tuneage : everyone deserves good music

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Discovery - “Orange Shirt”

Discovery is the unlikely side project built from members of two bands I wouldn’t necessarily have put together: Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend and Wes Miles of Ra Ra Riot. This odd couple doesn’t just work, it kills. Their debut album, the coyly titled LP, is a blast from start to finish. Drenched in synthesizers and handclaps (with no shortage of Auto-Tune), the music doesn’t sound like Vampire Weekend or Ra Ra Riot, but rather has a more trippy, R&B-cum-indie vibe that’s near impossible to get out of my head. LP should prove to be one of the summer’s most fun albums, so track down a copy when it’s released on July 7th.

Previously, on Tuneage

Another week of Tuneage, and another Sunday round-up of songs. This week’s roundup is missing two tracks (The Halos, and Sean Lee), but you can listen to those here and here (respectively) if you missed them. So, without any further ado, here’s the list of songs in this week’s round-up:

Alberta Cross - Old Man Chicago
Basia Bulat - Before I Knew (Live on Radio K)
Miles Davis - Blue in Green
Mitchell London - Mammal Reenactment
Nick Drake - Pink Moon
Sam Cooke - Bring It On Home To Me
Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin - Glue Girls
Sublime - 54-46 That’s My Number/ Ball and Chain
Sun Kil Moon - Ocean Breathes Salty
The Field - A Paw in My Face
The French Kicks - Don’t Thank Me
The Virgins - Fernando Pando
Vampire Weekend - Oxford Comma
Yael Naim - Toxic

Note: We changed the format this week. Instead of linking to individual tracks, we’ve created a single zip file of all the songs listed above. The zip can be downloaded using the post title link, or you can click here to download it.

Hope everyone had a good weekend; now kick back and enjoy the tunes.

This is an excellent a capella version of Tuneage favourites Vampire Weekend’s Oxford Comma, as performed by The Carleton Singing Knights.

And if you liked that, the guy that uploaded the video also has 40-something more a capella versions of songs by artists like Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin, Grizzly Bear, Postal Service, and Daft Punk.

Sunday Playlist: Last Week

This is the first of what we hope to be a recurring feature. We’ve gathered together mp3s of (most of) the songs we’ve talked about this week for you to download. We’ll keep these links alive until next Sunday.

The Avett Brothers - Paranoia In Bb Major
The Long Blondes - Nostalgia
My Brightest Diamond - Golden Star
Be Your Own Pet - Becky
Josh Ritter - Kathleen
The Silent Years - Sharks
Vampire Weekend - A-Punk
Monolake - Remoteable
Fujiya & Miyagi - Ankle Injuries
Fleet Foxes - Blue Ridge Mountains
Dragonette - The Boys (Calvin Harris cover)
Laura Marling - Tap at My Window
Justice - DVNO

If you subscribe to this feed you can get it all in podcast format, too.

If any of these links don’t work, you can let us know at tuneage.tumblr@googlemail.com. Feel free to send any other questions, suggestions, or recommendations there, too.

Enjoy!

All Songs Considered SXSW Preview

NPR’s All Songs Considered SXSW preview is well worth checking out. They’ve got an interview with Carrie Brownstein and Stephen Thompson, followed by an interview with Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig. On top of that, they’ve got 17 tracks from artists performing at SXSW available for streaming.

My advice is listen to all of them, but if you want recommendations, you can’t miss Bon Iver, Fanfarlo, Times New Viking, and Tift Merritt. And, of course, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn’t recommend Vampire Weekend (we postedthe music video for the song NPR are streaming, “A-Punk”, a few days ago).

If you’re not at SXSW, like me, you could do worse than subscribing to the NPR All Songs Considered podcast. They’ve promised broadcasts and webcasts of almost two dozen SXSW concerts:

NPR Music and All Songs Considered will be in Austin next week, blogging, broadcasting and webcasting nearly two dozen live concerts. You’ll hear R.E.M., My Morning Jacket, Jens Lekman, Vampire Weekend and many more, all webcast live on NPR.org.

Vampire Weekend - A-Punk

It’s hard to find a band as fun as Vampire Weekend. You literally CAN’T feel upset when you are listening to these guys. I’ve been dying to post something from them all day, but already used up my song post. Fortunately, I circumvented the system, and found an awesome video for you. I hope you enjoy; I certainly do.

SXSW Showcasing Music Torrents

Almost every year, the guys behind the SXSW music festival create a torrent of all the music they have in the website showcase. The torrent includes single tracks for a lot of the artists due to play the festival. This year, for whatever reason, they haven’t done that, so Greg Hewgill did instead. He writes:

So, I took matters into my own hands (after all, the songs are all available for download) and have created a torrent of the 2008 showcasing artists, which is one .mp3 file from 764 different artists. This year, it is almost 3.5 GB of new music, for free.

You can download it from here, along with the torrents for previous years.

The full listing of artists, and links to individual mp3s, is available here. And what an excellent lineup it is. Here are 5 of my personal picks from the lineup (though I haven’t listened to anywhere near everything on offer yet), that I don’t think have been mentioned on Tuneage before:

I’ve tried to stick to artists with mp3s uploaded, but a few don’t. You should be able to find something by just about all of them at Hype Machine.