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Showing posts with label metric. Show all posts
Showing posts with label metric. Show all posts

Friday, February 12, 2010

If You Tolerate This Your Children's Blogs Will Be Next

 If You Tolerate This Your Children's Blogs Will Be Next

Phew, it's been quite a few days for the music blogging community. What happened? This week Google decided to take down (i.e. completely delete) a number of large and smaller music blogs hosted on the popular Blogger and Blogspot services. For supposed copyright infringement. While in the past, Blogger would simply delete the offending posts (if you've ever found a dead link to a post, that's usually the reason), they've now moved to deleting entire blogs. You can read the full story here.

This obviously places us in a rather difficult position (given the we're, you know, a music blog and all). We now run the risk of being deleted at any given moment if we post (or have already posted) music we have not been expressly given (or even that we have been given) permission to post. The same could apply to images/artwork used (like the one I stole to make the image above).

Clearly continuing like this would be impossible, so it looks likely that Letters have no Arms will soon be moving itself to an independently hosted site within the near future. So, unless they delete us before we move (please don't), you will therefore be seeing a few changes around here pretty soon! 
 
Until then, we'll simply have to be VERY careful with what we post, and will start with a few songs SENT to us this week. Of course we'll have to delete them as soon as any of these bands gets big and starts selling records,  after which their lawyers will hunt us down and delete our blogs. ;-)
 

Remember them? Dark clothes. A bit moody. Sounded a bit like the Jesus and Mary Chain, then didn't. Had a very pretty drummer, then didn't. Well, they're back (so is the drummer), and if you just ignore the horrific title (In fact I even suggest changing its title in the tag of the song, to something like, oh  don't know, how about, you know, just 'Beat the Devil'?), it's actually pretty good.
 
Speaking of names, how's THIS for you!? How could this NOT kick little fleeing human ass? Sounds a bit like Millionaire (early 00s and very overlooked - I know, what a fucking cliché - Belgian band) making out with Queens of the Stone Age in a dirty toilet somewhere. Listening to it might make you feel a little badass.

This one's all electropoppy and has a dark sexy vocal singing about ghosts (double sexy!). I can totally picture boys and girls in a club drinking cheap beer and doing that cute arm swinging thing they do to electropoppy music like this (you know the one where you kinda let it hang and swing it from left to right, occasionally mimicking playing a keyboard along with the music). Remix options aplenty as well.
 
Dreamy and sweet and perfect for Valentine's Day mixtapes.

Close your curtains, turn up the heater, fill your bath, close your eyes and pretend it's summer, you're at the beach, and those girls over there are actually looking at you.

p.s. Subscribe to Letters have no Arms via that pretty link I just installed at the top right of the page!

 
p.p.s. BUY a Metric t-shirt!

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Lists and subtitutions.



photographs via Esther K.

My most played albums in 2009, according to Last.fm*:
1. Au Revoir Simone: Still Night, Still Light
2. Metric: Fantasies
3. Slow Club: Yeah So
4. The Thermals: Now We Can See
                              5. Emmy the Great: First Love

6. Sin Fang Bous: Clangour
7. Passion Pit: Manners
8. Fanfarlo: Reservoir
9. Nurses: Apple's Acre
10. Dead Man's Bones: Dead Man's Bones

12. Cymbals Eat Guitars: Why There Are Mountains
13. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone: Vs. Children
14. The Woodlands: The Woodlands
15. Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavillion


This top of course doesn't necessarily - actually cross that, it definitely DOES NOT  coincide with my favourite albums of 2009. First Love, for example (Emmy the Great's debut album) was a bit of a disappointment for me. Sure some of her old songs - previously unreleased but available online of course - were as good as I remembered, but the new ones left me decidedly unimpressed. The fact that the Thermals' Now We Can See is in this top is due almost exclusively to the song of the same name, which I must have played ad infinitum ever since I first heard it. The rest of the album however, apart from one or two songs, is unexceptional. And, while I enjoyed Yeah So, Fantasies, and Clangour, Fanfarlo's Reservoir should have been higher on the list than all of those if the aforementioned list were to reflect my preferences. So basically what I'm saying is that this list is just a lazy substitute. It's a lazy substitute for the Best Albums of 2009 list that we're not going to make. And we're not going to make it because, just like last year, we want to focus on individual songs rather than albums that may or may not have more than one or two good songs on them.

One album I was surprised to see on that list was the Woodlands' self-titled debut. Not because I didn't think it was great but because I hadn't realized I'd listened to it so many times. I'm glad that it did get to be there however, because that means the video we received in our inbox yesterday came just in time:



The Woodlands - Can We Stay

Related posts:

*Last.fm shows all the albums I've listened to the most during the last 12 months. I've included here only the ones released in 2009.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

What Emily Did



I can honestly say I'm a fan of pretty much everything Emily Haines has done so far, musically. There is Metric of course, and there is her solo stuff, but there's also - let's not forget - her many wonderful collaborations. Some, like "Anthems for a 17-year Old Girl", seem to be universally loved while others, like "Stopwatch Hearts" or "Uptown Girl", are less well known. From her songs with Stars and The Stills, to her involvement in Crystal Method and even Tiesto projects - it seems that this is one musician who cannot go wrong. Here's a look at some of the highlights of her career.

What Emily Did

K.C. Accidental - Them [Pop Song #3333] (Anthems for the Could've Bin Pills, 2000)


Stars - On Peak Hill (Nightsongs, 2001)
Stars - Going, Going, Gone (Nightsongs, 2001)


Broken Social Scene - Anthems for a 17-Year Old Girl (You Forgot It in People, 2002)
Delerium - Stopwatch Hearts (Chimera, 2003)
Broken Social Scene - Backyards (Bee Hives, 2004)


Metric - Poster of a Girl (Live It Out, 2005)

What Emily Did Next


Jason Collett - Fire (Idols of Exile, 2005)
The Stills - Baby Blues (Without Feathers, 2006)
MSTRKRFT - She's Good for Business (The Looks, 2006)


Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton - Doctor Blind (Knives Don't Have Your Back, 2007)
Metric - Hardwire (Grow Up and Blow Away, 2007)

Crystal Method - Come Back Clean (Divided By Night, 2009)
Tiesto - Knock You Out (Kaleidoscopes, 2009)
k-os - Uptown Girl (Yes!, 2009)



Metric - Blindness (Fantasies, 2009)

Friday, May 8, 2009

All those summer parties, bleep bleep beep, swine flu and a sweet farewell to Daniel F

Find us a trap door, find us a plane
Tell the survivors help is on the way
I was a blindfold, never complained
All the survivors singing in the rain
I was the one with the world at my feet
Goddess of battle, leave it up to me

What it is and where it stops nobody knows
You gave me a life I never chose 
Metric - Blindness 
 
I dedicate this to a certain Dr. Daniel F. I know you were only fictional, but you'll be missed! 
 
* 
 
 The Streets once had a hit with a song called Let's Push Things Forward. These past few weeks they've been doing just that. Releasing songs on Twitter and even writing a song about (how NOW can you get?) swine flu, titled He's behind you, he's got swine flu  
 
 

Surely this is how it should be done. I realize that financially speaking not all bands can afford to just record and release music whenever they want, but wouldn't it be nice if it were possible? To be able to just react to something in the news, on your mind etc, write a song about it, put together a quick video, Tweet it and get it out there.
 
 
The Streets - Trust Me
 
*
 
 In which Animal Collective do very strange things indeed to Yeah Yeah Yeah's Zero 
 
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Zero (Animal Collective remix)
 
 *
Ok, I've been going on about how good this album is for a few weeks now. It's probably time I posted something.
 
I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again
 
Bill Callahan - Jim Cain
 
*
1 part Modeselektor + 1 part Apparat = Moderat
 
Moderat - A New Error
 
*
Letter have no Arms was lucky enough to see Evripidis and his Tragedies a few weeks ago in Barcelona. Here they've distilled the essence of summer into four minutes and nine seconds. 
The best part? 1 min 25 sec in 'what a shame'. 
Get out your dancing shoes, unlock the door to the roof terrace and open a bottle of wine!

All those summer parties that we used to share
I can hardly recall a thing,
that surely means that I was there
dancing and kissing
you don´t know what you`ve been missing
all those summer parties that we shared
no-one could make
them fade away

with our fists in our pockets moving nervously
with a spring in our step and our dancing shoes on
we waited for this all winter long and nobody can stop us now