It hasn’t been a great music month for yours truly, because the amp is in for repairs again, but there have been a couple of exceptions. I’ve finally discovered the Killers (via the US special edition of Hot Fuss, which for no discernable reason has a different track order and several different tracks from the UK special edition) and have been re-acquainting myself with Lloyd Cole’s Rattlesnakes, which I first heard way back in 1984 but had never bought on CD; it still sounds pretty good.
Album of the month for January, though, was Spoon’s Gimme Fiction, a hot tip from Bill that pushes all the right alternative buttons. Shades of the New Pornographers, the Pixies, all that stuff, you know the drill. They have next to no profile on this side of the Atlantic, although the album has had a UK release. I liked it so much that I went scouting for more and ended up buying their previous albums A Series of Sneaks, Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight online. (Their debut, Telephono, is out of print and goes for $50 or more, which is almost as annoying as track listings that change from country to country.)
If you’re as clueless about them as I was, though, you won’t want to shell out for four albums without trying the music first, so here are some places to sample the goods:
- I Turn My Camera On, a free download from Gimme Fiction at Amazon;
- The band’s own mp3 page, especially “Believing is Art” and “Paper Tiger”;
- Epitonic’s selection of Spoon mp3s;
- The Creative Commons track Revenge! at Wired;
- And, if you can be bothered installing Rhapsody, the whole of Telephono and Soft Effects streamed for free at Rolling Stone.