Allmusic.com - Release Dates, Reviews, Track Listings and Discographies. Billboard Online - Trade magazine of the music industry featuring several internationally recognized record charts. Fact Magazine - UK based independent music review site with lots of great interviews and features. NPR Music - A staff favorite, with a plethora of well-written reviews, interviews, podcasts, and more. Tunefind - An index of music and songs appearing in popular TV shows and movies. Not comprehensive, but certainly accurate.
Discover New Music
Every Noise at Once - A one-page map of playable audio samples for more than 1500 music genres, from dance pop to bossa nova to black metal to Turkish new wave to swamp blues to deep opera. Prepare to kill an hour or more with this exhaustive and comprehensive interactive site. Gnoosic- A search engine for music, featuring a mapping system to locate music that is closely (or remotely) related to the artists you love. Music Ninja - A unique music review website, that has dozens of playlists covering all genres and moods. Noon Pacific - A playlist of music from hundreds of music blogs, hand-picked and delivered to your e-mail inbox every week.
Music in Film
Music makes a pretty compelling subject for a film, and our streaming movie database Kanopy has hundreds of music-related features for you to enjoy. Whether it’s a cradle-to-grave story biopic about a famous musician, or an enlightening documentary about a specific music scene, or simply a film with a killer soundtrack, Kanopy has you covered. You can access Kanopy through a variety of devices and platforms, and you get 10 play credits per month. Click here to peruse the music films available and stream (and listen to) a great movie today!
Listen to Music Online
Pandora - Free, personalized music that plays music according to what you love. Bandcamp - Discover amazing new music and directly support the artists who make it. Spotify - Free music, for tablets, smart phones, or computers. Slacker Radio - Hundreds of stations, adapted to your personal taste.
Freegal Pick of the Month
Are you using Freegal? How can you call yourself a music fan and not be using this excellent service that gives you five songs per week – absolutely free that you can keep forever. There are thousands of songs from popular artists and tons of new & upcoming bands and musicians to enjoy. You can also get a brief preview of each song before you use one of your weekly downloads – just log in with your library card and PIN numbers, then click the song's icon. Whatever your taste, Freegal is perfect for any music fan.
This month's pick:
Liar, Liar by Wheels on Fire Here is evidence that exciting rock ‘n’ roll can not only come from the most unlikely of places (Athens, Ohio), but also be recorded in this century (2010 to be exact). Perhaps it was the humdrum and indeterminate band name that prevented this group from ever crossing my radar. The four-piece not only had the Memphis sound down, but they accomplished it without a bass player, and on Liar, Liar they successfully expand their sound out to the ‘70s melodic pop ‘n’ roll regions of the Real Kids and the Beat. With its prominent whirling keyboards, soulful vocal delivery and pop sensibilities, it was this third and final album on Germany’s Alien Snatch Records that proved to be the charm. On “Bad Lie,” they burst out of the gate, quickly work up a storm and fire on all cylinders. The little vocal inflections at the end of “Sarah” and interspersed throughout “Looking at You” initially threw me for a loop as I could not quite place where I heard them before, then I recalled they were probably inspired by a David Byrne or David Johansen scat. The incendiary “Losin’” is testimony that they were well attuned to a long-gone past that allowed them to skirt the transient hipster trappings of their time, while successfully bringing in street-level characters like “Long Tall Sally” into the darkened alleys of the 21st century. The surging & shuffling minimalism of the Subsonics informs “Ambulance” which arrives on the scene "where the people were dancin’ in street/where the music never sounded so sweet.” The party rages on with “Looking At You” before heading back to the Reigning Sound of “Stick Around” - unadulterated, straightforward and brimming as tomorrow morning’s black chicory coffee. “Chasin’ UFOs” has them exploring the murky smear of night through the brambles with keyboards that reach a boil like a bubbling cauldron. Lastly, “I Wanna Know” unspools with the radio “ahn” somewhere between “Heart” by the Remains and Modern Lovers' “Roadrunner." Bucking the trends, they understood what they were good at and they worked feverishly within that framework. This rudimentary intuition is at the essence of rock ‘n’ roll and allowed the soulful quartet to connect the sound and spark of the past to the chain reaction of the present. - Ted (Downtown)
