Category: music

Song for a Seagull

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A really addictive, happy pop tune from London 4-piece Teleman: Song For A Seagull. This will improve your Saturday.

And a really original video too. Live Instagram (despite its problems) feed from the back of a black cab in London? Brilliant.

Apparently the usernames popping up on the screen, helpfully in time with the lyrics, are the handles of fans who wrote in asking to be in the video. A little bit of editing magic and it looks like they’re singing along.

Simple, but so, so clever.

This song has now made it onto my Inspired By 6 Spotify playlist. And in case you want to share that more easily, I’ve made a bit.ly for it:

http://bit.ly/InspiredBy6

Please share the wealth – enabling people to listen to really decent music is a public service.

William Shatner to release Christmas album

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Yes. You read it right.

William Shatner is to release a Christmas Album, and it’s looking like it could be the Best Record Ever Created. See, if William Shatner had released a solo Christmas album, that would be there or thereabouts in the Best Record Ever Created. But what William Shatner has done is to have gone so much further than that. What he has done is to team up with some of the biggest names in the contemporary music industry to give us this reported lineup of festive tunage:

1. Jingle Bells Feat. Henry Rollins
2. Blue Christmas Feat. Brad Paisley
3. Little Drummer Boy Feat. Joe Louis Walker
4. Winter Wonderland Feat. Todd Rundgren & Artimus Pyle
5. Twas the Night Before Christmas Feat. Mel Collins
6. Run Rudolph Run Feat. Elliot Easton
7. O Come, O Come Emmanuel Feat. Rick Wakeman
8. Silver Bells Feat. Ian Anderson
9. One for You, One for Me
10. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Feat. Billy Gibbons
11. Silent Night Feat. Iggy Pop
12. White Christmas Feat. Judy Collins
13. Feliz Navidad Feat. Dani Bender

ZZ Top doing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? Iggy Pop on Silent Night? Oh wow.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it starts – starts – with a William Shatner and Henry Rollins duet of Jingle Bells.

La Santa María de la Inmaculada Concepción, Jesús Madre!

The album, entitled Shatner Claus – The Christmas Album, is set for release on October 26th:

This won’t just be the new Best Record Ever Created, this will be the gold standard against which all future records will be measured, and fall short of.

Pre-order it here.

New from Seafret: Monsters

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New music from Yorkshire duo Seafret (you may remember them from… oh… loads of different posts on here). This is Monsters.

Genre is listed as “Rock”, and there’s certainly a heavier kind of element to this one, despite the acoustic guitar in the video.

Much as Seafret did an acoustic version of Bring Me The Horizon’s Drown, so this has the propensity to be covered by a full-on metal band.

But for “just” a voice and a guitar, the guys do this so well.

And if you’re hearing voices in your head, you don’t wanna hear, they’re probably not these ones, right?

They played the Shard last night. That must be quite a venue.

One day…

Please don’t die

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Not just an entirely reasonable request, but also the new song from Joshua Michael Tillman, t/a Father John Misty. A nice slow number which makes it onto here.

Arguably not my usual thing, but how can one pass by such a poignant song with such a powerful message? (A message also echoed in the video).

Enjoy it. Think about it. Learn from it.

Please don’t die.

Inspired by 6

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I may have mentioned these things before, but not together, and even if I have, it deserves repeating.

First thing: I listen to BBC 6 Music at lot. I’m right in their target demographic, so they suit me and I suit them. Symbiotic, innit?

Second thing: I’m (still) really enjoying Spotify. I love having the flexibility to think of a song and just listen to it, there and then. I recognise that this has been something that’s been around elsewhere (and even here) for a while. But because Spotify is new here it still feels a bit like living in the future.

Now, I have tied these two things together in a wonderful marriage by starting a public playlist called “inspired by 6”.

What I do is to listen to BBC 6 Music all day and each time they play an amazing song (rather than just a really good song), I quickly add it to the playlist. Therefore, what’s currently on there is a collection of more than eighty songs which are the best of what’s available on the best radio station around.

All according to me, at least.

Great for solo listening, background listening or appearing cool (to that certain demographic) at a party.

If you are on Spotify, you can listen and follow the constantly-evolving playlist by clicking the clever little box above or here. You’ll need to be a member of Spotify too, obviously, but I’m told that there’s more than just me on there, so maybe it’s for you too.