I wrote about this band a few weeks ago, after becoming a near-instant fan on hearing a few of their songs.
	The Cardigans First Band on the Moon Amazon MP3	Awww, this was my first Cardigans album. As I recall, it was on the cheapie rack then, too. Really doesn’t deserve it, though, it’s a good album. I mean, COME ON, they cover Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” on it.
	Dirty Projectors Rise Above Amazon MP3	I haven’t gotten into Dirty Projectors much, but their current album Bitte Orca has been all the rage around the music blogs this year. This is their previous album, from 2007.

More after the jump.

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Thanks to a post a year or two ago from the guys over at Film Junk with their top ten records of the year, I discovered this little gem of a band out of… somewhere, with their high flying but groovy, ethereal greatness. It’s hard to find really good, solely instrumental bands out there and El Ten Eleven is right at the very top of a small handful that I can claim as absolutely brilliant and gorgeous. If you can believe it, all this great sound is coming from just two guys. Sure it’s a lot of looping and effects, but it’s some of the catchiest and interesting sounding grooves I’ve heard coming from almost any artist currently rocking.

On top of that, they sell their wares properly in this day in age for music marketing: pay what you can. At least for a couple of their tracks. Otherwise their records are for sale for a mere ten bucks and trust me, your ears will thank you for digging the quarters from under your sofa cushions to get your hands on these mad notes.

There’re quite a few tracks and vids you can listen to and watch for free over at their site. And if you like it, drop some cash and grab the full .mp3 from them.

Just for listening purposes, I’ve stuck a couple of tracks below for you to dig on. This is for sampling purposes only. If you like what you hear, head over and support the artist. Oh and they’re soon to be on tour as well, so if you’re in any of these areas, drop by the club and then come back here and let me know what you thought. I’m dying to see them live and am going to try and make the Madison show.

My Only Swerving:

Every Direction is North:

Estrella:

One of my many honorable mentions from last year’s great record was “Visiter” by The Dodos. Looks like they’ve been busy in the studio and have added a musician to the band: 21-year-old Keaton Snyder on vibraphone. The third and newest album is called “Time To Die” and is, previously unbeknownst to me, available now.

Now for the really good news. Thanks to this thing called the internet and labels getting smarter about music distribution, you can listen to the entire album free. Sample the product before you buy; what a novel concept! Check out the tracks over here and buy the album over here.

I take a lot of shit from a lot of people because I like Coldplay. That is until I crack them in the jaw with iron fist and ninja like reflexes. In fact, I’m not afraid to admit that last year’s Coldplay record was one of my favorites on the year.

One more reason to like them? Just give them your email address and they’ll give you a free download of thir live album. I just did it and it took seconds. Anyway, if you want some free music by one hell of a melodic band, head over to Coldplay.com and get the hookup. Sounds like a good trade to me.

So over the past 18 months or so I’ve become obsessed with finding just the right browser for my tastes. I’ve dabbled with damn near everything from IE8 to Opera to Flock to SpaceTime to Pogo. Since Chrome came out, my search has ended as Chrome has the simplicity I look for in the aesthetics of Safari, the functionality of Firefox and the speed is unparalleled as of yet.

Still, when a new incarnation of a browser makes its way into my inbox, I’m always eager to check it out. Particularly when said browser is the next evolution in my second choice for browsers: Apple Safari.

Apple claims that the software runs 4 times faster than the previous generation of Safari and faster page loading times than either IE7 or Firefox (it didn’t say anything about beating out Chrome).

For iTunes fans, you’ll instantly recognize the “cover flow” feature which shows your browsing history in a series of screenshots that you can flip through, just like your home LP collection (or iPod album cover flow).

As innovative as Apple has been, they seem to have taken a few cues from other browser innovations however. For instance, Chrome seems to be ripe for the rip-off with the style points for the tabs feature; this includes adding the ‘+‘ sign to add tabs and also putting the tabs at the top of the screen rather than underneath the browser buttons. Also like Chrome, your home page can be set to a series of screen shots representing your most frequently visited sites (aptly named “Top Sites”); a feature I quite like… alot. Though with my particular download, this feature seems to be a bit buggy and all of the screenshots are invisible. Something Chrome doesn’t do with this feature that the new incarnation of Safari does, is implementing a feature that shows if one of these Top Sites has published new content since the last time you visited by adding a white star on a blue background that appears in the upper right-hand corner of the view for that site. Nice.

While I’m still getting used to the slightly different features of Safari 8, so far I think it’s a really nice piece of browsing software. Despite the bugs (that I’m sure are either only temporary or only affecting my specific download/computer), it does seem quicker than every other browser I’ve used (except Chrome). The tabs are gigantic and taking some time to get used to; including the “closing X” being on the opposite side that I’m used to and I can’t move the tabs around simply by grabbing them – you have to grab only the corner of the tab to move it. And you can’t move it into its own window like Chrome enables you to do.

If you wanna try out the new Safari, which again, Apple claims is still in BETA (which is code for, if there’re any bugs, don’t complain cause its in BETA), you can DOWNLOAD IT HERE. While it may not be completely up to snuff (so far), it’s worth a go – especially if you’re using that piece of shit called Firefox.