Grooveshark: Painless way to try out tunes before you, er, buy 'em

I recently wrote positive things about Spotify. And I meant them.

But things change. I'm no longer using a Mac as a daily driver and Spotify's desktop app is not the most stable thing in the world on Ubuntu, the Linux OS I'm now using every day. So I'm not using Spotify anymore, either.

So naturally, I've been looking for alternative services to preview records. It's a pretty helpful thing to do when you're trying to keep up with a music blog. No need to do any more than dial up a record and listen to it a few times, free of charge.

Craig Finn goes for gravitas over guitars

Craig Finn is looking as clean cut as his new solo record.

Craig Finn, the bespectacled front man of The Hold Steady, has a solo debut out called Clear Heart Full Eyes. It's a nice, but mostly predictable sort of record -- the kind that you'd expect from a straight-forward rock and roll prose stylist like Finn.

For anybody well-versed in The Hold Steady, Finn's word-rich lyrical style is still there. As a solo artist, though, he steers clear of the wall-of-guitar sound that propels the best Hold Steady tunes. Here, guitars mostly provide the ambiance for a set of songs that swing from slow blues jams to alt country-ish whiskey drinkers.

Fishbone: The Movie

I was a huge fan of Fishbone. In high school, as a kid learning to play bass, Fishbone's amazing Norwood Fisher was an inspiration. As a lot of other strange West Coast band's -- from Jane's Addiction to Primus -- became popular, Fishbone faltered, even though they were far more interesting, creative and just plain musical.

1991's The Reality of My Surroundings was about as big as the band ever got. The album is a masterpiece, a mix of metal, funk and soul, the likes of which have not been heard since.

Favorites of 2011

This wasn't the best year for new music from my view.

I promise I'm not sliding into a haze of oldster griping about nothing being good anymore (I'm sure that's coming some time). It's just that little of the new music this year held up to last year's best. Nothing, certainly, approached The National's High Violet, far and away the record of the year for 2010.

For me, the year's best records sound like music's future. Not its past. A lot of indie rock this year has felt far too mired in trying to sound like it was recorded in the '50s. That's fine. Some of those records are enjoyable, but I have a hard time getting past the gimmick of that sound being much more than just that: a nostalgia trip. It sounds neither fresh nor particularly like art. What do those bands sound like outside of the studio?

World's hardest working band, The Black Keys, didn't work hard enough on El Camino

The Black Keys are all work. Perhaps they needed a little more time
 for their latest, El Camino, a good record that sounds a little stale.

Is there a harder working band in all of Rockdom than The Black Keys?

No other serious rock band I know of works at the same pace. The blues/garage duo from Akron have released 7 LPs in the last 10 years. In addition, they recorded the superb Chulahoma EP, produced and recorded the Blackroc record, wrote a record for the late Ike Turner and frontman Dan Auerbach had a solo record that very well could have been another Black Keys album.

That work ethic has certainly paid off. If you had told me in 2003 that The Keys would be headlining the Wells Fargo center in Philadelphia in 8 years, I would have said you were nuts. I liked the band a lot, still do, but I never would have guessed theirs was an arena-filling sound.

Coldplay keeps trying to get those U2 shoes to fit

Cold Play is big. But are they U2 big?
And is that even a fair question?

It's been a while since I've written a word about music. I've been really busy and relatively uninspired by new music -- not a good mix for a hobby blog about music. But I thought I'd take a second here to talk about one album that's now a classic and a second one that is brand new and what they have in common.

Lost a little in the discussion of  seminal grunge and alternative records celebrating 20 years -- from Nirvana's Nevermind to Pearl Jam's Ten -- is the 20th anniversary of another record, this one by a super group and, like R.E.M., one of the bands that, like 'em or not, are really responsible for shaping the sound of rock music for the last 30 years.

Wilco find a bit of that old spark on The Whole Love

Wilco today, and, yes, that's a Saturday Night Live shot.

It's been a long time since Wilco turned the musical world on its head with one of the best rock albums of the last 10 years. 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was an amazing work for a number of reasons. It was the perfect sound for the time. It overturned expectations for a band that had cut its teeth on alt-country and breezy pop, thanks to Jim O'Rourke, whose remix of the material evidently led to a complete remake of the band at the expense of songwriting multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett. And the band's sound was deemed so revolutionary that its label, Reprise Records, refused to release it. It was all the stuff of a perfect rock legend.