Free and Legal mp3 Downloads

Please enjoy these songs from 2008, and then buy the artists’ albums. Stella Splice has made this post a page, accessible at the top of the blog, that you can check for updates throughout the year.

To download, click on the link, and on the resultant page scroll down just a bit until you can click on the orange Download Now button. Scroll down on that next page until you see “Your download should begin shortly. If it does not, try Download file now.” It never begins without me clicking on that link. Have fun!

American Music Club ~ All Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco
Band of Horses ~ No One’s Gonna Love You
Basia Bulat ~ In the Night
Benji Hughes ~ So Well
Benji Hughes ~ You Stood Me Up
Benji Hughes ~ Why Do These Parties Always End Up the Same Way?
Benji Hughes ~ The Mummy
Benji Hughes ~ I Went with Some Friends to See the Flaming Lips
Bodies of Water ~ I Guess I’ll Forget The Sound, I Guess, I Guess
Bowerbirds ~ In Our Talons
Brazos ~ Mary Jo
Dirty on Purpose ~ Mind Blindness
Dr. Dog ~ The Ark
Dr. Dog ~ The Old Days
Fleet Foxes ~ White Water Hymnal
Howlin’ Rain ~ Dancers at the End of Time
Iron & Wine ~ Innocent Bones
James Hunter ~ Jacqueline
Jens Lekman ~ The Opposite Of Hallelujah
Jens Lekman ~ Friday Night At The Drive-In Bingo
Jim White ~ Crash into the Sun
Kaki King ~ Two O’Clock
Ladytron ~ Black Cat
Lykke Li ~ Dance Dance Dance
Man Man ~ Top Drawer
Mates of State ~ My Only Offer
Mike Doughty ~ 27 Jennifers
Mike Doughty ~ I Just Want the Girl in the Blue Dress
Morning Benders ~ Crosseyed
Mudhoney ~ I’m Now
Mudhoney ~ In ‘n’ Out of Grace
My Brightest Diamond ~ Inside a Boy
My Morning Jacket ~ Evil Urges
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds ~ Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
Nina Simone ~ Revolution
No Age ~ Eraser
Oxford Collapse ~ The Birthday Wars
Port O’Brien ~ I Woke Up Today
Ra Ra Riot ~ Dying Is Fine
Saul Williams ~ Sunday Bloody Sunday
Saul Williams ~ World on Wheels
Science for Girls ~ Northern Lights
She & Him ~ Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?
Shearwater ~ Leviathan, Bound
Shearwater ~ Rooks
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin ~ Think I Wanna Die
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks ~ Baltimore
The Acorn ~ Crooked Legs
The Acorn ~ The Flood, Pt 1
The Breeders ~ Bang On
The Dandy Warhols ~ The World The People Together (Come On)
The Dodos ~ Fools
The Dodos ~ Jodi
The Dutchess & the Duke ~ Reservoir Park
The Mountain Goats ~ Sax Rohmer #1
The Republic Tigers ~ Buildings and Mountains
The Whigs ~ Right Hand on my Heart
Tilly and the Wall ~ The Freest Man
Tilly and the Wall ~ Cacophony
Tokyo Police Club ~ In A Cave
What Made Milwaukee Famous ~ Resistance Street
White Hinterland ~ Dreaming of the Plum Trees
Wolf Parade ~ Call It a Ritual
Wolf Parade ~ Language City

If you own a copyright and would like your mistakenly posted song to be removed, or if one of the links is not working, please contact Stella Splice.

Man Man, DeVotchKa, etc.

There are a variety of ways to hear the new releases of the week. Largehearted Boy and Muzzle of Bees have compiled lists, as always, that are link-full.

And you can listen for a limited time to the stream of the new albums from The Breeders, Man Man, State Bird, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, DeVotchKa, Gnarls Barkley, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, and Tapes N Tapes, among others, at AOL Spinner‘s Full Listening Party here (I know, I know, it has that Time-Warner ick, but whatchya gonna do…).

If you’d rather have a guide than browse on your own, listen here to an excellent installment of NPR’s All Songs Considered that offers streamable tracks as well as a bit of commentary regarding the following artists and songs: The Raconteurs (Many Shades of Black), Man Man (Ballad of Butter Beans), Colin Meloy (Wonder) (frontman for The Decemberists), and DeVotchKa (New World).

The Breeders

How do we love thee, Kim Deal! Let us count the bass lines. The Breeders‘ (Kim and Kelley’s) new album Mountain Battles comes out tomorrow. It’s the best sort of rocker girl jukebox music, and lord knows jukeboxes the world over could use a bit more of that. There are too many girlies and not enough Deals out there. Stream the whole album!

The new disc was produced by Steve Albini using no digital whatnot whatsoever (except on the title track, “which pains me so hard,” says Kim). Read about this recent manifestation of his “All Wave” push here: “This should not be construed as a call to arms, but could become at least as significant as the Ska revival or perhaps the WNBA,” and his 1993 treatise The Problem with Music here.

It’s been six years since the twin sisters’ last album, and can you believe Last Splash was 1993?! For old times’ sake … Check, check; ahh-oooooooo-ah, ahh-oooooooo-ah … watch them play Cannonball on The Jon Stewart Show back when they were touring with Nirvana on its tour for (Albini-produced) In Utero. That performance, that song, those voices … if I would have seen that I would have made some sweeping statement about these being rockers, not women doing rock music, which would necessarily relegate them to the margins … well, read what Kurt Cobain said about The Breeders (and The Pixies, for whom Kim was the bassist).

Back to the new disc. You can watch them screw around on a YouTube video while you listen to the very agreeable song Overglazed and the crystal-clear We’re Gonna Rise. Or download the mp3s of the infectious Bang On and Night of Joy.

Now buy the thing and go see ’em live.

Apr 25 – Coachella – Indio, CA
Apr 28 – Canes – San Diego, CA
Apr 29 – El Rey Theatre – Los Angeles, CA
Apr 30 – Slims – San Francisco, CA
May 2 – House of Blues – Las Vegas, NV
May 3 – Clubhouse – Tempe, AZ
May 5 – Emos – Austin, TX
May 6 – House of Blues – Dallas, TX
May 7 – Meridian – Houston, TX
May 9 – Bottleneck – Laurence, KS
May 10 – Pops – St. Louis, MO
May 23 – Richards – Vancouver, BC
May 24 – The Gorge – George, WA
May 25 – Berbattis Pan – Portland, OR
May 27 – The Depot – Salt Lake City, UT
May 28 – Ogden – Denver, CO
May 30 – First Avenue – Minneapolis, MN
May 31 – Metropolitan University – Chicago, IL
Jun 1 – Magic Stick – Detroit, MI
Jun 3 – House of Blues – Cleveland, OH
Jun 4 – Pearl Street – Northampton, MA
Jun 5 – Paradise – Boston, MA
Jun 7 – Toads Place – New Haven, CT
Jun 8 – Theatre of Living Arts – Philadelphia, PA
Jun 10 – Webster Hall – New York, NY
Jun 11 – 9:30 Club – Washington, DC
Jun 13 – The Loft – Atlanta, GA

I’m interested to hear what the set list is like, especially since Kelley said, “I’ve never felt excited about bands on tour. I never want to hear more than three new songs, just the old stuff. But this time, I’ve told Kim we should just start off with [1993 hit] ‘Cannonball’ and only play the new album from there.”

Kurt Cobain: About A Son

I’ve been geeking out on the soundtrack for Kurt Cobain: About a Son. I can’t speak to the way the songs articulate with the film, because I haven’t seen it, but I have gotten a lot of enjoyment from listening to and thinking about the artists that influenced KC.

Buy the About a Son CD or DVD for reasonable prices. The trailer for the documentary pulls from 25 hours of interview tape done for Michael Azerrad‘s biography Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. (His other book, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991, follows Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Beat Happening, The Replacements, Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Fugazi, and Mudhoney.)

Azerrad wrote the liner notes to the soundtrack, which contains no Nirvana songs but instead other artists’: “stuff he studied and worshiped and adored … So if watching About a Son is like seeing the world through Kurt’s eyes, then listening to this music is like hearing it through his ears.” I think fans will appreciate the amount of respect this choice shows for them and their ability to do the mental labor of analyzing influences and processing the clips of KC speaking that are sprinkled among the songs.

In particular, I like the inclusion of the Creedence Clearwater Revival cut Up Around the Bend because KC’s first band was a CCR cover band. CCR was logical, in retrospect, according to Azzerad, because it’s “basic, chunky guitar music, easy to play and yet boundlessly resonant, full of simple, catchy melodies and a singer with a voice that sounded like a tuned scream.” Nicely put. And when the CCR is juxtaposed against Put Some Sugar On It by Half Japanese (download), the Nirvana sound emerges around the margins.

Two songs that Nirvana covered are included: the original David Bowie version of The Man Who Sold the World (download) and Son of a Gun by The Vaselines. If you’re interested, Matt Yglesias talks about Nirvana covers of Vaselines songs here.

Of course Mudhoney (download Touch Me I’m Sick) and Lead Belly (The Bourgeois Blues) are on there. But I was unpleasantly surprised to note the absence of The Pixies and The Breeders, who influenced KC mightily. The Pixies’ lyrical ambiguity (for a discussion of that, see the 33 1/3 book for Doolittle) is what lets Nirvana go national; it made the angst malleable to any set of personal circumstances, to anyone who thought that the world and/or themselves were SNAFU central.

My only other complaint is the incongruous cut by Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service; his unmistakable voice concludes the CD with the song Indian Summer, and it sort of leaves me lost. I would have liked to see something more assertive or definitive as a closer. He helped compile the songs on the CD, so this track sort of feels like when a first-time film director gives him or herself a cameo.

But, regardless, the thing is worth buying. And in case you aren’t convinced yet, check the list of artists on the soundtrack I didn’t even talk about: R.E.M., The Melvins, Bad Brains, Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid, Arlo Guthrie, and Iggy Pop. Whew!

The Polyphonic Spree

The Polyphonic Spree‘s new video Crawl is worth a watch. It’s an intimate look at the band and frontman Tim DeLaughter, who has more charisma in his little finger than [insert lame comparison into this cliché here].

Watching Tim from his Tripping Daisy days (I cannot stress enough that the albums I Am an Elastic Firecracker and Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb are your listening homework if you don’t know them already but are even remotely into the Spree or The Flaming Lips) through The Beginning Stages of… and into worldwide success with the Spree, you can’t help but sense that he consistently does the dangerous work of exposing his soul to the world. That must be necessary to make music so expansive and touching. He always projects genuine elation, but the elation seemingly must be ripped out of (his) pain and (our) apathy to be sustained. I think this makes him one of the hardest working men in music.

At Tripping Daisy and Spree shows, Tim always seems to be standing on the monitors, surrounded by something. Sometimes it’s props like bubbles or plastic bits from a fake snow machine. But sometimes it’s light doing interesting things in concert with the sound, such as a flickering fluorescent bulb or a sunbeam breaking through the dreary clouds during a raucous version of It’s the Sun (both shows in Denton, Texas, at two very different venues).

I find the Spree’s recordings difficult to listen to since I know how bitchin’ they are live. In fact, it’s safe to say I like the Spree best at their margins, out of the studio doin’ their own funky thing. At the end of one show, they allowed the harpist time to perform a full song solo, and it was truly fulfilling in a basic sort of way, like eating bread. The improv moments during shows are some of the most fun bits, like when Tim broke spontaneously into a Tripping Daisy chorus while the rest of the band waited patiently. And their covers are fierce. Grab Nirvana’s Lithium, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s LHCB, and Wig in a Box here at Deaf Indie Elephants. You can buy covers of Lithium, Tripping Daisy’s Sonic Bloom, and The Psychedelic Furs’ Love My Way on the EP Wait. And I always love a little Ride Captain Ride.

Side note about the rockin‘ movie (and soundtrack) Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The Spree’s cover of Wig in a Box appears on a benefit album of the same name, along with other covers (by Bob Mould, The Breeders, Frank Black, Sleater-Kinney, Spoon, Ben Folds, and voice by Stephen Colbert long before I knew who he was) of Hedwig songs such as Rufus Wainwright’s pleasant rendition of The Origin of Love.

Tim does an interview with You Ain’t No Picasso, where he talks about his life philosophy and also a subject dear to my heart, albums: “I love making albums. We are in a world of singles and more people are interested in picking little jewels off the record. But for me as an artist, to have my creative worth and feel worthy, it’s got to be more of a concept. It’s got to work all together as one unit in one listen.” And for me as a listener, I can’t grow love for artists or their bodies of work via singles or mp3s on shuffle. Only albums will do.