Happy 4/20 to everyone. While today is typically a day reserved for smoking substances of an illicit nature, one look at “This Day In History” shows that a whole lot of tragedy has happened on this date. Hitler was born. The Columbine school shooting happened. BP had the huge oil spill in the Gulf. Depressing stuff. What we really need are for some great events to take place on 4/20. End a war. Declare world peace. Shut down all the nuclear weapons programs. These are things that can turn the tide on 4/20. Until then, maybe just keep smoking ’em while you’ve got ’em to help melt your cares away. Pick Your Poison today isn’t quite going to get you high, but hopefully it’ll make you feel pretty good. Highlights include tracks from Digitalism, Falcon, Fucked Up and Umpire. In the Soundcloud section I can also recommend Bright Spark Destroyer and Starlings, not forgetting the great remix of Cut Copy’s “Need You Now”.
So many people were preoccupied this past weekend, either with Coachella or Record Store Day, that not many stopped and saw that the lineup has been finalized for this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival. Artists like Wild Nothing, Superchunk, tUnE-yArDs, Battles, Cold Cave, OFF!, Julianna Barwick, Toro y Moi, Thurston Moore, EMA, Gatekeeper and Twin Shadow were all added, among others. Be sure to check out the official Pitchfork Music Festival website for all the details, as well as how to buy single day tickets (3 day passes are sold out). Pick Your Poison today is a delight, and though there are no artists in today’s edition that will be playing the festival, the good news is that I’ll be whipping up a post for you exactly about that once we get closer to the actual date in July. But my favorites in today’s exciting new batch of mp3s come from The Antlers, Dead Rider, Det Vackra Livet, Gardens & Villa, and Street Chant. There’s also a new Sade track and an old but remastered Queen track in the Soundcloud section, for your streaming pleasure.
Hope you had a spectacular Record Store Day over the weekend. After standing in line for 45 minutes, I got about half of what I was looking for. The rest was already sold out. Oh well, these things happen. I hope you fared better. Anyways, here’s today’s Pick Your Poison to kick off your week in style. Personal picks today come from Cassettes Won’t Listen, Eddie the Gun, The Fervor, and Witches. There’s also a handful of covers I can recommend. Cymbals Eat Guitars, La Sera (Kickball Katy of Vivian Girls) and Western Civ all do Guided By Voices, and Dark Dark Dark covers Kate Bush. Good stuff.
Announcement! Record Store Day is this Saturday, April 16th! If you already digest vinyl records like they’re going out of style (wait…they’re not IN style right now?), I’m sure you already know this, but let’s say this is a reminder. For those that are unaware, today is the day around the world in which you’re encouraged to stop by your local record shop and purchase something. The idea that physical product in music is still worthwhile is important, and independent music retailers that much moreso. There are so many limited edition things being released in such small quantities that you’re best off showing up right at store open rather than waiting until later in the day. Better later in the day though then not at all, so please buy something, anything from your local record store on Saturday. Check out RecordStoreDay.com for more details. Pick Your Poison highlights for today include tracks from Garden, The Gift, OFF!, Shabazz Palaces, and Thao & Mirah.
Just saw that Denny’s commercial for a “festival” they’re calling Baconalia. It is a celebration of bacon, and includes a number of specialty dishes with bacon added to them. There’s even a bacon sundae with maple syrup. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE me some bacon, but there’s a certain point where it can border on obsessive. That’s not even mentioning how healthy all of this is. If you celebrated Baconalia every day with every meal, methinks you’d best be shopping for coffins in your spare time. Sigh, this is probably no worse than KFC’s Double Down sandwich though. One thing that’s sure to not send you to an early grave is Pick Your Poison. Despite having the word Poison in the title, the only harm these mp3s can do is to your ears. Last I checked, that wasn’t enough to kill you. Highlights today include tracks from I Was Totally Destroying It, The Shivers and TV Ghost. The Soundcloud section has a wealth of good stuff too, including songs from Locksley, Manchester Orchestra and Mick Harvey. Delta Maid’s cover of The Strokes’ “Under Cover of Darkness” is solid as well.
It’s Hump Day, and depressing though it may be to think we’re only halfway through this already long week, the positive news is that once we make it over the top it’s all downhill til the weekend. What’s just a little more surprising than that is how quickly we’re approaching the halfway point of April. It seems like just days ago the month was just underway and I was being duped on April Fools Day. Ah well, summer will be here soon enough. Pick Your Poison is pretty large in size and scope today. Thumbs up tracks come from Balkans, Golden Bloom, Miwa Gemini and Yuzima. There’s also a solid Sade track in the Soundcloud section too if you care to listen.
Absolutely lovely set of songs in Pick Your Poison today. Right to the point, highlights include tracks from Bare Wires, Exlovers, Iceage, Milagres, The Sea and Cake, Secret Cities, and Title Tracks. In the Soundcloud section you’ll find a new song from Arctic Monkeys and a solid one from The Tambourines.
Anyone seen the movie “Sucker Punch”? No? Well, you and millions of others have all avoided going, but I sat through it over the weekend out of my admiration for director Zack Snyder among other things. One of the more interesting aspects about the film is that a number of scenes (in particular the first 15 minutes) function basically as long-form music videos, though most of the songs are covers. Emiliana Torrini does Jefferson Airplane, Alison Mosshart of the Kills/Dead Weather and Carla Azar of Autolux do The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and actors Carla Gugino and Oscar Isaac do Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug”. That’s just part of the soundtrack. The movie was more…eeehhh. The original songs would have been better, but still, it’s pretty dope. You can hear “Sucker Punch” star Emily Browning take on the Eurhythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” in the Soundcloud section below. Other highlights include songs from ANR, Chad Van Gaalen, Fabian, The Head and the Heart, Jookabox, The Sundelles and The Wombats. Two more covers, one by Benjamin Francis Leftwich and the other by The Submarines are also great selections from the Soundcloud section.
Friday is here once again, and with it comes another fun-filled weekend. Hope you’ve got a lot of great things planned, all of them not involving Rebecca Black. The hype has died down, thankfully, but if that hook still permeates your ear around this time of the week, maybe Pick Your Poison can help erase it from your memory. Recommended tracks today are from Anni Rossi (covering Rihanna), The Glass Canoe, Ryan Driver and Times New Viking. Morgan Kibby of M83 is White Sea, and her remix of The Naked and Famous track “Young Blood” is quite good as well.
No time to waste, it’s Thursday and that means it’s best to get while the gettin’s good. I have no idea what that means. Pick Your Poison is quite exceptional today, in my humble opinion. Lots of good songs, most notably from Atari Teenage Riot, Baby Teardrops, Damon and Naomi, Julian Lynch, Poly Styrene and They Might Be Giants. No lack of good songs. Check them all out.
So before I forget, and because it’s really cool, let me tell all of you Chicago readers about a great FREE show happening tomorrow night. Our good friends over at Vice, in association with VitaminWater, are putting on an UNCAPPED show tomorrow night (Thursday, April 7th) at Viaduct (3111 North Western Avenue). Show starts at 9PM and features a lineup that’s been curated by Black Lips. Mannequin Men, Lover! and Hollows will all be playing sets, all for FREE so long as you RSVP. You need to be 21+ to attend, primarily because there will also be free alcoholic beverages. You won’t find a much better deal in town, and if you’re looking for a way to kick off your weekend early, definitely check this show out. Again, you need to RSVP to get in, so go here and do so. Here’s a couple mp3s to get your interest peaked: Mannequin Men – Boys Mannequin Men – Grapefruit Lover! – No More Reasons
Outside of that, here’s the rundown of today’s Pick Your Poison. Highlights include tracks from Apparat, Chicago’s own Company of Thieves, The Olympic Symphonium, and Telepathique. There’s also an interesting collaboration between Graham Coxon, Paloma Faith and Bill Ryder-Jones that’s part of a Converse series. In the Soundcloud section you’ll find a new solo track from Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, which is pretty good.
Anybody an avid baseball fan? The regular season is just getting started, and I don’t know about you, but I’m exceptionally happy about it. I’m not quite ready to give up on the NBA and NHL just yet, but baseball is always a comfort. Keeps the mind off the thought that there probably won’t be any NFL this season. Ah, sports talk in an mp3 post. The pairing does not go well together. Tops of the Pick Your Poison heap today include tracks from The Disappearing Act, James Irwin and Rosebuds. There’s also a pretty great new jam from Sonny and the Sunsets available to stream in the Soundcloud section.
What a weekend that was. If you’ve been reading the site the last couple days, hopefully you have some gravity as to what I’m talking about. April Fools Day spun out of control into a mess that I’m somehow caught up in without actually being caught up in. These things happen from time to time, it seems. Ah well, I’m just as pleased to forget about it and keep on keeping on like we’re operating on a fully normal day. Pick Your Poison highlights today include tracks from Breathe Owl Breathe, Chain Gang of 1974, Dirty Gold, Heidecker & Wood, and Mercury Rev. The Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. remix of a Junip track is good too, and you’ll want to keep an eye out for that song from Woods in the Soundcloud section.
Funny how life works sometimes. One day after I get all excited and tell everyone about the one year anniversary of Faronheit making the move to “dot com” status, I get slapped with a legal document that basically orders the shutdown of the site. This is not good. We’re not shut down just yet, which is a good thing (and leaving me with enough time to save my archives), and I have every intention of fighting this, but for the time being it might be (okay, IS DEFINITELY) a good idea to put Pick Your Poison on an indefinite hiatus until this whole mess can get sorted out. That’s really what caused all this trouble in the first place anyways. Also, I have no real idea as to how long the site is going to remain active, so please don’t be discouraged if you come by one day and everything is gone. At the very least I’ll be re-starting someplace new under the same name (though the web address would change), so do a Google search if this site goes offline. There’s too much great music out there to sit idly by and not try and generate an active discussion about it, so that’s what I intend to keep doing, mp3s or no mp3s. Content is gonna keep coming until I’m unable to post it here anymore, so don’t consider this a shutdown but instead a scaling back. Please bear with me during this time, and hopefully the site can return to running normally again soon.
For all of you that have been visiting this site for the last year but did not know it existed prior to that time, let me share with you the brief story of how faronheit.com came into existence. The original version of Faronheit was started in June 2006 and went for a strong 3.5 years on Blogger/Blogspot before Google (which owns Blogger/Blogspot) made the call to shut it down for reasons of multiple copyright infringements. The long and short of it is that aside from a few missteps in the earliest of early days, the site was operating 100% copyright infringement free for the final two years it was alive. That doesn’t mean the left hand always knew what the right hand was doing in terms of who was giving permission for what mp3s to use where and how Google wouldn’t even check to see if a post actually infringed on copyrights but instead just took the word of the party making the complaint. Anyways, after a fight to get all that writing and the extensive archives of the old Faronheit restored, I got no response nor access to said archives. So they’re gone, outside of the large and disorganized Word documents where I write and save all my entries before posting them online. But in the wake of the destruction of the old site came this new one, and we’re quickly approaching the 1 year anniversary of faronheit.com. If you’ve followed me over from the old site, thank you for being a long-time reader. If you’re new here, welcome, and I hope you enjoy the daily content. Why I’m talking about this today is that though my first post took a week or two to get going, I officially took over this dot com address on April 1, 2010. In other words, faronheit.com was officially established one year ago tomorrow. Happy pre-anniversary in that regard, and I’m equally pleased to announce that after deciding to take this site on a one year trial run, I’ve just re-upped it for two more. I am very much looking forward to what the future will bring for faronheit.com, and I hope you are too.
Now then. Pick Your Poison today. Highlights include tracks from Chicago’s own Cameron McGill & What Army, Pechenga, S.C.U.M., Son Lux, Tindersticks and Vanity Theft. And hey, in the Soundcloud section there’s a pretty great b-side from Yuck for your streaming pleasure.
