Like most “indie” bands, I have never heard of Lovett but after this video and song, I am now an official fan.

HEARTATTACK from Lovett on Vimeo.

For those with a keen eye for random cameos, “Heartattack” features both primo indie film actress Amy Seimetz and multi Grammy award-winning Country star Dierks Bentley, and of course, the abominable snowman from the classic holiday film, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. What do the three have in common? When asked, Lovett simply responded, “Everybody loves a good party.”

Well we love a good party over here and we are officially fans of Lovett… Keep it up guys!

LOVETT – HEARTATTACK

On a side note, I had a chance to listen to the entire album and I am extremely impressed. This is actually one album I will buy this year.

For more info on Lovett check out:
www.lovettmusic.com
http://www.myspace.com/lovettmusic
http://www.facebook.com/lovettpage

Seb is a vocalist / singer / man of leisure from beautiful sunny London. He has pretty much done everything from selling cookware to working in a movie theater before he decided to focus on just music. We can most definitely relate to that.
When we were sent this latest collab, we thought it was going to be like most of the stuff we get, where someone thinks they can make a good thing better by singing over it and it ends up sounding like junk (i.e. the “Ghosts and Stuff”) but this is actually refreshingly good!

Take a listen for yourself…
FRED FALKE AND BURNS (FEAT. SEB) – FIRST MOVE

AND if you feel like digging deeper, check out video for the original “First Move” by BURNS

Yeah it’s great by itself, but this is one of those cases where vocals and a little remix makes the track go so much deeper.

For more info on Seb
http://www.sebmusic.com/
http://twitter.com/sebmusic

Meet Norwegian horror-house pop act Tôg – sizzling synthesizers, 60’s combo organs, arpeggio swirls and thumping, italo-house beats. Beginning through a chance encounter, songwriter Lars Christian Olsen and his room mate would conduct “disturbing” sessions of electronic music experimentation using laptop synthesizers and an old Farfisa organ. But as luck will have it with true musical genius, the two came to produce “Sansen” – a massive Summer hit in Norway. and guess what?!!!
They just announced a US tour!

TOUR DATES:
SXSW:
Tues March 15th @ Scoot Inn Inside Stage (7pm) Austin, TX
Wed March 16th @ Cherrywood Outdoor Stage (8pm) Austin, TX
Thurs March 17th @ Cherrywood Pancake Breakfast (4pm) Austin, TX
Thurs March 17 – Panache Booking SXSW Showcase @ Red 7 Outside Stage (9:10pm) Austin, TX
(w/ Oh Sees, Janka Nabay, Gary Wilson, Surf City, O’Death, Grass Widow)
Sunday March 20th – Panache Hangover Party @ Beerland (6pm) Austin, TX

NORTHEAST:
Wed March 23 – WIERD Party @ Home Sweet Home – New York, NY
Thurs March 24 – Comet Ping Pong – Washington, DC
Fri March 25 – @ Cake Shop – New York, NY
(w/ Religious To Damn)
Sat March 26 – @ Death By Audio – Brooklyn, NY
(w/ Free Blood, CAVES, Publicist)

If Sansen is any indication of what the rest of the album is going to sound like, I can’t wait to get my hands on the rest of this.

Tôg – SANSEN

It’s a nice house / minimal edit that has got a ton of soul… turn your speakers up and get stoked.

JINDER – YOUTH BLOOD (PRINCE KLASSEN EDIT)

For more info on this Texas born NY native check out.
www.fullyfitted.com
www.princeklassen.tumblr.com

In 2007 they released possibly their greatest album of all time entitled “In Ghost Colours” with two of their most popular tracks “Lights and Music” and “Far Away” on the album they showed that Australia was a force to be reconned with when it came to Yacht rock.

I remember seeing them live at the Glasshouse in Pomona 2 years ago with another one of my favorites THE PRESETS (also from Australia) and I couldn’t believe how good they were live…

As soon as I saw their names on the Coachella bill I got a little bummed out but only out of jealousy. You know that feeling you get after you see one of your favorite bands at a super small venue and you feel like you’re entitled to keep them all to yourself? A part of you love’s the band because they are so good but another part doesn’t want 50,000 people hopping on your bandwagon? Well that’s exactly how I felt about Cut Copy. At least I’m willing to admit it right?

At the end of the day I’m actually really glad they are playing Coachella, because they are going to change thousands of peoples lives all at once and that’s going to be a really good thing!

Speaking of changing lives…. Cut Copy just announced today that you can stream their entire album Zonoscope for FREE!!!!

Just click the image and enjoy!!

Here’s a little sample of what you can expect:

CUT COPY – PHARAOHS AND PYRAMIDS

Death From Above 1979 was first formed in Toronto canada by Jeese F. Keeler and Sebastien Grangier after they met at a Sonic Youth Concert. Their first album “Head’s Up” was released in 2002 under Last Gang records was their attempt to blow the heads off the stale music scene in Toronto and it did just that…..
Check out one of their early interviews, you can see where their name came from and why they felt the need to make music.. the rest of the interview is a little drab but super informative.

You guys all know how ridiculously excited I am to see these guys for the 3 day circus that is Coachella so I am going straight into a rare video of these guys performing one of my favorites, Pull Out. Live at the Lowlands festival in the Netherlands…

DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979 – PULL OUT

You can still grab your coachy tix here:
www.coachella.com

So from now until C-day, we will be featuring artists that we can hardly wait to see in the cocaine covered deserts of Indio. There are so many great bands playing Coachella this year, that it might be difficult for you to plan your schedule accordingly but for me it’s very easy… I’m going to Coachella for one reason and ONE reason only.
DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979!!!!!!!

When I saw their names on the press release last week, it seemed too good to be true but a tweet by AL-P (MSTRKRFT) confirmed the confirmation (ha!) they are using Coachella as their debut reunion show and I will be standing right there front and center!

It’s hard for me to precisely describe why DFA 1979 is my favorite band of all time, in fact I’m having a hard time putting it into words right now so the best description I can come up with is this: “Two genius’ on stage blowing your mind with a bass guitar, a synthesizer, a drum kit, and a voice that would even make Seal cry”.
Yeah see, I didn’t even really do them justice. Lucky for you, I happen to have a huge collection of live recordings from DFA 1979 so Ill let Jesse and Sebastien do what they do best.

I can go on for days about these guys, in fact, Im pretty sure I have enough material to dedicate all 81 days of the countdown to DFA but I digress and I promise Ill keep my DFA posts to a minimum. I mean there are other bands playing Coachella right?

Death From Above 1979 – DEAD WOMB

For more info on the Coachella music festival and Ticket sales, make sure you visit:
www.Coachella.com

An “outburst of the soul,” the composer Frederick Delius called music. The sounds associated with the form produce “a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without,” observed Confucius. It is the art “which is most nigh to tears and memory,” noted the writer Oscar Wilde.

It turns out that these guys were more on target than we thought. Our experience of the music we love stimulates the pleasure chemical dopamine in our brain, concludes a new study produced by a slew of scholars at McGill University. The researchers followed the brain patterns of test subjects with MRI imaging, and identified dopamine streaming into the striatum region of their forebrains “at peak emotional arousal during music listening.”

Not only that, but the scientists noticed that various parts of the striatum responded to the dopamine rush differently. The caudate was more involved during the expectation of some really nice musical excerpt, and the nucleus accumbens took the lead during “the experience of peak emotional responses to music.”

In other words, just the anticipation our favorite passage stimulates the production of dopamine. “Our results help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies,” the writers conclude.

Chills and thrills

To learn more about the music/brain/stimulation process, the McGill researchers followed subjects through the ‘chills’ or ‘musical frisson’ response moment. You may have thought that chills were just a subjective concept, but that isn’t the case. They involve a “clear and discrete pattern of autonomic nervous system (ANS) arousal,” the experimenters say, which facilitate “objective verification through psychophysiological measurements.”

Bottom line: the chills moment “can be used to objectively index pleasure.” So these scientists rounded up a cohort of people who had a proven record of getting the “verifiable chills” when listening to their favorite songs.

It took a while to find these folks. 217 people responded to an advertisement looking for chill-susceptible music lovers. Each candidate provided ten pieces of instrumental music that set them off in some way. The genres included tango, techno, punk, rock, electronica, jazz, folk, and classical. They then filled out a questionnaire designed to make sure their chills were authentic, and went through a mental illness screening session.

Degrees of pleasure

The process produced a cohort of 10 subjects for the actual experiment, who were scanned over two sessions. The participants listened to music that they experienced as pleasurable or to which they felt neutral. They also kept track of their chills themselves, including the “number of chills, intensity of chills and degree of pleasure experienced from each excerpt.”

Meanwhile these frisson seekers were MRI scanned during the listening experience, and images that correlated with chill laden moments were examined.

“We found that hemodynamic activity in the regions showing dopamine release was not constant throughout the [musical] excerpt, but was restricted to moments before and during chills and, critically, was anatomically distinct,” the researchers note.

The McGill group says that this experiment is “the first direct evidence that the intense pleasure experienced when listening to music is associated with dopamine activity in the mesolimbic reward system, including both dorsal and ventral striatum.”

Thus dopamine “is pivotal for establishing and maintaining behavior,” the researchers conclude:

If music-induced emotional states can lead to dopamine release, as our findings indicate, it may begin to explain why musical experiences are so valued. These results further speak to why music can be effectively used in rituals, marketing or film to manipulate hedonic states. Our findings provide neurochemical evidence that intense emotional responses to music involve ancient reward circuitry and serve as a starting point for more detailed investigations of the biological substrates that underlie abstract forms of pleasure.

It also may explain why, as Oscar Wilde suggested, we experience bursts of pleasant recollection while listening to the music that we enjoy. As studies of nicotine use show, the cigarette induced release of dopamine stimulates the remembrance of things past.

As every brand new project, RÜFÜS came out from a friendship story and started with some fun in a studio towards the end of 2010. The three friends involved started to write some songs and to sample “noise” directly from the forest and the beach; you can clearly hear this on most of the tracks.

The sound can be spiritual, dancefloor or chill-out but it always sounds like RÜFÜS; half intrinsic, half technologic. They’re also good friends with the French disco/electro label On The Fruit Records with who they are planning a club version of “We Left” with remixes by Symbolone, Go Go Bizkitt!, Broke One, Beaumont, Springflower, Monsieur Adi and Ride the Universe which will be out in a couple of months.

Here’s a little sample of what you can expect:

RÜFÜS – PARIS COLLIDES

RÜFÜS – WE LEFT (RIDE THE UNIVERSE REMIX)

For more info on RÜFÜS check out:
RÜFÜS Myspace
RÜFÜS facebook fan page

Röyksopp’s duo of Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland bring an unparalleled creativity to their stagecraft, creating an electro-fantasy world amidst dry ice, theatrics, costume changes, and electronics.
The eccentric outfits and the overall atmosphere add to the peculiar spectacle. On these dates, Svein and Tobjørn will be accompanied by vocalist Anneli Drecker, who’s featured on previous Röyksopp tracks – ‘Sparks’ from Melody AM, and ‘Vision One’, ‘You Don’t Have a Clue’ and ‘True to Life’ from Junior. In addition, guitarists Kato Adland and Ole Vegard Skauge will be joining them on stage. Audiences can expect to hear Röyksopp performing a collection of their greatest hits from their catalogue.

Plus don’t forget, they are still holding a video contest for every song off their latest album “Senior” .. they have all the songs off the new album available for FREE of their website as long as you promise to only use them for a music video..
Either way click here and find out more about the contest.

ROYKSOPP – FORSAKEN COWBOY

Highlander.. there can only be one!

Mercedes c1-11

BMW M1

Harrison Ford in “Air Force One”

One Leg Crutch race

On to the music…

Brian McKnight- Back at One (Live)

Blondie – One way or another

Weezer – No One Else

The Fixx – One Thing Leads to Another

PROJECT PAT & 3 6 MAFIA – CHICKEN HEADS

Heart failure caused the death of 1970s disco icon Bobby Farrell in a Saint Petersburg hotel room this week, his agent said Friday citing Russian authorities.

“It was heart failure,” agent John Seine told AFP by telephone from the northern Dutch town of Heemstede.
Steine said he had received an email Friday lunchtime from Euromed, a medical institution holding Farrell’s body in a Saint Petersburg mortuary, to report the findings of a post-mortem investigation by Russian authorities.
Farrell, 61, was found dead in his bed by a hotel employee on Thursday morning, having given a performance the night before during which he reported feeling unwell.

We will miss you Bobby, but we are glad to know you will be making the afterlife a lot more sexy.

BONEY M – MA BAKER (Sampled by Lady Gaga)

BONEY M – GOTTA GO HOME (Sampled by DuckSauce)

BONEY M – RASPUTIN

So here’s to 2011, I am looking forward to what the New Year has to bring and Im glad I have a stronger foundation to handle it.

Why not celebrate some of best times of 2010 with some of the best songs of the year?
So here are our picks.

My pick:
DUCK SAUCE – BRABARA STREISAND

Cancun Joey’s pick:
KILL THE NOISE – PERFECT COMBINATION

TeaLong’s pick:
ROBIN THICKE – SEX THERAPY (12TH PLANET REMIX)

Fiero’s pick:
MIKA – BLAME IT ON THE GIRLS (ANORAAK REMIX)

As soon as her album released she started touring and blowing the minds of her fans with her energy and her on stage talent….

After the success of her first album she continued to rise in popularity and kept pumping out hit after hit.
Two of her most famous hits:

Lovergirl

and

It Must Be Magic

Are still charting today! Pretty amazing for a couple songs that are over 20 years old.
Mary J. Blidge and P.Diddy both claim that Teena Marie inspired them to become artists. Teena Marie was most definitely an inspiration to us all and although she has passed away at the early age of 54, her music will live forever.
Thank you Teena, you will be missed.