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.