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28 Jan 2010 11:48

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About, U.S.: Our plans for world domination, State of the Union editon

  • Over the last few weeks, we’ve been hang­ing out with AOL News/Sphere. Cool guys. Any­way, this morn­ing we posted a break­down of the State of the Union. We’ll be work­ing on more stuff like this in the future – we’ll keep you posted. Thanks for tak­ing a stray kit­ten in, guys. source
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23 Jan 2010 23:57

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Music: Saturday Mixtape: Are the sad-sap Eels not made for these times?

  • 1. Most bands who aren’t Spoon would take a mainstream-rock-touching vic­tory lap like 2007’s “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” and push even fur­ther towards suc­cess. But Spoon is Spoon, and Spoon makes songs like “The Mys­tery Zone” (and albums like the freak­ing awe­some “Trans­fer­ence”) which are chal­leng­ing (and avoid verse/chorus/verse bore­dom) but by no means inac­ces­si­ble. And that’s why Spoon rules.
  • 2. Pitch­fork hated the lat­est Eels album, and we think we know why. The level of direct­ness Mark Oliver Everett touches upon in the songs on “End Times,” espe­cially “In My Younger Days,” is super-high. It ditches the wry humor and straight up goes for the sad sap music. And at 46, the dude’s quickly look­ing like an elder states­man of the sad sap set. Through­out the late ‘90s, music this direct dom­i­nated indie rock (see Elliott Smith, Sparkle­horse, and well, Eels). And nowa­days, it feels out of place. In our opin­ion, though, that’s why we like it. Even if Pitch­fork hates it.
  • 3. Speak­ing of sad sap music, alt-country guy Ryan Bing­ham is gun­ning for Ryan Adams’ man­tle and might just win it, thanks to “Crazy Heart.” Bing­ham – who’s halfway between Adams and Bruce Spring­steen – wrote the movie’s theme song, “The Weary Kind,” which is des­tined to get nom­i­nated for an Oscar thanks to the long­stand­ing buzz the movie has.
  • 4. With a fre­netic attack rem­i­nis­cent of Dan Dea­con (with way more gui­tars thrown in for good mea­sure), Fang Island’s “Daisy” is the kind of everywhere-at-once tune we can get behind on its good looks alone. It makes us look for­ward to their full album, out next month.
  • 5. Are The Avett Broth­ers as pow­er­ful when it’s just Avett Brother? Seth Avett released a hand­ful of albums as Tim­o­thy Seth Avett As Dar­ling back in the day, and the band’s old label, Ram­seur, re-released them late last year. “Some Bad Dream” shows where The Avett Broth­ers were headed even if it wasn’t all the way there.
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01 Jan 2010 11:12

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About: ShortFormBlog turns one! Anybody want some cake or something?

  • Julius can now eat solid food! Today, Short­Form­Blog cel­e­brates its first birth­day, and boy are we excited. A lot has hap­pened in the last year, and boy, we’d love to tell you about it. Our crazy idea of mak­ing a blog focused on num­bers, quotes and other short stuff has been noth­ing if a lot of sta­tis­tics. So here’s a few:
  • 6,098 posts, including this one have been put on the site in the last year
  • 268k people have found their way onto the SFB site in the last year; neat
  • this is our most popular post of all time. People love Transformers, kids!
  • So, what’s next? Well, we’re gonna keep doing what we do best. Blog­ging and keep­ing you jerks informed. After a year of doing this, we’ve got­ten pretty good, and are always try­ing new things. That’s our plan for 2010.
  • Any ideas? As you might know, we’re totally open to cool ideas, so send us some! We’re all ears, espe­cially if the ideas are good and can extend our mis­sion of giv­ing the news in as short of a space as pos­si­ble. source
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26 Dec 2009 17:02

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Music: Saturday Mixtape: The best singles of 2009, in no particular order

  • Lots of great sin­gles came out this year – pieces of mem­o­rable mind candy wor­thy of (more than) a few min­utes of your time. Here are a few of our faves.
  • one Instant eupho­ria, in just a few words. What else could you want?
  • two Croc­o­diles hit our Jesus & Mary Chain soft spot; they get in easily.
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19 Dec 2009 14:17

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About: ShortFormBlog is stuck in its apartment. Julius is getting cabin fever.

  • We’re not going out today. We had a few things we wanted to knock off our Christ­mas list, but there’s no way Julius will be able to get out of this mess with­out being super-rusted. So we’re giv­ing up like the pathetic beasts of blog­ging that we are. We’ll be blog­ging next to an open fire cre­ated by bro­ken dreams.
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12 Dec 2009 17:14

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Music: Near the end: Our Saturday Mixtape decade roundup hits 2008

  • 1. “What’s gonna hap­pen to you?” As we noted in last week’s mix­tape, Plants and Ani­mals was going to be a part of our 2008 list, too. And “Bye Bye Bye” may only be the sec­ond best song with that title, it’s cer­tainly a  close second.
  • 2. Cut Copy’s attempt to syn­the­size New Order into some­thing fresh and new worked sur­pris­ingly well for 2008. The record, “In Ghost Colours,” got a lit­tle beat heavy, but when they mixed the beats with pure pop, like on “Feel The Love,” it worked bet­ter than good.
  • 3. It’s funny how dif­fer­ent you feel about an album after a year. A year ago, we felt like Titus Andron­i­cus’ “The Air­ing of Griev­ances” was a great album, sure, but not one of the best of the year. But we kept find­ing our­selves com­ing back to it – repeat­edly. Ragged but by no means dull, these Jer­seyites bring pas­sion to every chord they touch, espe­cially on “Titus Andron­i­cus” (the song).
  • 4. Fel­low Jer­seyites The Gaslight Anthem also brought pathos with them on “The 59 Sound,” but they brought it with a lit­tle more punk and a lot more Bruce. The Killers’ attempts at Bru­ceisms were mis­guided, but they also paved the way for Gaslight’s suc­cess, so we’ll give them a break.
  • 5. We were really torn about putting Atlas Sound over Deer­hunter in this spot. Ulti­mately, Deer­hunter won. It’s because Brad­ford Cox’s full band has amaz­ing sin­gles even if their full records don’t hold together as well as his side project. At least that’s our take on the world of Brad­ford Cox. Any­way, “Noth­ing Ever Hap­pened” is sim­ply sick.
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05 Dec 2009 20:54

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Music: Our Saturday Mixtape wants to live in Montreal or something

  • 1. This song has been embed­ded in our brains for approx­i­mately two weeks. Montreal’s Think About Life, who come out on paper as a com­bi­na­tion of TV on the Radio and Chromeo, is some­what hit-and-miss, but when they hit, as on “Havin’ My Baby,” it’s a sugar rush you can’t ignore.
  • 2. Land of Talk – a fel­low Mon­treal band fronted by Eliz­a­beth Pow­ell who comes off as a gui­tar super­hero live – mixes the low-key and the guitar-smashers deftly. The cen­ter­piece of their new “Fun and Laugh­ter” EP, “May You Never” mixes calm and chaos (and the gift of hazy atmos­phere) into a tasty stew.
  • 3. Dis­clo­sure: Plants and Ani­mals will be in the mix­tape two weeks in a row, because their 2008 album “Parc Avenue” is that good. “A L’Oree Des Bois” has this way of start­ing out loose and then expand­ing slowly.
  • 4. There’s a few obvi­ous picks that can go on this list: Arcade Fire, Bro­ken Social Scene, Wolf Parade, and so on. Hand­some Furs are sort of on the cusp of that, but we admit­tedly like Dan Boeckner’s non-Wolf Parade band a lit­tle more than the main act, espe­cially on “All We Want, Baby, Is Every­thing,” which man­ages to come across as unpre­ten­tious dance-rock. At least it’s less pre­ten­tious than Toronto’s Crys­tal Castles.
  • 5. The Lovely Feath­ers have a lit­tle of the Arcade Fire ris­ing huge­ness going on with “Low­iza,” but what’s really inter­est­ing is that the cho­rus sort of breaks into a group oy-style endeavor. It’s like they’re the Drop­kick Mur­phys doing “Neigh­bor­hood #1.” (Well, kinda.) It’s pretty awe­some to hear, actually.
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friendly nudge: 051 – my phone interview, part 2

From I Heart Recession

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21 Nov 2009 18:47

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Music: Our Saturday Mixtape looks back at rock history’s greatest badasses

  • 1. Lou Reed is a badass because he man­aged to make a song like “Pale Blue Eyes” – an exer­cise in emo­tional nudity which few artists of his stature are will­ing to try – seem brave, not pan­sy­ish. It worked to strong effect in this year’s “Adven­ture­land,” by the way.
  • 2. Marc Bolan is a badass because he lived fast, died young, and still man­aged to have a career full of badass moves. From his start as an off-kilter folkie (Tyran­nosaurus Rex) to his peak as a glam god (T. Rex) who directly inspired the pre­vi­ous badass, his badass­ness set a pretty high bar.
  • 3. Paul West­er­berg is a badass because he never gave into the main­stream when he was cre­at­ing his great­est work. “Bas­tards of Young” is per­haps The Replace­ments’ catchi­est tune, but instead of actively try­ing to push it on MTV, they made this video to go with it. That’s badass.
  • 4. Josh Homme is a badass because he released this song as a sin­gle. And then his band, Queens of the Stone Age, played it at a drug rehab cen­ter last year. It really is the feel-good hit of the sum­mer. Or any year, really.
  • 5. James Mur­phy is a badass because he knows how to get down even though he’s get­ting old. Really, we could’ve picked any song Mur­phy did as LCD Soundsys­tem over the last five years and nailed it as evi­dence. But “Daft Punk is Play­ing at My House” works as both a sneer­ing homage to Daft Punk and a homage to being a badass. So it wins. source
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20 Nov 2009 05:06

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About: We’re building a ShortFormBlog theme for Tumblr. Whaddya want?

Screen-shot-2009-11-20-at-4.39.22-AM
This is still early in the process, but recently, we figured out a major breakthrough in short-form blogging technology – using Tumblr – that doesn’t require any of the clunkier database-driven technology we’ve been using. It’s so simple, we’d be complete jerks if we didn’t share it with the rest of the world (possibly with a price tag on it), because it makes Tumblr way cooler. So, fellow bloggers, what would you want from a SFB-style theme? Our hard work could be your next blog. Click the source for a preview. source
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15 Nov 2009 02:09

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About: A quick shout-out to our RSS readers: Hey guys!

If you didn’t know …
… you can read ShortFormBlog’s posts without ever having to visit the site. We have a full-featured RSS feed with hundreds of readers that offers an experience that matches the bite-sized nature of the site. Numbers, photos, quotes, videos and so on show up on the feed. It looks particularly good in Google Reader. On recent issues
Over the last few weeks, we’ve had some significant problems with our feed – both under the hood and above the hood. We admittedly worked really hard to get that feed in good shape, so this is frustrating. Please e-mail us if you find any further problems with that or anything else on the site. We appreciate it greatly. source
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