Flour Power

Last night Dave Matthews Band had their return to Ireland for a concert in The O2, 3 years after their last visit to Guinness-land. The show was opened by Alberta Cross who didn't really manage to warm the crowd up, and got me afraid we would have a below average concert. But slowly the venue got almost full and then Dave and his band, with all their experience in live performances, turned it into an excellent show.

Dave was very energetic as usual, and goofed around and danced throughout the whole gig, stealing some cheers from the crowd. The talk about getting drunk the night before (in a pub with live music and singing even without knowing the lyrics) probably wasn't just talk, and I bet he had a few in him when he stepped on the stage. The leprechaun hat and the pints of Guinness were nice details that made the Irish crowd quite happy.

My favourite song of the night was Ants Marching, with a brilliant violin solo by Boyd Tinsley. Being more of an old-school fan, I thought there were too many songs from the latest album, a total of 8: Funny The Way It Is, Squirm, Shake Me Like a Monkey, Lying In The Hands Of God, Seven, Why I Am, You & Me, Baby Blue. Even so, the band managed to get a few of the classics in, like Stay Or Leave, Gravedigger, The Stone, Crash Into Me and Crush. I was a bit disappointed that some of my own favourites, like #41, Say Goodbye, Jimi Thing or Typical Situation, didn't make it, but it was a great setlist nonetheless. The other problem was the very short, and somewhat lukewarm, single encore. But that seems to be Dublin City Council's fault, with their 11pm curfew... Oh well, I shouldn't be complaining about a great almost-3-hour concert, should I?

I've already mentioned Dave's hectic behaviour that helped ignite the crowd, and the amazing Boyd Tinsley violin solo. Add to that Jeff Coffin's fantastic performance on the saxophone (who seemed to never run out of breath); the less than brilliant but still very good Tim Reynolds on the electric guitar; fan-favourite Carter Beauford on the drums (who threw so many drumsticks to the crowd and I couldn't get my hands on a single one, argh!); Stefan Lessard on the bass; and Rashawn Ross playing trumpet. The result was an awesome concert that started slow but had the crowd roaring for more by the end of the night.

Here's the complete setlist:

Bartender
Stay Or Leave
Funny The Way It Is
Squirm
Shake Me Like A Monkey
Lying In The Hands Of God
Gravedigger
Anyone Seen The Bridge
Ants Marching
#27
Seven
The Stone
Crash Into Me
Crush
Where Are You Going
Why I Am
You & Me
You Might Die Trying
All Along The Watchtower

Encore
Baby Blue
Cornbread

Will be posting some of the videos and photos I was able to take during the show as soon as I have the time to sort through them all. Stay tuned!

Flight of the Conchords, the New Zealand folk comedy duo, will be coming to Europe for a 15-stop tour with dates in the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, and the UK. Jemaine and Bret will be joined by co-stars Kristen Schall (fan-turned-stalker Mel) and Arj Barker (shop owner Dave).

That's awesome news, right?

Well, kind of. Maybe it's good news for the lucky ones who got tickets, but us mere mortals won't make it.

Here's what happened. Tickets went on sale at 9:00 today. And by... I don't know... 9:00 they were sold out (at least the Dublin and London dates). I know that because I was at the the bloody ticketmaster page refreshing it over and over again, and still all the tickets were gone as soon as the "Find tickets" button showed up. How that happened I don't know, but it's very frustrating that I didn't even get a chance. Kudos for the Conchords for having such loyal fans (maybe the tickets were all bought in the Fan Club pre-sale).

As usual, some tickets are already showing up on eBay and other such sites. For 3 times their original price. I feel like shooting those people...

For reference (not that you'll be able to get tickets...) all of the Flight of the Conchords 2010 Tour Dates are:

3rd May- Amsterdam, NL at Melkweg Max
4th May- Amsterdam, NL at Melkweg Max
5th May- Dublin, Ireland at Olympia
6th May- Dublin, Ireland at Olympia
10th May- Birmingham, UK at NIA
11th May- Manchester, UK at Apollo
12th May- Manchester, UK at Apollo
14th May- Glasgow, UK at SECC
15th May- Glasgow, UK at SECC
16th May- London, UK at HMV Hammersmith Apollo
17th May- London, UK at HMV Hammersmith Apollo
20th May- Bergen, Norway at Grieghallen
22nd May- Oslo, Norway at Folkteatern
23rd May- Copenhagen, Denmark at Vega
24th May- Stockholm, Sweden at Cirkus

In case you forgot, The Smashing Pumpkins are releasing their new album for free. Teargarden By Kaleidyscope will have 44 songs, which will be freely available for download from their website. So far 3 songs have been released:

1. A Song For A Son
2. Widow Wake My Mind
3. A Stitch In Time

I'll be updating this post when a new song comes out, so be sure to check back every once in a while.

And just a few hours after my rant about Christmas, I'm gonna do the unthinkable: I'll post a video of a Xmas song!

Now, there are a few good reasons for that:

1. This song is not too bad;
2. It's a cover by a very talented Portuguese singer/songwriter;
3. The video is cool.

Here it is, "Last Christmas", performed by David Fonseca:

On the 19th of July, Coldplay performed a "Stripped" acoustic show for iheartradio at the Capitol Records Studio in Hollywood. The intimate show is now available to watch online. The track list:

• Lost
• Strawberry Swing
• Viva La Vida
• Death Will Never Conquer
• Billie Jean

I especially liked the Michael Jackson's Billie Jean cover, but you should already know that I love covers.

(via Coldplay's Twitter)

I've clearly been distracted, because Billy Corgan has announced more than one month ago that the next Smashing Pumpkins album will released for free, on the Internet, one track at a time. And I only heard about it this weekend. It was big news when Radiohead first did something similar with In Rainbows in 2007, but now it seems news like these just go a bit unnoticed.

The new new record, entitled Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, will feature 44 songs, each of which will be made available online by the band, completely free of charge.

Each song will be made available absolutely for free, to anyone anywhere. There will be no strings attached. Free will mean free, which means you won't have to sign up for anything, give an email address, or jump through a hoop. You will be able to go and take the song or songs as you wish, as many times as you wish.

11 "highly limited edition" EPs with 4 songs each will be available for the more devoted fans, and when the album is complete it will be compiled in a deluxe box set.

In the meanwhile, and to help create anticipation for the songs, Kerry Brown (the producer) has been releasing some studio videos in his TwitVid.

The first song was scheduled for "around Halloween", so it shouldn't take long now.

This is just so cool! If you know what a "flash mob" is, this is supposed to be the biggest ever done in a single place. If not, watch the video before reading about it on Wikipedia.

Now tell me you wouldn't like to be part of something like this.

I know I would.

Not happy with implementing the "3 strikes" method of getting rid of customers alleged pirates announced earlier this year, Eircom has decided to bend over a bit more and go along with the music industry's demands to block access to The Pirate Bay.

Starting today, September 1st 2009, Eircom customers can no longer access The Pirate Bay and instead, are presented with this message (body in plain text for clarity):

On the 24 July 2009, an Order was made by the High Court requiring eircom to block or otherwise disable access by its subscribers to the website ThePirateBay.org, its related domain names, IP addresses and URLs. The Court was satisfied that on the basis of the evidence presented by the record companies that the PirateBay website is a website that facilitates the exchange of copyrighted sound recordings without the consent of the copyright owners.

eircom recognises the legitimate rights of the owners of copyrighted material and believes that individuals who share or download copyrighted material without the authorisation or the permission of the copyright owner are acting illegally.

The Order further provides that should the PirateBay website content be legitimatised in the future then eircom has liberty to apply to the Court to have the Order vacated and access to the PirateBay website enabled.

eircom in compliance with the Order has agreed that access to the website the PirateBay.org, its related domain names, IP addresses and URLs from the eircom network will be blocked indefinitely from the 1st September 2009.

eircom would like to reassure customers that:

* eircom will not monitor customer’s activities at any stage, nor will it place any monitoring equipment or software on its network in order to facilitate this block.
* eircom will not provide personal details or any information relating to customers to any third party, including the record companies.

So if you're in Ireland and your ISP is Eircom, you won't be getting in The Pirate Bay easily (you can always use a proxy). And because I don't like to see people being denied their share of downloadable stuff, check out this nice post with 25 Great Pirate Bay Alternatives. Although I really doubt that anyone that is tech-savvy enough to know about and use The Pirate Bay will have a hard time finding alternatives...

The rest of you need not worry, at least for now, because the other Irish ISPs ignored the threats.

(via TorrentFreak)

Seriously, this is weird. A combination of LEGO, stop motion animation and 8-bit video games and music.

It is also amazing...

The song was written by Daniel Larsson and Tomas Redigh was the one spending 1500 hours (yes, 1500 hours!) moving legobricks and take photos of them.

(via Gizmodo)

We men really do everything we can to see girls taking their clothes off, don't we? This guy Calvin Harris used his music as an excuse to get 15 girls strip down to just bikinis and use some kind of ink technology to recreate his latest single in what he calls the Humanthesizer.

Basically, the ladies stand on conductive pads on the floor, and paint their (and Harris's) hands with the conductive skin-safe ink called Bare Conductive. When Harris slaps his hands against those of the ladies, a small current travels through their bodies and onto the pads on the floor, which triggers a sound, all without the girls feeling a thing. He uses eight models to play the main accompaniment, and the others perform a tightly-choreographed routine to create the rhythm.

Let's all praise the ingenuity of the guy, and admire the result, which is pretty cool, actually:

(via Gizmodo)