"Punched in the heart, in the throat, in the kneecaps too," begins Clem Snide's new album, The Meat of Life. There's no musical build up, the album jumps right out the barrel with this unabashed nasal powered declaration from singer songwriter Eef Barzelay.
Pleasant music with a sad sack singer is a recipe for success, at least for my tastes. And this album does that job perfectly. A little less depressing than The Mountain Goats breakup album "Get Lonley," it does the job I was talking about in my last post. That is, it works as background pleasantness as well as something to sink your teeth into.
I recently got this album for free on lala.com, a site that Pitchfork and AV Club started using to give you a taste of the music you're reading about (click on links to read about and listen to The Meat of Life from the respective websites). I'm not really sure how the whole thing works so far. I think it allows you to listen to a song once for free, then you've got to log in and you've got 5o or so credits, with each one good for a song. Once you get the song you can listen to it on your computer but it's still not an mp3 you can put on your ipod. For that, it looks like each song is 79 cents, or 20 cents cheaper than i-tunes. I've got to explore this thing a bit more, but it may replace i-tunes as my mp3 purchasing go to site.
Maybe I'll learn more about it at SXSW, which I'll be attending next week and reporting on for Flagpole. I'm very excited.
Wait, hold on, I just looked at lala.com's wikepedia page and it looks like it's owned by Apple. This new discovery just became a lot less romantic. But it's still cheaper than i-tunes, so why wouldn't I use it. Apple actually bought lala.com last year for over 80 Million dollars. With that kind of money you could pay full price for the whole CD package.
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