One aspect of this blog that I am very proud of is the fact that I take the time to listen to the vast majority of the music I post about. It might seem like a small thing, but the fact is that there is an enormous amount of free music out there, and it would be very easy to simply post a huge list of links every day, leaving it up to the reader to decide what is worth clicking on. Writing reviews of the music I post about helps me to make sense of it all, and I hope that it allows you to decide if something is worth your while to download or if you should just wait until the next post.
With an introductory paragraph like that, you probably already know what I'm about to do. Yes, I'm going to post about something I haven't completely listened to, but I think you'll agree that it is for good reason. The artist in question is Two Seconds Away, a duo from Kansas City that has been releasing music for free, one song each week for the last year, as part of a project called New Music Monday. The only real catch was that each week's song was only available for that week, after which it was replaced with the next week's song.
You might rightfully ask why I haven't written about these guys before - like, when it would actually have been possible to download new songs as they were released. The answer is quite simple: because I hadn't actually heard of them until this past weekend, when a news article informed me not only of their existence, but of the fact that they would be re-releasing all 52 of these songs for a limited time (a total of 52 hours, to be exact). The article stated that this giveaway would last from September 25 to September 27, but when I visited their website I couldn't find anything except the final song there. I decided to start following them on Twitter to find out what was going on, and they soon informed me that the giveaway would actually be starting today and continuing until Wednesday.
I have at least been listening to this music as I've been preparing this post, and I have been really enjoying it. A lot of it seems to have a laid back, almost folk feel to it, but there are times when distorted guitars and keyboards add more dynamics to the music. I hear some Edwin McCain, James Taylor, and even Chris Gaines (Garth Brooks' short-lived pop rock alter ego) in some of these songs. For music that was created under such tight time constraints, the songs are all very well written, and the production is very clear and clean as well. It should be interesting to hear what happens when they rework some of these songs into a proper album, which is their current plan.
Okay, the more time you spend reading this, the less time you have to download the music. If you haven't done so already, please head over to their newsletter subscription page, enter your name and email address, and once your subscription has been confirmed, you can download the music in 4 .zip files. The total size of all of the files is about 303 MB. Just get it downloaded for now, and then you can take all the time you want to listen to it. I hope you enjoy it - I'm up to the beginning of the third volume now, and it has been very enjoyable for me so far. Happy listening!
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2 comments:
Thanks for the really nice write up Jeff! Glad you've been enjoying the tunes, and thanks for helping us trouble shoot ;)
My pleasure - really. :)
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