With Thursdays garnering the title of ‘Throwback Thursdays’ over at the Outsider Vocals Facebook Page, today seemed like an appropriate day to post these thoughts (Throwback Thursday = a video of a now-defunct band gets posted to jog your memory and inspire some ‘No way! I remember these guys!’ statements).

I was in a local used record/CD/movie/video game, etc. store last weekend (for those of you concerned about my social life, don’t worry, it wasn’t the only thing I did that night) and I saw a guy come to the register with a stack of like ten CD’s. The guy was absolutely beaming as he pulled out his wallet to pay for what he had found. I was simply in there to buy a horror movie remake that I found for $5; which shall remain unnamed for fear of embarrassment/death by stoning.

As I was leaving, I saw the same guy sitting outside inspecting his purchases – purchases that I am pretty sure made this guy’s night a success. How that strikes you is irrelevant. The point here is that I started thinking about the last time I had actually bought a CD.

The last one I got from a major artist was a few months ago when I subscribed to Outburn magazine and selected August Burns Red’s Constellations as my free album. The last one I got from an artist who submitted their work was probably Yours Truly - The Colorage. The last one I was handed for promotional purposes was a Taproot album sampler at Rock on the Range 2010. And the last one that I actually bought – if I remember correctly – was Underoath’s Define the Great Line (because I got a free t-shirt with it if you bought it at Circuit City) back in 2006.

This post could end up being like 3,000 words long if I went into the tangent – which 90% of you have heard – about why the music industry is ‘dying’, why album sales are dropping, etc. I’ll save that crap, because most of you have already heard some form of it.

There are two major problems with CDs nowadays, hence why they are dropping off so drastically.

A – This one is just the nature of the beast because of times changing: they aren’t as portable as an MP3 player. Where do you put a CD player if you are walking around town (or especially working out at the gym)? In your pocket? Buy one of those fanny-pack looking things and zip it around your waist? Doubtful. An MP3 player is the only real way to be able to transport music compactly, and listen to it at any time and any place. I have an idea which I discussed with an employee of La Famos PR & Branding for how to please both vinyl aficionados, CD collectors, and MP3 lovers alike; but I am keeping that under wraps for the time being.

B – full albums are just not as solid as they used to be as a whole. I can’t tell you the last time I listened to an entire album and liked the entire thing the whole way through. Actually, that’s not true. I really liked As I Lay Dying’s new album, The Powerless Rise, and I picked August Burns Red’s Constellations as my free album from Outburn because I knew that it was a solid album the entire way through. Aside from those two, nothing comes to mind quickly. The majority of albums seem to have between four and six tracks which are very solid, and the rest are filler. And people wonder why album sales are dropping? Would you rather pay iTunes $3.96 for the tracks you like, or pay Best Buy $10.69 for those same four tracks?

To further help my point (and to provide some multimedia to jazz up the post, because I know you guys like that) I decided to search some YouTube clips to see what I could come up with. There are about fifty thousand zillion clips on YouTube of people ranting about music, but I wasn’t going to embed like a hundred nine-minute-long clips of random dudes sitting in their closets rambling about nothing. Here are some of the highlights of what I found:

I’m including this clip not because it is relevant (well, technically it is, it’s just not anything that anyone hasn’t heard before), but because whoever this dude is, anything and everything he said in this clip had me groaning…any 7th grader writing a paper for their English class could come up with statements just as enlightening as the ones he does. I groaned even harder when I saw that the caption in the video says he is an entertainment attorney, which means he probably makes at least six figures to come up with those brilliant and revolutionary thoughts. It would be nice if he had something to say that wasn’t blatantly obvious…or at least intermixed his interview with ideas that you couldn’t develop while in a coma.

This guy has the idea of this site in a nutshell. I have no idea what song is playing in the background, but it sounds quite crap-tastic. Ignorance and apathy are the winners on the part of that one – don’t know, don’t care, and don’t want to know either. He did make one mistake though…he should have included the Outsider Vocals URL on that second to last slide.

I am PRAYING that Jimmy Iovine was high as a kite in this clip, because I know for a fact the dude is not as dumb as he sounds in this clip. Either that, or maybe he just doesn’t want to expose any details as to what he has planned. Either one works I guess. Watch this if you just want to go WTF? Was that really interview-worthy material? (Hint: the answer is no.)

This guy is actually worth hearing out, I enjoyed this clip. He is Don Van Cleave, president of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores (CIMS). He gets an added bonus for saying “I hate the radio.” I bet he visits this site daily. If he doesn’t, he should be. Someone hit him with some knowledge about what we do here.

And I saved the best for last…Frank Zappa (yes, Frank Zappa like twenty? thirty? years ago talking about this issue), Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead, and others.

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All photos, music, and videos copyright of their respective owners. Used only for promotional purposes and to gain notoriety for the artists featured.

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Haste the Day will be recording a live DVD in support/celebration of their new album, Attack of the Wolf King, set to hit stores on Tuesday, June 29th. As you can see below, their hometown show (in Carmel, Indiana) that same day will be filmed for an upcoming DVD. I saw Haste the Day back in October 2009, and although the crowd was pretty weak, they showed definite signs that they could be awesome live (Haste the Day Pittsburgh Concert Review). In related news, there should still be time to get tickets for the June 4th hometown show (in Lancaster, PA) that August Burns Red will be filming (August Burns Red June 4th Show to be Filmed for Live DVD).

Here is the official press release:

Haste The Day have already announced ambitious plans to celebrate the release of their new CD, Attack of the Wolf King – in the form of a June 29th hometown tour stop where they will be joined by past members of the band. Now the band is excited to announce that the one-of-a-kind show will be filmed for a future DVD release.

The one-time performance, being billed as ‘Haste The Day vs Haste The Day’ will feature all the former members of the band coming back to play the old favorites.

“This may turn out to be the best Haste The Day show that will ever happen,” explains bassist Mike Murphy. “It’s hard when band members grow older and no longer have the energy and passion to stay on the road. With HTD, our purpose has always been bigger than the individual members. We want to be be a voice to kids at shows, that they are loved and important. So, as members leave, they pass the torch to the newer guys, and the mission continues on. There are no hard feelings within the HTD camp and we are blessed that both versions of the band are essentially one big family. So, to bring those two groups together for one show just demonstrates the true purpose and unity of this band.”

In addition to celebrating the release of Wolf King, the band will perform songs from their entire catalog, swapping out old and new members from Haste The Day’s different eras, and the band is thrilled to be able to share the experience with their fans.

Adds Murphy: “We’re hoping that as many fans as possible will join in this celebration, so we invite everyone to travel and share this special occasion with us!”

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All photos, music, and videos copyright of their respective owners. Used only for promotional purposes and to gain notoriety for the artists featured.

Just a quick note to all of you current and new site visitors…THANK YOU!

Thanks to all of you, we hit a new high for both unique visitors and repeat visitors in one day. I would think that this is due, in part, to all of the people who visited the site after seeing us at Rock on the Range 2010.

Please bookmark the site and visit often – we try our best to post new content every day, whether that happens to be breaking news or an artist review.

Thanks for your continued support of new music and music outside the mainstream.

-Duke

I’m sure by now that you have seen me references All Time Low’s 2009 release, Nothing Personal, while making a point about how an album is disappointing or a band deviated from their original sound.

I figured that was probably enough to make my point…until I saw a news post on absolutepunk.net about how fans have called All Time Low “the new Blink 182.”

Here is the CNN (yes, CNN) video clip that was linked inside that post:

I like Alex’s quote about making the songs “more universal”…a.k.a. “we want to sell more records.”

It’s a legit statement (who wants to tour in a beat-up van for the rest of their lives, while working a part time job when they are home because their music “career” isn’t much of a career at all?), but as I have said before, my problem isn’t the minor tweaks in a bands’ sound. My problem is that not only did they add a bunch of auto-tune and weird electronic elements, their songwriting also dropped off significantly. The lyrics on the new album were enough to make me cringe in a lot of cases. Expanding to a wider audience is not supposed to translate into “we dumbed down our lyrics and targeted girls in junior high school.”

There is no replacement for Blink 182. That’s like saying a band is the new U2, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, etc. To a fan of that genre, that statement is pretty much blasphemous.

Blink 182 are pretty much the godfathers of the pop-punk genre. They set the bar with albums like Dude Ranch, Enema of the State and Take Off Your Pants and Jacket. I remember going to buy Enema of the State at a store in the mall, having only heard ‘What’s My Age Again?’ and not really knowing what to expect. It was pretty much a stab in the dark, if you will. Turned out to be a great musical gamble; it opened the door for me to discover plenty of bands outside of the limited selection of music I had been listening to previously.

Don’t even bother telling me that Cheshire Cat and Buddha were better than those three albums mentioned previously…it’s not going to make you look like a music purist; it’s just going to make you look like an idiot who wants to be edgy and act like you are only a fan of bands ‘before they were cool.’ Save it. You aren’t fooling anyone.

If you have no point of reference in what I am rambling on about, here you go.

Old All Time Low: ‘Coffee Shop Soundtrack’ from the Put Up or Shut Up EP:

New All Time Low: ‘Sick Little Games’ from Nothing Personal:

All of this being said, if I could go to a show and have the band promise me that ‘Weightless’ would be the only song they would play from Nothing Personal, I would be there. I think the stuff working backwards from So Wrong, It’s Right is great. ‘Coffee Shop Soundtrack’, ‘Jasey Rae’, ‘Shameless’, ‘Vegas’, etc. are awesome pop-punk songs. The majority of auto-tuned, electronica songs on Nothing Personal are not…unless you haven’t graduated high school and/or never heard All Time Low’s older stuff.

They are touring right now on the Bamboozle Road Show, but because of the direction they took on Nothing Personal, I wouldn’t be caught dead there – just being there I’d feel like the biggest creeper/pedophile.

If they right their wrongs on the next album, I’ll consider this a fluke. Unfortunately, with the album selling 63,000 copies in it’s first week, hitting #1 on the US Rock Albums, US Independent Albums, and US Alternative Albums charts and #4 on the Billboard 200, chances are high that ATL is now a lost cause.

I’ll give their next album a spin anyways; I’m just not holding out too much hope for it.

PS – what the hell were they thinking when they took that photo?

All photos, music, and videos copyright of their respective owners. Used only for promotional purposes and to gain notoriety for the artists featured.