I found an enlightening dissection of the Pitchfork music articles (via travelers diagram). The author has built a MySQL database of the 100,000 different words used in all 5,575 reviews. By calculating scores for words used in positive reviews he tries to find out which kind of music the critics like. He found very positive scores for words like "sad", "dark", "crescendo", "massive", "distorted", "lush" etc. In the end he even composed two songs taking into account his findings. The first one Kissing God is ok but the whole is definitely less than the sum of its parts. The song is not cohesive, the elements only form a conglomerate. It comes as a kind of relief that the recipe to satisfy the critics doesn't seem to work. I think people listening to a lot of different music want to be surprised, they want to discover new sounds and they crave for a personal, individual touch of the music. All this cannot be achieved using a program even if it is as well thought out as this one.

The best drum solos with audio links (via mosaikum).

Cerysmatic Factory: " - a blog, history and archive about Factory Records, the independent record label from Manchester, England."

Sean offers two songs from the forthcoming Kings of Convenience album Riot on an Empty Street. The first one sounds like a forgotten tune by Simon & Garfunkel. The other one has a nice female guest appearance by Leslie Feist on it and is more of a well flowing ballad.

Kim im Interview mit der taz:

Translation: How do your songs form?

Don't laugh: When we recorded this album, I jammed with Vincent Gallo. I took his guitar, played it and it was tuned totally differently than the guitars from Sonic Youth. Therefore I asked him: What kind of subtle way is that to tune a guitar? And Vincent answered: 'Usually every guitar is tuned like that, with the tuning fork.' (laughs) There I felt like an idiot.

Live at the 400 Bar in Minneapolis: Cat Power 1999 (6 songs) and the Dirty Three 1999 or 2000 (3 tracks plus one introduction by Warren Ellis). Download rather slow. Link credit: largehearted boy

Another newish mp3 blog on the block I just discovered (via good old wisdom goof) is Word in the Alleys. Recent offerings included Explosions In The Sky, Scout Niblett, Divine Comedy, British Sea Power and Wilco. Pete and Sean do not mince matters and write in a style which often makes me smile. It probably is British humor or something.

From my referrers: Mystery & Misery is a fine blog on independent and underground music with external mp3 links. Nice plain layout, terrific taste and lots of bands to discover.

ILM threads:

• Quite fascinating analysis of the cover for Morrissey's new album

• MP3 blogs story On NPR

• Some dream pop, shoegazer, noise pop, atmospheric etc. of the zero years to download on the page of the Pehr label. Great song sounding like Lush meeting noisy My Bloody Valentine (at the end) by Experimental Aircraft: Symphony (via mystical beast)

• The Pixies at Coachella, May, 1st (rename to *.mp3) via <a href="blog.largeheartedboy.com"lhb. 20 songs, mostly classics.

• Scott Woods 1967 choice is of course the Banana album. I think up till now I'd have chosen exactly the same records.

• Five recent shows of apocalypse post-rockers Godspeed You Black Emperor! and The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra plus Tra-La-La Band to download (via kingblind).

• Scott Woods from rockcritics daily does his 40 years countdown with a single, an album and a film for every year from 1964-2003. Will I ever finish my 40 years project?
• Yo La Tengo 2004 WFMU covers (69 meg zip file; Gigantic, Barstool Blues, Jesus, Tonight's the Night, White Light/White Heat, Close to Me, Taxman and many more) via largehearted boy
• Robert Christgau's random A-list with 12 different albums ranking A- or better every time you reload the page. A nice way to discover some worthwhile albums and some interesting succinct writing on them.