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It May Be Time to Backup Your Bandcamp Purchases

Bandcamp
Jason Tate

David Rutland:

You can’t rely on other people or organisations to hold onto your media forever, and it’s a tired but true maxim that the cloud is just someone else’s machine.

If you’ve spent your hard earned cash supporting independent artists through Bandcamp, a series of ownership changes and layoffs suggest that now might be the best time for audiophiles to download their audio files to secure offline storage.

And:

While we’re not saying that Bandcamp is going to disappear into nothing (MySpace is still around after all), we think it’s perhaps prudent to download your albums from Bandcamp and store them offline. You never know – that’s all we’re saying.

The Bandcamp UI isn’t really designed with massive downloads in mind, and there are a lot of boxes to tick.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to download all of your Bandcamp music using the excellent Batchcamp extension which is available as both a FireFox addon, or as a Google Chrome extension.

Interview: Mitski

Mitski
Charlie Joseph

It’s hard to put into words the effect of Mitski’s music. Her voice is as clear and sharp as a knife, and the instruments wrap around you with the warmth of a blanket on a cold day. Even though the name of her new album, Puberty 2, sounds like a cheesy American teen movie a la American Pie, Mitski reminds us that life is messy, the question of where you belong is complex, and we can’t always have the things we want. I had the pleasure of talking with Mitski during the lead up to this new album about everything from the music to the in-between.

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Review: Blink-182 – [Untitled]

Adam Grundy

It really does feel like yesterday that I was just unwrapping the CD of this Blink-182 classic, known to many as their [Untitled} fifth effort, and grinning ear to ear about the sound that was about to surround me for the next two-plus years of a standard album cycle. Little did I know, this would be the last studio album Blink-182 would record for eight (!) years, until they returned with 2011’s Neighborhoods. This studio effort was a flawless execution of slick pop-punk hooks, experimental rock, hip-hop beats, and a top-notch collaborative song with The Cure’s Robert Smith. While some longtime Blink fans were disappointed with the final result of this record (that succeeded the bulletproof pop-punk classic, Take Off Your Pants & Jacket), almost all of these fans now point to this album as a seismic shift in the band’s songwriting and offered glimpses as to where they would take their sound for the foreseeable future. This fifth LP was produced by Jerry Finn, and it would also end up being their longest album to date, clocking in at a little over the 49-minute mark. Mark Hoppus, Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker should be looking back fondly on this momentous album today that would find Blink-182 breaking down the silos of what a pop-punk band should sound like, and blow the doors off the hinges in the process.

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Review: AJR – The Maybe Man

Adam Grundy

There’s something to be said for a band who knows how to make a well-crafted, thought out, and carefully mapped out  album. AJR may have just made their early-career masterpiece on The Maybe Man, a record that is brimming with purpose, an ultra-personal touch, and better structurally organized than any of their previous four LPs. The Maybe Man finds the three brothers (Adam, Jack & Ryan Met) at a crossroads: they’ve just made their most commercially and critically successful record in 2021’s Ok Orchestra, the band recently announced their first arena tour, and yet the material found on this record is dripping with self-doubt. For a band that got famous with songs like “Bang!” “Weak” and the ultra-viral “World’s Smallest Violin,” the opening song/title track finds lead singer, Jack pondering vulnerably, “Wish I was a stone so I couldn’t feel / You’d yell in my face, it’d be no big deal / But I’d miss the way we make up and smile / Don’t wanna be stone, I changed my mind,” while getting into heavier material (lyrically) with “God Is Really Real” that comes to terms with their father, Gary’s, untimely passing. As close as I am to my dad, I can’t imagine going through life without my own mentor, and I commend AJR for tackling this concept head on with grace on The Maybe Man.

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