I don’t subscribe to and rarely read Rolling Stone magazine. In fact I don’t read any music magazines really unless I hang out for a while in a mag shop. I know right? I talk about and review music and don’t read any magazines like NME or Rolling Stone or anything? Well right now I’m just relying on the internets until maybe I go back to school and maybe I’ll start subscribing. But the thing is half the fun of discovering new music is searching for it on your own, no? Either a friend sends you some songs or tells you about it, you are sitting in a restaurant and overhear someone talking about it, you hang out at record or music stores and just listen to what they play on their speakers and go up and ask whats being played, you dive into myspace or search around and small obscure music blogs and sites. All this may be more unnecessary work, but its that much more satisfying when you find a real gem of music all by yourself. And often times if you know for good places to look for new music, you’ll find out about a group even before the mag does or does a story on them. Sometimes they won’t be big enough for print media just yet. So I say keep your $30 dollar subscription fee and just go out like a blood hound and find the music on your own.
So one of my friends that I feed-subscribe to on Tumblr posted a link to the Rolling Stones website that had a breaking story about Apes & Androids. She lives in New York City and is quite in tuned with the very active indie scene and has seen these guys live before they released their first album, Blood Moon:
Apes & Androids have a very unique and eclectic style. This Queen + Mika + retro late 80’s synth + Prince(80s) + a bit of The Darkness and Beck. What you end up with is a classic rock meets futuristic craziness dance-floor-ready opera. A&A’s Brian Jacobs says “We tried to build the record into something that would be a journey when listening to the whole thing”. And what a journey it is. This is quite a complete album with at least 5 songs and maybe 7 that I would highly recommend. “Golden Prize” with its beat box style and Bohemian Rhapsody-esque falsettos, “We Don’t Understand You” with its future rock flare, “Radio” and its edgy guitar rifts, “Nights of the Week” with its beat that just makes you want to you up and down and clap to the beat, “Johnny & Sarah” and its guitar and keytar madness, “Imaginary Friends” with its dream-like flow and “Riverside” thats starts off acoustic and ends up epic! Videos of A&A show that their live performances are just as awesome as their music, “with cheerleaders, giant silver skulls, face paint and even a Korean drum circle all making appearances for a unique live experience.”
Also following the ever growing trend set by Radiohead and NIN you can download a few of their songs for free, download the whole album for $10 and buy the CD for about $17 (GhostsI-IV was a better deal but oh well) as well as on iTunes but it costs more and has DRM so why would you? Still a great deal though for what you get.
This is truly a “get up and dance” album and made of pure fun and experimentation. With an amazing debut album A&A is definitely a band to watch, their explosive style is going to launch them into the lime light in no time.
-Alx-
Here are some of the songs available for download, I highly recommend at least getting “Nights of the Week” and a video introing Blood Moon I guess:
MP3 | Nights of the Week
MP3 | Golden Prize
MP3 | Creepy Girls
One Comment
They were in England this month I think, and I missed them.
I need to get their album still too.