Creeper’s new album, Eternity, In Your Arms, can be streamed over at The Independent.
Creeper Stream New Album
No Free Parents at Warped This Year
Warped Tour will not be offering their “free parent ticket” promotion this year:
In 2015 and 2016, we tested implementing a “Parent Get’s In For Free” program that allowed (1) parent to be admitted to the show for Free if they were bringing a child that had a paid ticket. Unfortunately in 2017 and moving forward, the tour is “going back to our roots” and with the booking of a more balanced lineup including many legacy acts, we are no longer offering the FREE Parent Ticket.
Wish instead I could dictate that zero of my dollars go to Attila. But, who am I kidding? I don’t wanna go stand in the sun all day to watch four bands anyway.
Kickstarter for The Matches Documentary Close to Goal
This Kickstarter for a documentary about The Matches is really close to its goal, figured I’d give it a little signal boost for any fans that may not have seen it yet:
Bleeding Audio is a feature-length documentary featuring The Matches, a band from Oakland, CA, who experienced a meteoric rise in the mid-2000s, signing with Epitaph Records, and quickly putting out 3 records produced by the likes of Tim Armstrong (Rancid), Brett Gurewitz (Bad Religion), Nick Hexum (311), Mark Hoppus (blink-182), and John Feldmann (Goldfinger).
The Decemberists Announce Music Festival
The Decemberists have announced their own curated festival, Travelers’ Rest, that will take place August 12th and 13th at Big Sky Brewing Company Amphitheater in Missoula, Montana. The lineup can be found below.
“The Pop-Punk Coloring Book”
A second edition of “The Pop-Punk Coloring Book” is up for order on Etsy.
The book is 40 pages, 19 of coloring and activities, and 19 of information on the featured bands.
Featured bands include All Time Low, Blink-182, Sleeping With Sirens, The Story So Far, The Maine, State Champs, Patent Pending, Green Day, Waterparks, Twenty One Pilots, Pierce The Veil, The Summer Set, Taking Back Sunday, New Found Glory, We The Kings, Fall Out Boy, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, and Bayside.
Advertisers Seek More Control After Unintended Breitbart Spots
Jessica Toonkel, writing for Reuters:
Some advertisers are working overtime to scrub their spots from websites including Breitbart News, an unintended consequence of the automated ad buying systems that are meant to lower costs and allow for more targeted advertising.
Those trying to keep their ads off certain websites are finding they must take steps to verify the spots they bid for are where ads actually appear and that there are no third parties involved that can result in ads winding up in unintended places.
Another consequence of just throwing your ads up everywhere and praying for clicks: you don’t know where your brand ends up being shown, and what it’s next to.
The Seamless Transition of Fleet Foxes Albums
A Reddit user correctly predicted how the new Fleet Foxes album will open. Here’s Ben Kaye at Consequence of Sound summarizing:
User blackbirdpie has apparently been bugged for years that the final song on Fleet Foxes’ 2011 album, Helplessness Blues, ended too soon. “I’ve always had the feeling that the end of ‘Grown Ocean’ seems slightly incomplete and was wondering if this was on purpose,” they wrote on the Fleet Foxes subreddit. They went on to say they felt like “a final chord or line is missing that would tie things up. It got me thinking that maybe Crack-Up will open with that missing chord, so that Helplessness Blues blends seamlessly into it.” […]
This sounded like a pretty but unlikely thought, that a band would choose a specific note to connect albums made six years apart. But then frontman Robin Pecknold himself logged on to respond to the theory. “First note on new album is F for exactly this reason,” he revealed in a response to the original post.
Moose Blood Remove Drummer Following Accusations
Moose Blood have booted their drummer, Glenn Harvey, following accusations of sexual harassment:
It’s taken a few days to respond to everything that’s circulating online at the moment regarding our band but Glenn Harvey is not currently a member of Moose Blood.
In no way do we support any disrespectful or inappropriate behaviour towards anyone, male or female. This is not a decision we’ve taken lightly.
We will continue with our North American tour, with the exception of St. Louis tonight, with our good friend on drums. Moose Blood and our label Hopeless Records will be making a charitable donation to RAINN to show our support and awareness.
We appreciate your patience and your loyalty.
The “is not currently” language seems a little non-committal.
iTunes Gets “Rent Once, Watch Anywhere” Feature
Apple have released a new version of iTunes which finally lets you watch your rental movies across multiple devices:
The new ‘watch anywhere’ feature for rentals appears to require iOS 10.3 and tvOS 10.2 however, although iOS is currently in developer and public beta and tvOS is only available in developer beta previews. Both software updates are likely coming soon for all users based on previous beta cycles as well as this iTunes release.
Descendents to Release Deluxe ‘Everything Sucks’ Vinyl
Descendents will be releasing a special edition 20th anniversary version of Everything Sucks on vinyl on May 5th. Pre-orders are now up.
Paramore’s New Album Is Finished
Zach Farro of HalfNoise talked a little about the new Paramore album in a recent interview:
It’s all finished. We’re just figuring out the logistics of when to release it and everything. With HalfNoise it’s just me and a couple of managers, and we work pretty closely, but Paramore is a worldwide known band. There’s a lot of chefs in the kitchen, and figuring all that stuff out… the goal is definitely to release it this year, but I can’t really touch base and even if we had a set day we were telling people, things change so much. But the record is finished.
How Instagram Changed — Before It Had To
Harry McCracken, writing for Fast Company:
“A big change happened when we decided to go non-square,” says Systrom, who, with his close-cropped beard, chocolate-colored quilted blazer, and wooden water bottle, has a sense of style befitting the cocreator of a tool for sharing beautiful photography. The decision not only gave the company more confidence to change its app, but also inspired it to go much further in evolving the service. Systrom realized that if the company waited until there were signs that the app was in dire need of revamping, it would likely be too late.
Guetzli: A New JPEG Encoder From Google
At Google, we care about giving users the best possible online experience, both through our own services and products and by contributing new tools and industry standards for use by the online community. That’s why we’re excited to announce Guetzli, a new open source algorithm that creates high quality JPEG images with file sizes 35% smaller than currently available methods, enabling webmasters to create webpages that can load faster and use even less data.
Guetzli [guɛtsli] — cookie in Swiss German — is a JPEG encoder for digital images and web graphics that can enable faster online experiences by producing smaller JPEG files while still maintaining compatibility with existing browsers, image processing applications and the JPEG standard. […]
And while Guetzli produces smaller image file sizes without sacrificing quality, we additionally found that in experiments where compressed image file sizes are kept constant that human raters consistently preferred the images Guetzli produced over libjpeg images, even when the libjpeg files were the same size or even slightly larger. We think this makes the slower compression a worthy tradeoff.
Impressive.
Opposition and a Shave: Former Obama Aides Counter Trump
The New York Times profiled the three guys behind Crooked Media and their wildly popular podcast, “Pod Save America:”
So they set out to mix jokes with insider descriptions of executive branch norms and interviews, often with people who can recommend political action — a protest, a phone-call campaign, an organizing drive — which is the sort of thing mainstream news media can’t do because, as Mr. Favreau said, “it would be picking a side.”
With episodes being downloaded up to 1.4 million times, according to data they shared from their hosting platform, ART19, they tapped into “a wave of interest about this president, a lot of it based on fear,” Mr. Favreau said.
A few thoughts:
- Holy shit is that a huge number of downloads.
- The podcast is one of the few I listen to almost immediately when it’s released. Jon Lovett kills me.
Record Store Day 2017: The Full List
The full list of Record Store Day 2017 releases have been released. You can find the list for the U.S. here, and here for the UK.
Looks like some fun stuff, anything you’ll be picking up?