New Bomb Turks - Hammerless Nail Video

New Bomb Turks hold the record for the best live show I've ever seen.

Phantods - Lone Highway Video

Columbus' own:

Phantods and their video for Lone Highway

Please enjoy responsibly.

Love Songs

Except for when I was a child and listened and liked everything I heard on the radio (like all children); I have never, until recently, enjoyed love songs. During my teenage years and most of my twenties, I couldn't stand love songs. I thought they were vapid and shallow and for people who didn't understand real music or real emotion.
It wasn't until recently that I finally understood. Love songs became the majority of music I found myself listening to. I discovered that I was the one who was vapid, shallow, and with no understanding of true emotion.
I've discovered that love entails a lot of distress, a lot of pain, and a lot of crying. For some peeps, this leads to anger, frustration and depression. For others, it leads to happiness, understanding, and enlightenment. The feeling of love is being alive and living. One does not have to be in love with another person; it's really about whatever makes you happiest. Music, as an art form, is subject to interpretation by the receiving audience, with guidance from the artist. As such, a simple love song takes on far deeper connotations; metaphors and similes can burst out and take on new meanings.
Knowing this, I walk the streets of my city and see so many dead people. Zombies who live day to day, struggling desperately not to feel any pain - but in so doing, they end up not feeling anything but dull melancholic sadness.
But I also see those who have what I want to achieve for myself; passion, joy, happiness. And this makes me smile. It makes me want to be a better person. It makes me happy. It brings me home.




And don't worry, I will be back to write fire and brimstone reviews of shit-stain bands and the dreck of society once again. Maybe I'll throw in an interview or two as well. The old da trux hasn't gone completely soft - in fact, in some ways, he's even harder than before. Go ahead, make fun of me for liking love songs. You're missing out.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Letting Go of Attachment, from A to Zen (cheerfulliving.com)
• Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes Announce Tour (pastemagazine.com)

Edible Onion

Edible Onion is a small indie label out of Philadelphia. What makes Edible Onion interesting is that all of their releases are hand made!

From the Edible Onion website:
We silk-screen and sew record jackets together, hand paint labels, attach flower pedals to record jackets, and more... to make every record we release individually unique and special. We hope to put something beautiful back into the art of releasing music amidst the frenzy of the digital world.

I think this is wonderful! Digital music has its place, as we listen to MP3 players on the bus, or while we're walking somewhere, or even on our home computers - it's convenient.

But nothing, NOTHING, beats the aesthetic value of something you can physically hold, put on a shelf, look at and enjoy.

You might have 10,000 mp3's on your drive, but when your drive craps out (and it will eventually), all of those songs are gone. forever.

Vinyl records have existed for decades, actually about a century. And vinyl records are still being made because people want to be able to see, feel, smell, and love their music.

Edible Onion takes it one step further by actually making their records with love.

"We hope to put something beautiful back into the art of releasing music"

That says it all right there.

In May, they are releasing a compilation album called, A Cure For The Broken-Hearted in an accordion style book filled with watercolor paintings and information about the songs contained within.

How awesome is that?

here is a link to one of the songs on the compilation album. It is from Minneapolis based band, The Chord and the Fawn. The song is called, "Love, Sex, and Rock N' Roll"

http://www.edibleonion.com/media/acftbh/love-sex-and-rock-n-roll.mp3