The Blakes

While driving to Bellevue co-lo facility to fix a broken web server, (the very server serving this page), stuck in morning rush hour traffic, desperately tuning around the dial trying to find something other than morning drive time commercials and brain dead banter, I happened to stop on KEXP, the University of Washington student station that was formerly KCMU before Paul Allen dumped a bunch of money into it.

And just as I tuned in a song started up that just sounded good, got me as close to happy as I am capable of being anymore. The song is by a local Seattle group called "The Blakes" and the name of the song was "Modern Man".

I've never heard this group before in spite of it being a local band and I am impressed. They sound good. Where do I get this?

When I got home I first went to the KEXP website where they have the play list on-line. By every single piece of music they have a "Buy" button that takes you somewhere that you can purchase a CD or whatever, except for this song where they have "Album - Live at KEXP", "Label - KEXP", damn, it was an excellent recording.

More digging turned up a Blakes page on CD Baby, and a Blakes MySpace page. Both locations have samples of their work online that you can listen to. However, the CD Baby page has extremely low quality encoding, 32 Kb/s 22 Khz sample mp3, and only the first two minutes of each song, and the Blakes MySpace page has three of their songs online but it's choppy and cuts out.

I'm broke right now, but you can bet that when and if I ever do have disposable income again, that CD is going to be at the top of my music purchases list.

Red Elvises

The Red Elvises will be coming to Seattle and play at the Tractor Tavern in Ballard this Saturday the 14th.

They will be starting at 9:30PM, tickets are $15 in advance through TicketWeb and $18 at the door.

If you've seen the film Six String Samurai, they're the band that are doing the music and acting some of the parts in the film, and if you haven't, you should, it's a real twist on the usual post apocalyptic thing.

The Red Elvises are simply one of the funnest bands I've ever heard, versatile, and a tremendous sense of humor. Totally hilarious lyrical content, wonderful harmonies, melodies, and rhythm, smooth base, incredible guitar, and lots of positive energy. Flaming Cheese includes an incredible rendition of Zorba the Greek on guitar. How could that work? It works very well.

The tractor tavern is located at 5213 Ballard Ave NW, Seattle, WA.
Their telephone is (206) 789-3599.

Pandora

Pandora refers to their service as Internet Radio, but actually it is a music discovery service. It's a rather unique and clever concept and I find that I do indeed find new music that I like. Pandora is free though they do have some premium options.

Pandora has a large ever expanding library of music. For each song they enter into the library, they spend approximately a half hour analyzing various attributes such as melody, harmony, lyrics, rhythm, some four hundred attributes in all.

You create a "station" by defining a song or songs or artists that you like. Pandora then plays other music which has attributes similar to the songs you initially started with and for each song that plays, if you wish, you can vote on whether or not you like it. Pandora then uses that information to further refine those elements which you like in music.

Pandora has a wide selection of domestic music from the past and current and has quite a few lesser known artists. However, at present, Pandora does not have a good selection of world music.