Excellent Online

On Monday's I'll try to get a list of the interesting bands that are playing the late night shows for the upcoming week.  Here's the first batch:

Monday, March 29:  Jimmy Fallon: Jeff Goldblum, Jennifer Morrison, Julian Casablancas
Tuesday, March 30:  Carson Daly: Snoop Dogg, Keane
Wednesday, March 31:  Carson Daly: Jesse Ventura, Doves
Friday, April 2:  David Letterman: Nathan Lane, She & Him
 

Here's some of the stuff I've seen over the week that's kinda interesting but not interesting enough for me to clog up your RSS feed, twitter account or Facebook page over.

• MGMT's new album was leaked so they decided to stream the whole thing from their site.  Enjoy.
• The National's new album, High Violet, will be released on May 11th.  You can grab a track from the record, "Bloodbuzz Ohio" on highviolet.com.
• Larry Crane is a longtime friend of Elliot Smith and he's in the process of remastering Smith's debut album, Roman Candle.  Fans are upset over an album that no one has heard, but I can see why.  It's something that should be preserved, faults and all.
• Beck, St. Vincent & the Liars have covered INXS's popular "Kick" album in a day.  They are releasing one song a week from their project, first up is "Guns in the Sky".
• The BBC reviews Jonsi's new album, Go.  I like the intro:  "His voice remains one of modern music's most readily identifiable instruments".
• Iggy Pop will no longer stage dive after the audience failed to catch him at New York's Carnegie Hall.
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I can't believe that this is my first Teenage Fanclub story I've ever written on Excellent Online!  I've loved them ever since their 1990 album, Bandwagonesque.  And their 13 album is one of my all-time favorites.  In the late nineties they left the shredding guitars and went with a more grown up sound and I didn't follow them.  But in retrospect I've come to appreciate their latter records (thanks pandora!), and am quite excited about their followup to 2005's Man-Made.  Their new record will be called Shadows and is out on Merge Records in June.  They also plan on touring the US in September.

The hugly popular Internet indie radio station, WOXY.com, has gone off the air yesterday at 10 am EST.  They have run out of funding and it isn't the first time the station has been in trouble.  In 2004 the station had to shut down only to be revived by "anonymous investors".  It's a sad day but I can understand the problems.  There are just so many choices to listen to music online that it's very difficult to get an audience.  I rarely tuned into woxy.com since I had pandora, my ipod, or the ton of other shoutcast stations.  Right now I'm syncing up MP3's from my house using a dropbox folder.

Below is a short documentary on the station (via PopCandy):

We've previously talked about the new band Admiral Radley which has Jason Lytle (ex-Grandaddy) and member of Earlimart.  Over at npr.org you can check out a couple of tracks.  Since their first album isn't due out until the summer, it's really the only way to hear the band.

Last night Suede played their first show in seven years.  As reported earlier, the lineup was from the "Coming Up" era and did not include Bernard Butler.  Last night's performance was a warm up gig for their upcoming performance at the Teenage Cancer Trust Benefit on March 24th.  They played for about ninety minutes and included tracks from all of their albums including two b-sides.  The full setlist is below.

Universal Music Group (UMG) is going to test a new lower pricing plan.  Their goal is to get CD's on the shelves for $9.99.  According to billboard.biz, some of the other labels are annoyed/nervous about the move to a lower price but hopefully they will fall in line.  Surely UMG can't be the only major label that has hired an executive that understands basic economics.  If you're sales are dropping year after year and digital sales haven't picked up enough of the slack, then you have to do something.

Two bits of news from NME:

First up is that Noel Gallagher is playing the a show for the Teenage Cancer Trust later this month and he'll be joined by none other then Mani (from Primal Scream and Stone Roses fame.

Secondly, Liam snubbed Noel when he accepted an award for Best Brit Album and then threw the award in the crowd.  Apparently, he was just misunderstood!  He only thanked the band because all the news circulates around Liam and Noel and he "thought it was only right to mention to other lads who played on the album and the best fans in the world".  And when he tossed his award into the crowd, "I thought it was a nice gesture to give this to the fans.  Obviously it was misinterpreted as per usual."

After many many years, we finally have our tour dates page back online!  I was introduced to Excellent Online back in the late nineties when someone emailed me a copy of the "New Music Release List" that assembled together by hand.  It looked like something that needed to be online.  So I contacted Shane Brown, joined the mailing list and quickly began work on Excellent Online 1.0.  One of the other features that we really wanted was a tour dates page, something that I used heavily.  Back then we updated all the dates by hand and it was a very tedious process.  This time around I wanted something automatic so that I know it will be kept updated.  So we're now working with songkick.com to automatically fetch the tour dates for the bands that we have previously mentioned on this site.  So check it out and we hope you enjoy the new feature of the site.

The next National album, 'High Violet', will be released on May 11 and there are already some videos of the new songs online.  The first video we have is from "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" where they played the opening track, "Terrible Love".  Since I'm typically pessimistic, I didn't expect much, but this song is fantastic.  It has a nice build up to the crescendo which I'm a total sucker for.

Following that, we have a fan video (via Pitchfork) of The National performing, "Vanderlylle Cry Baby".  It's more on the mellower side and I'm reserving judgement until I can get the album in my hands.  Click on read more to see the two videos.