I enjoyed Hot Chip's The Warning (2006) and Made in the Dark (2008) a lot. Good beats, quirky synth, interesting vocals and super listenable.
A new Hot Chip album wasn't on my radar, so I was excited to discover a new album on Zune - One Life Stand. I guess the title single has been out for a couple of months, but new to me. After a few listens, it's shaping up to be another great album, and is really good stuff for worktime.
Check out the live BBC performance video below - pretty great!
Check out the Pitchfork review for a lot more meat and insight... "Hot Chip steadily rebuilt their reputation by toughening up their sophistipop side. Their melodies began to develop an itchy, nervous twitch, and they earned dancefloor credibility..." and "Hot Chip crafted some of the sneakiest and most effective earworms around" - good stuff. Enjoy!
“Having a great conversation with a partner about social media and web presence for small businesses.”
Odd, twisted melodies. Some energetic beats to keep your energy up. Highly listenable but also seems like it will be worth many more focused listens to explore and discover more and more layers of this intricate and interesting sound. Production quality is great. And the one-man live show, building layers of loops live with violin and synth are pretty cool.
I really respond to this classy, understated typographic identity for Sightglass - a coffee house in San Francisco. It's clean, and reminds me of brand marks I see on vintage industrial products and objects from say, the 1930s through the 1950s. It has a warmth and intrigue that makes me want to check out their space. Great work.
I've been chafing over slow performance for browsing, searches and really any kind of activity in Zune 4.0 software that involves the Internet - and that's pretty much everything. Earlier versions of the Zune software never gave me issues, but the problem had become such an issue, it was really tarnishing my impression of the service, and had taken all fun out of exploring new music and using the software. Boo.
Too bad I didn't take the time until just yesterday to Google for a fix for the slow Zune software performance, because I almost instantly came across the thread linked below, with the following tip for Zune users running Windows Vista or Windows 7 64-Bit...
- Go to Internet Explorer > Tools > Connections > LAN Settings
- Clear the box "Automatically Detect Settings"
That's it. According to the forum thread, with that setting checked, the Zune software runs through some process with every single Internet query, bogging down performance to an extreme level. Deselecting that option causes Zune not to do this, restoring performance to what it should be.
Changing the setting worked instantly for me. Performance back where it should be. I'm a happy Zune user again!
As a bonus, I've linked up a couple of Miike Snow videos below. Good stuff - check out the whole album on your favorite music service.
