The Allen Almanac

Ethel Suspense (MySpace page) is up this week. I found them on this page, and haven’t really been able to find out much about them. They’re a Finnish pop band (although their songs are in English). Onechord.net has a short description on them. Since I don’t know much about them, other than I really like these songs, I’ll just post the link to the music. The tracks I downloaded were the ones from the M1 EP. Enjoy.

Iron and Wine is currently my favorite artist. Don’t let the name fool you; Iron and Wine is the psuedonym for solo artist Sam Beam. For the most part it is just his voice accompanied by hypnotic acoustic guitar. But what could get boring very quickly somehow never does. This is American Folk music at its very best. There are five songs available for download on this page. I recommend every single one of them, but if you pressed me for my recommendation as to which of them is best, I’d have to go with Naked As We Came. It’s a song about growing old and dying with the one you love, and the knowledge that no matter what course your lives take, you will be there for each other even to your deaths, and the knowledge that you know everything to there is to know about each other. There is also a music video available for downloading of Naked As We Came.

Our second FMF selection is from a band I don’t really know that well. I found this track on Amazon.com (which is a great source of free mp3s) and Off The Record caught my ear. It sounds like a rock-reggae combination. Again, these downloads are completely legal. This one comes from Amazon.com’s site. My position is that if it is questionable at all, it won’t be linked here. I’m no expert on this band (I’d never heard of them before I heard this single) so I’ll just do a copy and paste from the A.V. Club’s review.

It’s both rare and marvelous to hear a good band make its first really great album. This hasn’t been an era for disciplined, focused LPs, which makes listening to My Morning Jacket’s Z—with its 10 fantastic tracks packed tightly into 47 minutes—so bracing that it’s hard to trust. Maybe Z is all surface, and will tear easily with repeated use. And isn’t it kind of choppy? My Morning Jacket usually follows a smoothed-out boom-and-twang sound, but Z is all over the map stylistically, and the songs don’t fit together too neatly. Or maybe they do. Better play it again. It’s not hard.
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The record is undeniably the work of My Morning Jacket—all grandeur and pounding heart—but Z’s take-a-shot spirit is bound up in the nutty, insanely catchy “Off The Record,” which stacks up a stolen surf riff, a reggae rhythm, lurching vocals, and an extended, spacey coda. At first it sounds too wild and beastly to be any good, but the hook is as infectious as freedom, and around the third time through the song, doubts dissolve. If it takes some time to adjust to, it’s only because it’s hard to recognize a classic right away.

Here’s the link where you can downlad an mp3 of Off The Record. If you like that, the CD is only $7.44 at Amazon.com.

I have excellent taste in music (unlike most kids these days) so I thought I’d start a weekly series where I showcase a free download of an artist I like every week. These are totally legal. What I’m going to try to do is link directly to the artist or label’s site. I’m not sure about the legality of mirroring them here. I thought I’d start out with a pretty well-known band that’s not exactly mainstream (that I’m aware of any way), The Postal Service. The Postal service is a synth-pop collaboration of Ben Gibbard (lead singer for Death Cab for Cutie) and Jimmy Tamborello (aka James Figurine or Dntel). It really reminds me of really good 80’s music, but it is definitely something new. Such Great Heights, the song I’m recommending today, is just beautiful. It’s been in the top of the Last.fm charts for awhile now, but it still deserves to be more well-known.

So here’s a link to the page where you can download an mp3 of Such Great heights (and a few other Postal Service songs which also come recommended).