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:
Dropout City by Trummors Dropout City starts boldly by exploring some unmarked trails on the opener “Late Arrival,” which leads into some dissonance that is as jagged as Organ Mountains Desert Peaks National Monument. This Taos, New Mexico-based female-male duo proceed to circuitously find their way back to the main trail before returning home to their kerosene lamps, Navajo rugs and Gene Clark records. The 3/4 waltzing “Oh Laura” is achingly reminiscent of the long-forgotten Idaho Falls in presenting a loping, lilting and lamenting tale of a Western drifter set against the vast horizon. In other spots, they evoke the Ladybug Transistor tuned into a classic honky tonk rural radio station. Sometimes, their unhurried pace seems a little too removed from the onward rush of life on songs like “Rollin’ Boulders” and spurs one to mutter, “Giddy up Giddy Up” and reach for the nearest disc by the Dickies.
The tempo picks up on “What You Had” and things start to fall in place on the back stretch of the album. This number rides the steel guitar rails and is straight down the pike with its sage wisdom of “No sense of returning...to where you've been.” Another highlight is Anne Cunningham taking the reins and the lead vocals on “Tulsa Country,” which was written by Pam Polland of Gentle Soul and recorded by the Byrds - the bedrock band of this sound. “Peacock Angel” ventures deep into a hazy mirage and features their intertwined “harmonic convergence” vocals inspired by Friend & Lover, Chuck and Mary Perrin and Everly Brothers records of yore. Their coinciding vocals mostly convey a good natured and welcomed optimistic outlook, and are augmented with a host of proficient musicians from the West Coast Cosmic Country scene. Not to be missed are the pronounced and sweetly plaintive steel guitar lines, which run fluidly throughout the record. Both pedal steel and slide guitars embellish their sound with lovely accents, while filling the spaces between the distant stars and the Western sun. Dropout City is branded with Trummors’ rustic yet dexterous Western borderlands twang, which reminds listeners of adventures that still await in the Land of Enchantment. - Ted (Downtown)
