Fresh tunes for June

Let me see, what tunes have been occupying myself lately..


Fables by Immaculate Machine features some great hooks and the always amazing vocals of Kathryn Calder. Plus they hail from my home town of Victoria, B.C.

Missed seeing them live last week, I bet they were great.







I just got Pride Tiger's album "The Lucky Ones" off of iTunes, $7.99 for the DRM-free stuff. Can't beat that for this fresh slab of Vancouver rock. Reminds me of Thin Lizzy, and that ain't a bad thing.






Being as up on things as I am (hah), I just discovered the CBC Radio 3 streaming radio. They have some really excellent stuff on there! I use iTunes for my radio needs (check under "Alternative")

Music: Listening Habits of the week

In the first of what will hopefully be an ongoing series of posts expounding on my musical discoveries of the week, I thought I would get it going with what has been rockin' my car stereo for the past week straight.

The band is Bang Camaro, and as far as I can tell it is nearly perfect music for summer drivin', drinkin some beers with buddies (not whilst drivin', of course), or doing pretty much anything where you want to have a grin on while you're doin it. The concept is fairly straightforward: three guitars, a bass, a drummer and a chorus of about 20 or so dudes belting out lyrics. Makes for the ideal sing-a-long! The music reminds me a lot of some of the excellent hard rock/metal from the 80s, and they chuck out all the boring bits like long versus and go right for the meaty hooks and solos. Stuff like this makes me want to plug in a guitar and crank the amp, and then promptly realize I'm too lazy to actually learn guitar. So I crank this instead!

Link to the iTunes store is here. I looked around locally and ended up just going with iTunes and I don't regret it one bit. Buy it, burn to a CD you can play in your car and you will not be disappointed.

New iTunes Plus - Now DRM free!

As reported on various sites around the intertubes, iTunes has added the "Plus" section that allows you to download a selection of special files. These AAC files are at a higher bit rate (256kbps instead of the old 128kbps) and come without the FairPlay DRM.

I'm excited about this because I like the idea of buying direct from itunes, but I had been held back by the possible issues down the road with DRM'd music not working with future players etc. Plus it always seemed a shady move for companies to assume people were dirty thieving pirates from the get-go.

Anyway, my one beef is.. What's up with the pricing? On the US iTunes, regular albums cost $9.99. The "Plus" albums cost.. $9.99! However, on the Canadian iTunes, regular albums cost $9.99, however the "Plus" albums are.. $11.99? Now with the current exchange rate pushing $0.93US per $1 CDN, this makes little sense.

Hope this gets fixed soon!