You might know Failure better as the band that wrote the song The Nurse Who Loved Me which was later covered in a somewhat over-the-top way by A Perfect Circle. Interestingly enough, Troy Van Leeuwen, who played guitar during the time this album was released, was a member of A Perfect Circle during their first album, but left the band before the second album was completed and did not play on the cover of this song. Just kind of funny.

Failure are one of those bands that most people would probably never hear of if it wasn’t for people like me who think that the grunge era was something to be celebrated and remembered. It’s easy to point to Local H and say, hey, grunge is still kind of relevant (regardless of the fact that Local H are more hard rock than they are grunge), but that’s because they’re still kicking. Failure has been dead for almost 13 years now, and no one is talking about them. That’s a shame because this is a damn fine album full of damn fine songs just like this one, and you should check it out.

I’ll be going back to trying to cover an equal number of new and old songs, as I’ve been focusing a bit too heavily on new music that excites me. I’m getting a lot of traffic thanks to being on Hype Machine now, so I’m going to use this as inspiration to post more. As always, just enjoy it!

The most surprising thing about OK GO‘s new album isn’t the new musical direction they take, but how good it is. I thought that treadmill song was fun and good and everything but the rest of their work sounds like the worst parts of Weezer crossed with most lackluster parts of Eve 6, so it’s understandable why fans of the band are a little miffed about their new album sounding like The Flaming Lips crossed with Prince, which are two artists I’m actually pretty much completely unfamiliar with.

White Knuckles, one of the more upbeat and easily accessible tracks on the album, sounds to me kind of like Pavement trying to do a Passion Pit song. It’s good, but it’s weird how much like other bands it sounds. I guess that’s part of OK GO’s underlying problem, they always sound like they’re trying to sound like something. They never really just sound like themselves, whatever that could be. The more popular album cut, This Too Shall Pass, comes about as close as the band could possibly come to not sounding like another band, but for all I know that’s just because I’m not familiar with whatever band that song sounds like.

All in all, I like this album, and I spun it a good seven or eight times straight through. My first listen I felt kind of feh about it, but This Too Shall Pass kept me coming back. I’d say out of the whole album there’s maybe three or four “keepers”. YMMV.

Site News: It looks like after my comments yesterday, I’m now on Hype Machine.

The best thing about Vadoinmessico is that they remind me of how amazing Gomez sounded back when they first came around and eventually won the Mercury Prize. At that time Gomez sounded like this was a band that had it all figured out: easy to listen tunes you’d relax to in a beach chair while some lovely tanned girl (not a woman, mind you) laid by your side and you sipped some fruity tropical drink and smoked a big fucking blunt full of some bomb kush. This was “get a little buzzed, a little high, and fuck lazily when you get back from the beach” music. Unfortunately Gomez never lived up to the promise of their first album, and instead gradually devolved into a band that made songs that sounded like they were trying way too hard to be friendly to American radio (to such an extent that their songs could be performed by Nickelback and not sound at all unusual).

Thankfully, London-based (with members from Mexico, Austria, and Italy) Vadoinmessico seems to pick up where Gomez failed horribly and mix it with a little bit of the typical indie-of-today flavor and give us a nice seven track EP full of lazy sunny-day driving music. In Spain wraps up the EP with arguably their best song so far, and you only really need to listen to it once to understand that this song is pretty damn good.

While you can buy the EP from Amazon by clicking on the album are above, I recommend you go to http://vadoinmessico.bandcamp.com/ and download it directly from the band themselves. You can even download it in FLAC from them, if you want, as well as a wide variety of other formats.

See, this is why you read staires! because all those music blogs on Hype Machine don’t know dick about shit. Or is that shit about dick? I don’t know. Point is, I’m fucking awesome, and I’ve been doing this for well over a year now and no one gives a shit about me. That’s the true badge of awesomeness, right there.

In an effort to increase my chances of getting sued by someone, I’ve decided to put up a streaming shoutcast ‘radio station’ for you all to listen to. You can access the frontpage for the server at http://radio.staires.org or just launch the stream here.

Works great. Ten listeners max, though I may increase that if necessary as I’m not sure how many people my connection can actually handle. This is streaming a shuffle of 1,840 different songs that should take almost 5 days to shuffle through entirely, so you should be able to listen for quite a while without hearing the same songs over again, which is more than I can say for local radio stations like JackFM where you hear Use Somebody every fucking day.

Anyhoo… enjoy if you do! There’s a thing in the sidebar that will update when the radio station is offline. In my testing it works great over the 3G connection on my Nexus One using DroidLive (available in the market). (And here’s how it looks on shoutcast.com.)

I’m unabashedly in love with Archie Bronson Outfit’s Derdang Derdang. I posted two songs from it here and even included Dead Funny in my drifted away playlist. I knew, however, that their album before Derdang, Fur, was not very good. So I was worried: would their new album be good and live up to the unrealistically high expectations Derdang’s purely consistent awesomeness set for me, or would it fail those expectations and just be merely OK, or worse, would it just suck really bad?

It’s clear from the first thirty seconds of album opener Magnetic Warrior that this is not Derdang Derdang. It’s basically a relentless assault on your ears, a dramatic opening statement meant to completely obliterate any thought you had that Coconut might have been Derdang Part Two. He’s not singing about a woman, or at least I don’t think he is, or anything at all really, probably. I’m not even sure what Magnetic Warrior is, you know?

Maybe that’s part of the genius of the album, how almost indiscernible a lot of the lyrics are, with vocals buried under static and echo. Derdang was an album with a message (and that message was “love sucks balls but damn women are fun to play with”) and Coconut isn’t, at least as far as I can tell. This is a collection of songs, good songs that are fun to listen to, but is there meaning to it? Is there meaning to anything, ever?

I just read a review of this album that suggested there are strains of psychedelia in it, and maybe it’s because I’ve saturated myself with so much psychedelia over the years or just because so much music I listen to has subtle strains of psychedelia in it, I just don’t see it. If psychedelia means your music is echo-y, static-y, and “swirly” in some ways, then this song is clearly psychedelic, but that beat, that almost disco-like feel to it, what does that make it?

Is Coconut the first disco-psychedelia record? Are we witnessing the further evolution of music here? After years of same-y bullshit is it Archie Bronson Outfit who are bringing us the first clear example of what music in the 21st century became? Disco-punk-psychedelia?

The 21st century fucking rules.

I’m utterly gobsmacked by how good the new Ted Leo album is. Before this I didn’t really listen to Ted Leo. I liked Me and Mia (I mean, who doesn’t? Who couldn’t?) but his albums left me feeling a little lukewarm. The Brutalist Bricks reverses this trend completely and I’m finding myself thinking about it a lot. This song, Bottled in Cork has been the first “song I’m addicted to” that I’ve had in a couple months, where every time I get in my car it’s the song I specifically seek out to listen to because I like it that much.

There’s a couple cool things about the album, one is that it doesn’t start off with its strongest songs. Most albums blow their load in the first four tracks, putting the best song in the second place, but that’s not the case with Brutalist Bricks. Heck, I’d say one of the weakest tracks on the album is track two. The album just gets stronger and stronger as it goes on, and past the halfway mark you’re finally hit with some of the best songs on the album. It’s surprising, and, dare I say, absolutely genius. Instead of petering out, this album ramps up, and by the time it ends you want more.

Ted Leo is playing at The Troubadour on Saturday. Despite not being a fan, I went and saw him play near the end of summer last year and he was fantastic. The guy lives and breathes music. He’s like the pop-punk version of Bruce Springsteen, giving his all every show and never letting up. Ted Leo is something that needs to be witnessed, and I’ll be at his show Saturday (Ted, if you’re reading this, please get me, my girlfriend, and my fan of yours friend on some sort of list, just so we can be sure to get in, please!) rocking the fuck out!

See you there…

You know if I had posted this two days ago when I first listened to it, I would have scooped Pitchfork.

The Strange Boys play music that sounds like The Animals and The 13th Floor Elevators, and they do it really well. I shouldn’t really need to say anything else about it in order to get you to want to listen, because if you have any taste at all you should be all over this shit.

Their album from last year, The Strange Boys and Girls Club, this is not. Be Brave is almost a quiet album, something you listen to while you take a slow easy road trip to destinations unknown. …and Girls Club was something you got fucked up and twisted your body around to. The title track itself is as close as the album gets to matching the energy of their first record, but I don’t miss that energy at all. I don’t want to say anyone can play upbeat garage rock that’d fit in at most bars full of people wearing ironic facial hair, but, well, pretty much anyone can.

It actually takes some chops to slow it down, pair it back, and end up with good music. I want to say that Be Brave is the Strange Boys’ response to The xx. “You can make simple music really good? Well, we can, too.”

Laugh At Sex, Not Her is my favorite track off the album, and to me, the one most clearly reminiscent of the easy going kind of sort of bluesy songwriting that prevails in some of my favorite grungier moments from the 1960′s. The lyrics don’t really match the era they’re paying homage to (or unabashedly aping if you ask morons who think playing to your influences makes you a poseur) and that goes for pretty much every Strange Boys song, but that is what makes them a modern band, and hell, the mood doesn’t either, really… but there’s something about it that I just love.

Much like The War on Drugs, who are probably one of my top five artists if the album they release this year doesn’t somehow suck balls (it is so unlikely), the Strange Boys take the sounds of yesterday (if yesterday was 50 years ago) and wrap them around the feelings of today, and thank god.