OK, maybe I'm wrong about Deerhunter

I've complained a bit here about "not getting" the indie rock outfit Deer Hunter, whose Halcyon Digest got a lot of attention from critics last year. I've found myself circling back to the record and am really enjoying portions of it. This song, "Desire Lines," performed live on a show called The Interface is a pretty terrific track in my opinion. They're definitely hipster douchebags, but dig these wonderful ambient, cascading guitar lines.

Washed Out's got the theme music to your melancholy summer nights

As far as music taste goes, I like a lot of different things, but I tend to stick with what I know: buzzy indie guitar rock. Greatest rock band ever as far as I'm concerned is Sonic Youth. Rounding out a list of favorites would be Radiohead, Pavement, Pixies and Modest Mouse.* You get the idea.

I try to factor in those preferences when I approach writing about a record like Washed Out's new one, Within and Without, released by Sub Pop on July 12. It's a pretty good  example of where the "dream pop" or "chill wave" wing of indie music is right now: moody and ambient, yet eminently danceable music that owes a great deal to the keyboard-dominated new wave and U.K. pop of the early '80s.

Washed out has been a favorite band of the indie blog tastemakers, like Pitchfork, where the record scored a "Best New Music" tag and a rating of 8.3 (out of a possible 10).  The band -- which is really just a stage name for Earnest Greene and his laptop --  received a bunch of buzz on the release of last year's EP Life of Leisure, which featured a well-played single "Feel it All Around." (If you've watched Portlandia starring SNL's Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein, you've heard "Feel it all Around" during the opening sequence.)

Shit Luck: The Video

Posted this on Google+ last week... Just happened to find this great fan video for an old Modest Mouse song I really love. It's just a great video

Believe the Hype: Spotify is good

The Spotify player

So, I managed to grab an "exclusive" invite to Spotify. Those invites were so "exclusive" that music and tech blogs were posting links to what might best be described as mass invite engines. The service launched last Wednesday and I was trying it out by Friday.

What is Spotify? After Google, which also launched this month, Spotify is the most buzzed about music service since Pandora. It started in Europe, where it gained a ton of users, and had been gearing up for a U.S. launch for the better part of the last year.

Does it live up to the hype? I think so. I've never been a big Pandora fan. I've found it really hard to plug in an artist and not land on a song I really didn't want to hear within 15 minutes. I think I've been around for Pandora hitting that sweet spot for a good hour only two or three times. Generally, a good old-fashioned iTunes genius playlist is better. And the new Google Music instant playlist is even better than that.

Yo alt rap: Where's the love?

Tribe's Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Q-Tip

A funny thing happened to me just a few days ago. Well, not funny. Just an unexpected nostalgia trip.

I was perusing my Twitter feed and came across an item on Slate about a new documentary by Michael Rappaport about one of my favorite groups of all time: A Tribe Called Quest. Right after I put the piece down, I got my Tribe all queued up and ready to go: People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders.

All three albums still sound terrific. They could be brand new.  But in fact Tribe's classics are now 20 years old. The middle record in that trio, perhaps the best, was released in 1991. I had been thinking about doing a series on key overlooked rock records that were released in 1991 in response to what will likely be a great big nostalgia dump for the 20th anniversary of Nirvana's Nevermind this September. But I hadn't until that moment thought about the equally great rap records of that same period. In fact 1991 was as great a year for rap as it was for rock.

Put down that stick: It's time for a new biz model for the RIAA

I've been thinking of digital piracy and file sharing a bunch since I signed up for Google Music about a month ago.

Google Music and a few other new cloud services by Apple and Amazon have raised a lot of new questions about piracy and file sharing, with some Recording Industry of America legal minds calling  such services a way to "launder" pirated songs. Both Google and Amazon, which allow users to upload their music to a cloud locker (a reserved piece of storage on a remote server), launched without first securing license agreements with major record labels. Many observers are wondering when the lawsuits will begin.

The RIAA has spent more than the last 10 years in a all out scorched-earth campaign to try and enforce copyrights and crackdown on file sharing services. Yet 10 years later, there's little evidence that the lawsuits and threats have done much to stop people from downloading whole albums illegally, which for even the least tech savvy users takes a quick Google search and 5 minutes to download a compressed .rar or .zip file. Sales are still really low... so low in fact that Cake was able to top the Billboard Album Charts in the last 6 months. Cake!