Screaming, Nirvana and Hype Machine

animal collective portraitAnimal Collective – On a Plain (nirvana cover). You can hear the song at that link.

I’m not very familiar with the original nirvana track, but this cover just blows me away every time I hear it. Something about the thrumming guitar mixed with the random shouting just brings it home like crazy.

hype machine - blog musicFound with the amazing Hype Machine service, which aggregates temporary mp3 uploads posted to this big weird network of blogs where people are constantly posting music for each other. The result is a huge searchable database of songs that you can play in a ton of different ways (popup a player and play everything on the page, or just play one track).

If the song is fresh enough (posted to a blog in the last couple of days) you can also go to the blog and download it for keeps, but the whole thing seems to stay legal because the tracks can’t be downloaded after a certain amount of time has passed, so a lot of them can only be listened to and not downloded (hint: use the ‘latest tracks’ on the front page and you’ll be able to download anything you like). It’s not the best filesharing network in the world for stealing music, but it’s an amazing way to find new songs and it beats the hell out of the radio for surprising you with what you end up liking.

I’ve known about the site for awhile (it’s my first stop when I want to play something for someone and don’t have the mp3 on my computer, way faster than booting up Limewire or the like), hopefully it sticks around for a long time (and doesn’t get sued /woodknock)

[Animal Collective portrait from their myspace page.]

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