New Music Splurging

My music listening had gotten a little stale as of late, so last week I decided to do something about it. Since we've been selling our album at CDBaby for a while now (with some success), I thought I'd do some looking around there first. CDBaby is an online store based out of Portland, Oregon which specializes in independent bands, so you're likely to find a whole lot of stuff you've never heard of before, and nothing from the major labels. (I also like that they have a dedicated surf rock section.)

They have a promotion where if you buy three CD's from selected bands (of which we are one), then they're only $5 each. So I picked out 6 CD's (hey, at $5 each, why not?), put in my order, and later that day they were in the mail. They sent me this great confirmation e-mail.

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Wednesday, March 21st.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year." We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh...

Nice. Anyway, the CD's got here yesterday and I've been listening to a few of them pretty constantly since last night. Some of this stuff is fantastic! Here's a couple of samples:

Like Knives - S/T

This is one that I've been listening to quite a bit this morning. They actually remind me quite a bit of They Might Be Giants, only with less accordion. But they write really catchy songs with clever lyrics and lots of awesome vocal harmonies. Definitely a very fun album.

Like Knives - The Unlincoln Tunnel


The Hellbenders - Today We Kill... Tomorrow We Die

This is actually a side project of an excellent surf band called The Volcanos. Three-quarters of the band decided to put out a spaghetti-western record, and it's pretty fantastic. It's about half instrumental, and half vocal. I'm obviously partial to the instros, but the whole thing is really good.

The Hellbenders - Winchester Justice