Of Monsters and Men

One of my friends showed me this band about a week ago, and I'm pretty surprised that I didn't know about them before. They are really great. They are kind of a mix between Mumford and Sons and I don't even know what, because there's like pop and then there's not. I'd heard the song "Little Talks" on the radio and didn't recognize who was singing, but then I listened to the whole album My Head is an Animal and love about every song on it. Everything is so catchy and has so many different parts in it. The guitar is always awesome and the vocals are really great because it's a guy and a girl that take turns singing and then harmonize and I love it. My favorite songs off of this album are "Little Talks", "Mountain Sound", and "Slow and Steady". So definitely check em out.

"Little Talks"

 

"Mountain Sound"



 

"Slow and Steady"



Joni Mitchell and Des Ark

Joni Mitchell
I thought Joni Mitchell was okay, but not really my favorite. Her lyrics were really awesome because they always told a story. Now I'm not one for thinking lyrics make the song not the actual way the song sounds, but the lyrics of her songs were always powerful and made you feel the emotion that she brought out so strongly in yourself, which I thought was a really cool quality. I the piano and vocals just started to blur together and sound the same to me. At first I thought her voice was really pretty and natural but then for some reason it really started to annoy me. And I thought the piano sounded pretty awesome up until about halfway when every single song had the main instrument as piano; that's when it got boring to me. The song that I liked the best off of her album, Blue, was the song "Carey". It kind of came out of nowhere and was a change which I liked. I really liked the bongos or congos or whatever type of drum was playing in the background because it gave the song a tribal feel which was different than the rest of her album. So all in all, I thought Joni Mitchell was okay, but I wish it would have been a bit more interesting in the musicality aspect.

"Carey"

 

Des Ark

I thought that this band was a lot more interesting than Joni Mitchell. They had a really awesome Indie sound and the singer's voice was just plain awesome. I liked her voice better compared to Joni's. These songs always had a beat you could go along with and dance to and it was just a lot more fun to listen to all the different instruments rather than just an acoustic, piano, and singer. It was a bunch of different sounds meshed together to form an awesome album, and I seriously think I'm going to by it. I wish this band was more known because they would seriously be famous. Loved it.

 

Des Ark



Randy Houser- How Country Feels

I didn't know who Randy Houser was until just one of his songs went to the top of the country charts. I heard "How Country Feels" the song on the radio and immediately downloaded it and then the other day I saw on iTunes that the full album came out. I was so excited, and then to be honest a little disappointed. I found a couple more songs that I really loved but I was truly expected it to blow me away because that has happened with a couple of other albums but I'm a little upset I bought this entire album instead of just select songs. That always stinks. But it may be one of those albums that after you listen to it like 3 times it really grows on you. So I'm really hoping that happens. And I'm really hoping that his next album blows me away. Randy Houser is no Jason Aldean but hey, he's trying and he made a couple of amazing songs out of it. And now he's got a lot to improve upon. My favorite songs on this are "How Country Feels", "Runnin' Out Of Moonlight", "Like a Cowboy", "Growin' Younger" and "Top of the World". So that's a lot out of all of them, maybe I just have my expectations a little too high but seriously I want an album where every song is good.

Zep 4

This album now trumps the third album in my thinking it was the best. This album had a lot of variety in it which I enjoyed. Like it wasn't all heavy but it wasn't all folk like zep 3. I liked that it had a perfect balance so that I wasn't bored or not liking the sound the whole time. The only thing that I don't like about this album or I guess the band in general is the singers voice. It is possibly one of the most annoying voices ever. He goes really high and tries to sing the high notes like that and I'm just like no you sound bad. Honestly if they had a better singer I would love led zeppelin but it kind of just ruins it for me because the singing is what I mainly pay attention to, and you can't pay attention to the lyrics without listening to the singing. My favorites on this album were of course "Stairway to Heaven" and "Going to California" because they were the most interesting and catchy to listen to. Plus the lyrics in this album are getting better from previous albums also.

My favorite lyric in "Going to California" was this because it actually seemed like they were trying and wanting to send a message not just throwing random words together:

Seems that the wrath of the Gods
Got a punch on the nose and it started to flow;
I think I might be sinking.
Throw me a line if I reach it in time
I'll meet you up there where the path
Runs straight and high.

Make Up Blog #3

Ra Ra Riot

I saw this band on Spotify on the new stuff and decided to listen to it and a I am slowly becoming obsessed and I'm only like halfway through the album but they are AWESOME. I really hope they come to ACL next year. I don't even know what they sound like, they're so completely original. They're pretty poppy, but then you hear some rock and some alternative and even some like island stuff and some techno stuff it's so weird but I love it. It's such a cool mix of sounds. I've been listening to their album Beta Love which is pretty new, I'm guessing because it was in the new section of Spotify. But literally I wanna like get up and dance right now this music is so happy. So anyways here are my favorites as of right now:

"Dance With Me"

 

"Angel Please"

 

And I have a feeling I will be listening to a lot more of this band. Check em out

Make Up Blog #2

Film Scores

I was watching Pitch Perfect the other day, and was like dang I should blog about film scores because that's some pretty awesome stuff. Film scores are the background songs and music you hear in movies. If you have never seen Pitch Perfect before, the main guy in it wants to intern at a radio station because one day he dreams of being the guy who scores movies, like he thinks that would be the coolest job ever, and I for one agree. And let me just say, that I am totally not saying that I would be very good at this job, just that it would be pretty cool if I actually knew all the music there was and could find some undiscovered music and make it popular. But I don't and I wish I did know that much music. The music in movies is basically, what I think, adds to the drama of stuff. It makes you feel stuff a lot more than you would normally and I think that's really cool. Maybe it's just because I'm a movie junkie, but I think that would be a pretty awesome job if I would actually be good at it.

For example, in Pitch Perfect they use the movie The Breakfast Club, and the last track that goes into the credits, because it's so powerful and creates a perfect ending.

"Don't You (Forget About Me)" by Simple Minds

Make Up Blog #1

Residual Kid

I went to a concert on Sunday with the best teen bands in Austin and one that I was just blown away by was called Residual Kid. The band is made up of three kids, two fourteen year olds and one twelve year old. They have legit music videos and have been on the radio, like my dad had heard of them before, I just thought it was so crazy. They even played at Fun Fun Fun Fest, like oh my gosh that's insane. They were so awesome, but a little too loud for me to be honest. When I left the concert I couldn't hear a thing and my ears were still ringing later that night, like they were THAT LOUD. I think if they had toned it down a little bit I would have liked it better. I was just amazed at their talent, it was insane. Watching this twelve year old's hand fly up and down the bass and go crazy was a really cool thing to see. They were mostly heavy rock, which isn't really my thing, but their song was still stuck in my head the whole day, it was super catchy. So you should definitely listen to them on youtube or who knows maybe they'll be on the radio again sometime soon. But here is a clip from them.

"Friend"


"Make Up Your Mind"

Simon and Garfunkel

Simon and Garfunkel was a band that I really enjoyed. They're singing, musicality, and lyrics were all really good to me, especially after listening to heavy rock for the last couple of class periods, it was a nice change. The heavy rock time period that we have been listening to has probably been my least favorite so far. I think that those bands have some really shallow lyrics and they sound pretty sloppy. Also, lets be real, this is the type of music I like. If you scrolled down my blog you would see that I'm mostly only interested in chill/country, calm music. This is exactly that, so it pretty much fits into my blog. It's not that I don't like other genres of music, it's just that these are my favorites. This band is pretty much all of them: rock/country/folk/alternative. They remind me a lot of a mix of Mumford & Sons mixed with the band, mixed with like the Beach Boys voice. It was pretty cool, because those have all been my favorites that I've discovered in this class so far. Basically, this band=perfect for me. My favorite songs were:

"The Boxer"

 

 

"America"



 

 

RiP: A Remix Manifesto

The documentary "RiP: A Remix Manifesto" was pretty entertaining and informative. To be completely honest, I hadn't really thought about mashups being stealing, they were just something I listened to. I thought they were pretty cool, but after seeing this film I realize that so much more goes into mashups than what I could ever imagine. For example, Girl Talk is one guy who makes all these incredible songs, but by day is a biological engineer, some pretty classy stuff. Basically, you gotta be really smart to do that job. Then, by night is a mashup artist, which now I realize takes about as much smarts and effort as being an engineer. During the documentary, they went through the process of mixing two songs together and it took about a minute of him explaining something that I did not understand at all to make like five seconds of the song. So now, imagine three minutes of that, and then ten songs of that. It's kinda crazy how much effort it can take. Girl Talk's mashups are really fun to listen to and I like being able to try and find all the songs that are mixed in and find out how cool those songs sound being meshed together. In my opinion, Girl Talk is not making his complete own music. I think when you're taking other people's songs, then your just letting them do all the work of the actual lyrics and songwriting and you're just using a computer. I know that it takes a  lot of effort, but I think if you put that amount of effort into writing an original song, it could be just as good. And of course you have to be smart to do it, but what's the point if it would cost over two million dollars to put out an album? What would that do for you? I understand that people think it's rediculous that record labels charge that much for copyright but I mean, it is that person's song and if the other person is making money off of that song, then what good would that be for the original artist? Another point that someone pointed out to me was that what if you mashup got famous for being super terrible, like "hey listen to how bad this is, it's funny", then wouldn't that be declining the conatation of the original songs and decreasing sales there? I think that those people deserve credit for their songs. I think that it's a very tricky balance and you can't tilt too much one way or the other or way too many people will be upset, and that's the hard part.

Led zeppelin and black sabbath

I wasn't a big fan of led zeppelin besides their third album. Their first two were a little too heavy for me and the lyrics were pretty weird. As the albums continue, you can hear the lyrics becoming better and their music becoming more folky. I like their folky side better because I think it sounds less sloppy.

We also listened to black sabbath in class and I did not like them. They were too heavy and their lyrics were also pretty strange. Overall the only song I actually liked was iron man and I'm pretty sure it's because I've played it on guitar hero so many times. Other than that their songs were just too many solos and weird lyrics