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It wasn’t the best of weeks last week. My wife lost her Grandma. Here’s the new Califone video for “Funeral Singers” goes out to her. Lovely song. Hopefully you have a great weekend:

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No, I’m not going to make a list of 10 albums that you need to buy. No, This isn’t going to be an elitist list. Music Emissions is about community so what we are going to do is try and collaborate on some albums that have changed your life these past 10 years. What albums have you returned to over and over this past decade?

We’ll keep this as a work in progress. As you think of some deserving mentions, drop a comment below. We’ll compile in the new year and see what we’ve come up with.

I’m going to start with one that I still turn to, in fact just reviewed recently. It is Grandaddy’s Sophtware Slump. Agree or not, it is one album that gets repeat listens.

And your input…

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Seattle’s Josh Ottum is getting ready to release Like The Season, an album full of quality singer/songwriter pop/rock. Josh decided he would like to let us in on some rare finds that really inspires him.

Law of the Least Effort -
this music was made by one man, Casey Foubert.  One thing it does sound like is strutting into a room with Link Wray’s jacket and a Meter’s record that has just scratched to a halt and some old jazz drummer just remembered he likes listening to country music.  One thing it does not sound like is the suburbs of Bellevue, Washington.

Arizona Amp and Alternator
This music makes me picture cactus and long highways.  Its like a broken rusty truck.  its like a cat that got hit by lightning.  Most of the songs seem semi-made-up-on-the-spot…but then there’s this really pretty lyric about how the “wind turns skin to leather”.

Frank Lenz
This music is very complex but beneath it all there lies the soul of a man who has looked deep into the abyss and harnessed a sense of melody that can only be attributed to a deep look into the abyss.  This is mildly open soulful music to be listened to while looking at the colors a stained glass window can make on the hard wood floors of your apartment.

Arm of Roger
This music is made in central california.  The album cover has a guy flying over the ocean with rollerblades on holding a cat.  You should listen to this when you’re taking everything very seriously.  The song “down with animals” is absolutely absolute.

Michael Deakers
This music is another one man show.  Its instrumental and sensitive.  It embraces electronic equipment.  It is neither here nor there.  It drives down the coast in a car with Christmas on the horizon.  or…not?

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Hello faithful listeners. This is Dennis Scanland bringing you another weekly dose of the New Music Podcast from Music Emissions.

Today I am conducting duo electrolysis. Yes, musical hair removal by way of some cutting edge electro artists. Primarily duo acts.

• Not Me – Datarock (Red)
• Phantom Limb – Fuck Buttons (Tarot Sport)
• Silver Cruiser – Röyksopp (Junior)
• Servo Manual Chapter 1 – Beautiful Small Machines (The Robots In Love EP)
• The Gift – Jaz Klash (Thru The Haze)
• Archive – Down Review (From Here, For Anyone)
• Some Way Through This – The Black Ghosts (The Black Ghosts)

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Ahh, the almighty Animal Collective. Another one of those bands that doesn’t seem like it can do wrong. They’ve got a handful of classic albums already. Here’s a video that’s bound to be classic as well. It’s for In The Flowers. Happy weekend everyone!

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Up here in Canada Our Lady Peace is legendary. I remember watching them play a little club in Calgary called the Republik on their first tour and we all thought, “This band is going places”. That was a long time ago and OLP are still at it, having just released a new album called Burn Burn.

We caught up with guitarist Steve Mazur to get some of his favorite bands and albums. Check them out:

Ray LaMontagne–Until the Sun Turns Black: In this day and age where we are ambushed by music and so-called artists at every turn, it can be tough to discern who is worthy of checking out. Ray LaMontagne is one of those that you want to check out. Just because we have more and more people putting their music out there doesn’t mean that we have any more real artists than we did in years and ages past. Ray LaMontagne is the real deal, a real artist.

Devo–Duty Now for the Future: When I first got a Devo record, I thought it was cool and really quirky and all that but it didn’t stick with me. I’d like to think that I’m a better person now because when I dug their 1st two albums out recently again, I was floored. The arrangement of parts within the instruments are ridiculously original, intricate, and effective. They were such a one-pointed focus of a band and vision. Don’t cast them off as just goofy. There’s genius there as well.

TV on the Radio–Dear Science: I have grown cautious and somewhat weary of the word “eclectic” from past experience of artists who throw a bunch of different styles or instruments together without any depth and expect you to dig it ’cause “It’s so diverse, man….” You still have to have quality in there. That’s where TV on the Radio comes in.

Queen–A Day at the Races: Yeah Freddie was flamboyant. Yes they were dramatic. They probably were also the best band of the 20th century. To think that they cranked out an album or more a year of this quality and depth in the 1970′s makes me wonder if they were not of this earth. And it makes me feel lazy.

King’s X–Dogman: The best band that you’ve probably not heard of, and a great record of theirs. One part great guitar riffs and tone, one part crazy cool distorted bass, two parts killer Beatles-like harmonies, one part gritty gospel-like lead vocals, and many parts great, great songs. Please buy this record. If you don’t like it I will pay you back.

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Yeah, so I’m running low on creativity these days. Apologies for the Podcast title. Anyway, it’s been a busy couple months as we wound down our Indie Of The Year contest at the end of October. Full steam ahead with some new site features, coming soon!

Today’s podcast starts out in the UK, heads over to Athens, Georgia then takes a trip to Brooklyn, stopping by California and ending up on Long Island. No real theme to this one except all great music that I’ve been into recently.

Here’s a breakdown of the playlist:

• All Is Vanity – Manic Street Preachers (Journal For Plague Lovers)
• Cornerstone – Arctic Monkeys (Humbug)
• Made to Disappear – The Twilight Sad (Forget the Night Ahead)
• My Halo – Atlas Sound (Logos)
• Planting Seeds – Built To Spill (There Is No Enemy)
• No Intention – Dirty Projectors (Bitte Orca)
• I Get Lonesome – Beck (One Foot In The Grave)
• Gasoline – Brand New (Daisy)

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Unprecedented, we are doubling up our video of the week choice for Friday the 13th. Finally, a flick with an indie premise. Philip Seymour Hoffman and friends, I don’t think this largely marketed box office release will disappoint this Friday. Drop a comment if you end up checking it out…

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Happy Friday everyone. I found this on a blog I frequent. I had no idea that the man behind The Violent Femmes had a new project out. It’s called Gordon Gano and the Ryans. Here is a new video for a song called Man In The Sand. It’s no Blister In The Sun but it’s pretty damn catchy. Can’t wait to hear the rest of their album.

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Warning! Techie article. No musical merit in this post whatsoever. Skip to the pertinent content…

Note: If you can’t log in, close down your browser and open it again. Seems to be a cookie issue.

It has been a while coming and while I may be a web developer I tend to be a bit of a hack. When we moved over to the WordPress backend from PHPBB I ended up doing some heavy standard file editing which is a no-no on these packages. The reason isn’t that it may break something, the reason is that you will have a hard time upgrading. Basically when an upgrade is done in WordPress you overwrite all of your files with the new files then perform a database upgrade. In essence, overwriting ALL of the hacks you’ve done.

We haven’t really changed the way we do things, only this time around we’ve actually documented the files and changes that are needed to added the wonderful user extensions as well as Artist and Album tagging on posts. Nothing major but when you’ve got an entire site depending on the infrastructure you need to do it right.

What’s next…

We have a whole slew of plans moving forward. We were on a bit of a holding pattern with the onslaught of visitors during the Indie Of The Year contest but now that the contest is finished we’ll have some time to address. I won’t get into much detail about what plans are but I will reveal this, we are working on a micro-payment system for editorial reviewers. What does that mean for you as a “user”? You will want to prove your chops to us to get in on the editorial team! Start taking part in some of the comments and such throughout the site and most importantly, submit many user reviews. If we like what we see you will get a personal invite to join the team. We are so far behind on reviews we aren’t just looking for a couple. We’d like to expand to at least 10-15 full-time editorial staff to help out with reviews, blog posts, podcasts, posting artist bios and much more.

This micro-payment system has been on the table for quite some time but the resources haven’t been there to do the extra coding necessary in order to make it happen. Let me know your thoughts on this and what you might hope to see in such a system down in the comments below.

Thanks for your patience in this upgrade and please let us know via the contact form if you run into any bugs or glitches in the upgraded version.