Weekly Song Recommendation: Does it Offend You, Yeah? – Doomed Now

Does it Offend You Yeah?

This week in my attempt to improve your music taste I’m making you listen to the awesome tune “Doomed Now” by the the band “Does it Offend You, Yeah?”

Start by realizing there are few songs better than this one and you’ll be on the right track.

I love this dance-rock tune.  It comes off as a well produced, tightly integrated almost artificial sounding song.  But then you realize it’s a drum kit, some guitars, vocals.  It’s just a rock band.  An awesome one.  Sure there’s some blips and beeps mixed in, but I love that.

Remember last week when I told you more songs need vocoder usage?  Well this song took that advice and went balls out with it.  All of the vocals are vocoded and therefore radified to the max, yo.

Now even though I think this song rocks, it doesn’t compare to the album as a whole.  The album “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into” by this band is honestly one of the best start to finish albums ever.  It mixes dance rock with full on electronic tracks.  You’re doing yourself a grave disservice if you don’t check out this album yesterday.  Someone on Last.FM tagged them as “like robots having sex”.  If you don’t like that, then I don’t want to know you.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Admiral Ackbar joins Twitter

Per recommendation of @EternalCow I built a bot that puts a much needed appearance of Admiral Ackbar (@AdmiralAckbar_) on Twitter. He’s warning (as he should be) to all who will listen that “It’s a trap!”

This is funny, but the most entertaining part is the fact that people are replying back.

See below for a real time update of responses to “It’s a trap!”

I’ll soon have itsatrap.org up :P

Weekly Song Recommendation: Cut Copy – Feel The Love

#MusicMonday!
This week’s recommendation is Cut Copy’s “Feel the Love” from their 2008 release “In Ghost Colours“.  What makes this recommendation cool is the fact that the album was originally recommended to me by Mr. Frank Payne.  Frank can be thanked for introducing me to so much of the awesome music that I’m into.  Nobody has better music taste than him.  Hands down.

Now onto the song.

This song really has pretty much everything a good track needs.  So take note if you’re in a band or planning on starting one.  These things will make a tune an instant hit.

1) Obscure introduction with ample electronics that breaks into a standard indie rock jam.
2) Lots of padding consisting of heavily reverb’ed “Ohhhh”s or synth pads.
3) A dance chorus that absolutely consists of a double time hi-hat pattern.  You may also replace the acoustic drums at this point with a drum machine if you like.  But bring back the acoustic drums for the verse.
4) A vocoder.  I can’t stress this enough.  Modern music does not use a vocoder nearly as much as it should.  Fine, autotune… but the vocoder is where it’s at.
5) Synth heavy outro to dance to.

With this track having all of these things and more, how could it go wrong?

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

A new social experiment

If you remember back I recently had #TweetDinner.  Where people a web site decided who  my “closest friends” were all got together for dinner and hung out.  It was a good time, I consider it a success.  It doesn’t hurt that they were cool people.

So I think it’s time for a new social experiment.

Currently I follow 340 people on Twitter.  Some of them are automated entertainment sources, many of them are out of the area.  So that leaves a good chunk of them as local Omahans.

I’m going to select people, at random, and ask them to hang out.  A drink, dinner, lunch, something.  My guess is many of them will decline, since this is admittedly pretty creepy.  But maybe a few will go along with this crazy idea, and maybe even have a good time.

So some stipulations: If it’s already a close friend of mine I’ll select someone else.  If it’s someone that’s not local I’ll select someone else.  If they decline I’ll select someone else.  If it’s not someone who follows me I’ll select someone else too.  If they don’t know who I am, I doubt they’ll want to hang out.

After each outing, I’ll vaguely blog about the experience here and post a picture or something.

I’ll probably start next week, as I don’t have a system in place to select a completely random Twitter user that I follow yet.  Stay tuned.

Weekly Song Recommendation: Quintron – Witch in the Club

I really need to start putting more of my personality into this blog.  Even it bores me.  So once a week I’m going to plan on posting a song that I think my friends should listen to.  Most of my Omaha friends need some music schooling anyway ;)

This week I feature a track from Mr. Quintron (and Miss Pussycat)’s album “Swamp Tech”.  It’s called Witch in the Club.

He was here a couple months ago at The Waiting Room and in my opinion put on one of the best shows here so far this year.

The track starts off with the sound of the infamous Drum Buddy, an instrument that he invented and plays live at his shows.  It consists of a coffee can with holes in it, on a turntable, with a lightbulb inside of the can.  As light leaks out through the holes little photo sensors pick it up and make a synth sound.  Genius.  Enjoy.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.