Well it’s already come to the third “Summertime” Friday, and for this one we’re reaching pretty far back in the vault with the 1965 hit “Summertime” from the record Begin Here by The Zombies. I think this is probably my favorite cover of the Gershwin classic, and the photos in this video are almost enough to fool you into ignoring the rain outside.
The Zombies – Summertime:
-Drew
Filed under Jam of the Day, Music
Insound Music is having their 10th Anniversary celebration tonight at the newly opened Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg. After launching back in 1999, Insound has grown and grown and continued to be the place to find the CDs, vinyl, digital music, and merch of your favorite up-and-coming and unsigned bands. The way the music industry is going these days, the stream of revenue from these types of sales is becoming more and more important to a band’s success or failure. While on the road, many working bands depend on the sales at their merch tables to get by, so it’s a good thing to come out and support. The lineup of bands they have set to perform includes: Cymbals Eat Guitars, These Are Powers, The Drums, and Real Estate. The last time we saw The Drums, at one of their first shows, they killed it and if their brand new video for their song “Let’s Go Surfing” is any indication, they’re only getting tighter and sharper over time.
On all of the promotion for the event and on the Brooklyn Bowl website it lists the fifth band that will perform as “TBA.” But **EXCLUSIVE UPDATE** our sources at Brooklyn Bowl tell us that this TBA band will be Brooklyn’s own Suckers! I have been wanting to check them out for a while, mostly because of their song “Easy Chairs.” Listen below and you’ll see what I’m talking about. There is a free happy hour provided by Brooklyn Brewery from 6-8 so get their early if you’re going tonight!
Suckers – Easy Chairs:
-Melissa
Filed under Event, Jam of the Day
If you’ve been around the neighborhood lately, you will have notice that a lot of cute new coffee shops are popping up the East Village. One of the best that I’ve tried is the Coyi Cafe (Avenue B between 3rd and 4th streets). It’s adorable inside, although quite small, and the coffee is hard to beat.
Brooklyn is also embracing coffee these days, that is, the song “Coffee” by Brooklyn’s own Motel Motel, a new americana jam that you’re sure to enjoy.
The boys of Motel Motel play at the Mercury Lounge tomorrow night and at Union Hall on Friday, so if you like what you hear, check them out!
Motel Motel – Coffee:
-Melissa
Filed under Jam of the Day, Restaurant
It looks like we finally have a release date set for the new Boy Crisis record, Tulipomania! According to their myspace blog, we can expect an October 5th release (both in stores and online), although I think that you may be able to pick up a copy in the U.K. already. Also, the first single, “Fountain of Youth,” will be released on September 28th. Get psyched!
So last night we had a chance to see them play at Mercury Lounge, and it was a blast. The band got all dolled up in matching costumes (taken from the set of the “Fountian of Youth” video shoot earlier this month), and were surrounded on either side of the stage by the very girls that were holding them aloft in the video:
Boy Crisis @ Mercury Lounge, August 25, 2009
They played kind of a short set, but it included a lot of the new material (“Elementary Particles” was the opener, followed by “Bohemian Grove,” and later on “Fountain of Youth” was probably one of the best songs they played all night). And before they jumped into the encore of “Dressed to Digress,” we were hit with a pretty great cover of “In the Air Tonight,” the Phil Collins classic! Check it:
Boy Crisis – In the Air Tonight (Live Cover @ Mercury Lounge):
The place was pretty dark for this one, so the video quality isn’t top-notch, but the magic shines through in the vocals.
-ev2bk
One day the machines will rise up and rule over us all!
It’s not a new fear, it’s just one that keeps coming up in the news and popular culture everywhere lately, maybe because it’s becoming more and more of a possibility. According to a recent Times article, a group of computer scientists who have been “impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence” is debating about whether there should be “limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.”
Although this seems like the opening scene to any number of recent movies in which the machines rise up, kill everyone, and take over the world, this meeting actually happened last month in California. The group of researchers, which included roboticists, leading computer scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers, generally agreed that it would not be possible for centralized “superintelligences” to spring up spontaneously, although they did acknowledge that robots who can kill on their own are already here, with more advanced versions to come soon. Some of the potential threats of this new technology becoming widespread include the possibility for criminal manipulation/exploitation, and possible threats to human jobs. With The Singularity – the notion that there will come a moment when humans will create smarter-than-human machines, thus ending the “human era” – looming, the panel is looking for ways “to guide research so that technology improve[s] society rather than move[s] it toward a technological catastrophe.” One way they are proposing to keep this technology from getting into the wrong hands is to conduct research in a “high-security laboratory.”
The latest film in this vein, Surrogates, coming out in September, looks sufficiently creepy. From what I gather, the premise is that humans spend their lives in the safety of their own homes and control their surrogates (robotic versions of themselves) who are out in the real world living their lives for them, so that their humans can be free of risk or fear. It’s a movie, so inevitably something must go wrong. These ideas seem crazy now, but maybe one day it could happen. Who thought that we would ever have tiny hand-held drones and robots disarming roadside bombs for the army?
One group who seems unafraid of such a phenomenon, and embraces the machine, is London’s Florence & the Machine. Florence & the Machine is the recording name of Florence Welch and the band of several musicians (the Machine) that plays and records with her. Their first studio album, Lungs, was released in the U.K. on July 6th and will be released in the U.S. on October 20th by Island Records. Florence & The Machine’s music has received wide praise across the British music media, including rave reviews by NME Magazine and the BBC. The general public must be pretty behind them too, seeing as Lungs was at the number 2 position its first five weeks on the U.K. charts, only behind Michael Jackson.
The latest release from, Lungs, “Drumming Song” is catchy in a way that will leave you wanting to listen to it again and again. The video, released earlier this month, is a preview to the release of the “Drumming Song” digital EP that will come out on September 14th. Although it’s not an actual machine playing with Florence here, this hard hitting track could signal the rise of something—hopefully we’ll be hearing a lot more from them soon.
Florence & The Machine – Drumming Song:
-Melissa
Editor’s note: Thanks to our London correspondent Eimear for turning us on to Florence & the Machine in the first place.
Filed under Jam of the Day, News
Clearly, Twitter and other social networking sites are changing the way that companies interact with and listen to customers, and now, that interaction has also turned into a business of its own! Yesterday the New York Times ran an interesting article about the “virtual currency” of online opinion, and takes a look at some of the early frontrunnrers in this emerging field unsentimentaly dubbed “sentiment analysis.” Companies such as Scout Labs in California and Jodange in Yonkers are powered by increasingly complex algorithms that serve to aggregate feelings, thoughts, and opinions as expressed by users of various online social networks, blogs, and other community web sites. The companies can then theoretically use this information to gain valuable insight into new marketing strategies or products (essentially free market research, replacing 20 random people in a room with 200,000 readers of a blog, say), or to better manage public relations, such as this spring when StubHub used data from Scout Labs to notice brewing discontent over its bad weather policy and was able to avoid any major backlash.
Of course, this all sounds nice until you hear that the accuracy of even the best of the companies’ algorithms are only “70-80% accurate” (as quoted in the Times piece). And as the article points out, “translating the slippery stuff of human language into binary values will always be an imperfect science.” I’m no moral philosopher, so I’m not looking to get into all that right now, but it seems like this article gets it right when it points out that this road may ultimately lead to a dangerous conflation of feeling and fact.
It’s almost like Chris and Thomas are commenting on the potential downsides to this “innovation” in their song “Take These Thoughts,” when they warn:
Take these thoughts /
They’re heavy and they’re old /
Don’t let ’em steal your soul
Chris (Anderson) and Thomas (Hien), a folk duo in the vein of Simon and Garfunkel, met in Liverpool at the same art school where another pretty famous pair first got to know each other (although come on, the comparison is QUITE a stretch, Ms. Dunham, no matter what their PR peeps told you). Their first full album, Land of Sea, generated a lot of interest in the group, and I’m sure that comparisons to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young have helped almost as much as the major success of last year’s Fleet Foxes record, which sounds awfully similar to these guys at times. They don’t seem to have any tour dates up on their myspace or official website, so for now, I guess you’ll have to settle for this video.
Chris and Thomas – Take These Thoughts:
-ev2bk
P.S. Happy Birthdays, Moms!
Filed under Jam of the Day, Music
East Village to Brooklyn 