Pelican - City of Echoes

Yay. Another album leak. This one doesn't come out until May. Pelican makes good, heavy post-rock/post-metal. This is probably their best album yet. Everything seems more focused, whatever that means. I am too busy playing the NIN ARG to write more. Download this. It's good. Also, I just realized that the mp3 tags might not have any artist listed. I should start checking stuff in iTunes before I upload it instead of assuming that Winamp is correctly displaying tags. Oh well.


1. Bliss In Concrete
2. City of Echoes
3. Spaceship Broken-Parts Needed
4. Win With Hands
5. Dead Between the Walls
6. Lost In the Headlights
7. Far From Fields
8. A Delicate Sense of Balance

Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero Leaks

So I guess Nine Inch Nails has a new album coming out in April. I found a CD rip of the first single, "Survivalism", at 320 kbps. There is also another song floating around the Internet called "My Violent Heart". There's a pretty interesting story behind the leak of that song. I guess someone found a USB flash drive in the bathroom at a NIN gig in Lisbon, Portugal. Supposedly, the version I downloaded is a direct copy of the one on the USB flash drive, which is kind of cool. It came with a file called "Phone Message". On the backs of the recent NIN tour shirts, some numbers are a lighter color. When put together, they spell out the US phone number +13102951040. The file is a recording of what you hear when you call that number. There has been some pretty ridiculous advertising for this thing, which you can read about at the wikipedia page for it. This looks like it's going to turn out to be a pretty massive ARG (put on by none other than 42 Entertainment, the people responsible for I Love Bees and the I, Robot ARGs), and the album is going to be a concept album, both of which excite me a lot. I guess I can kiss my life goodbye until this thing drops on April 17.

Now that that's out of the way, I should probably say a little something about the music. Survivalism is pretty decent. Sounds like it probably could've been on a-With-a-Teeth-a. It's got the same minimalistic approach, simple drum pattern, repetitive fuzzy guitar line, miscellaneous percussion during the verses, with a quick build at the chorus, then back to quieter with a little more complexity. Then back and forth between loud and quiet with different variations. Lyrics seem to talk about the dystopian America that the new album will focus on. My Violent Heart is a better track, in my opinion. It's got the same quiet-loud-quiet pattern, but it's more atmospheric. Trent does his spoken-word vocals for the verses, and then kind of yells the chorus. At about 2:45, it goes off into a cool instrumental part with a bunch of variations until the end, similar to Closer.

Anyway, enough of my rambling that no one reads. Here's what you came here for:

1. Survivalism
2. My Violent Heart
3. Phone Message

Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank

The new Modest Mouse album leaked. I've got it on in the background right now, and I'm on track 10. I don't think it sounds very good, but I'll have to give it a proper listen or two at work tomorrow before I really start to make a decision. Either way, here it is. If it sucks, you can thank me for saving you $15.

EDIT: The track tags are reversed. Track 1 is tagged as 14, Track 2 as 13, and so on. I downloaded it in a torrent as a zip file, and just started upping the same zip file before I got it into iTunes. I figured a couple people might be as anal retentive about that kind of stuff as I am, and thought I would make a note of it here. Also, I'm coming around on the album. I don't know where I'd rank it amongst Modest Mouse's other albums, but I definitely enjoyed listening to it today.



1. March Into the Sea
2. Dashboard
3. Fire It Up
4. Florida
5. Parting of the Sensory
6. Missed the Boat
7. We've Got Everything
8. Fly Trapped in a Jar
9. Education
10. Little Motel
11. Steam Engenius
12. Spitting Venom
13. People as Places as People
14. Invisible