July 2007

The indie music scene is very much about mislabeled, misguided irony. But more so than just the catchy T-shirts, there’s genuine irony in the fact that indie bands are blowing jambands

We’re not a filter. We don’t pretend to be the first guys on the scene. We won’t find you the hot new band that’ll probably suck in two weeks time. What we do

Earlier today we wrapped up our not-so-live Live Earth coverage with a round-up of links and videos from around the world wide netweb. But plenty of non-Gore shit went down this weekend, so check out this other linkage as well…

• Click here to stream Flight of the Concords’ World Cafe appearance
• New studio album: Foo Fighters aim to mix Steely Dan with No Means No
• Prince rocked First Avenue on Sunday morning…until the cops came
• Where’s Cactus? He’s sharing the demo of Phish’s Simple on his MySpace
• Funky 16 Corners shares some Old School Hammond
• IckMusic kicks down some Parliament Funkadelic
• Buffalo Tom is back after a nine-year hiatus with a new album
• The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde opens a vegetarian restaurant in Akron
• DeRo enjoyed the Police at Wrigley — well, for the most part
• Nickel Creek has added some more dates to their pre-hiatus tour
• More Guitar Hero controllers are coming out everyday
• Blender looks at 100 Days That Changed Music
• David Gilmour is coming out with a live DVD
• R.E.M. wrapped up their week of gigs in Dublin
• A Black Sabbath bootleg from a forgotten era of the band
• Largehearted Boy is still tracking the best of the Smashing Pumpkins recordings that keep of getting uploaded to the Live Music Archive
• ’60 Variety Show dancers + Unk’s Walk It Out = Unbelievable Video
• Stream a soundboard recording of Friday night’s moe. show on Cape Cod
• Genesis-News talked to Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford backstage at a recent gig

And as usual on Monday mornings, read on after the jump for a full listing of setlists from the weekend — today’s batch includes Arcade Fire, Band of Horses, Brian Wilson, Foo Fighters, Genesis, Gov’t Mule, Prince, Rush and many, many more…

Live Earth played the center of the music world for more than 24 hours this weekend. While we can’t really say if the concerts saved the world — actually, we can say it: they

Here’s the way I see it: Various webcasts and television channels brought us a constant stream of top-drawer artists rocking crowds across continents and oceans. How on (live) Earth could Al Gore’s latest invention be anything but entertaining for the average viewer? Every time I turned back to it someone relatively cool straddled the stage. The artists may not have given their best performances to date (understatement of the year), yet I still enjoyed the day/night in toto.

That’s not to say I understood the point of this grandiose endeavor. Why would you fly hundreds of artists more than 220,000 miles around the world to make an old point everyone’s been hearing already for years? Will Lenny Kravitz and his directive of letting love rule really get me to take a shorter shower? Still, a global concert’s a global concert, and I ain’t complaining.

So read on after the jump for a slew of videos from yesterday’s intergalactic, 24-hour Live Earth concert, and check out what you may have missed. But before you do that, watch this backstage interview with the specially re-united Spinal Tap — did Rob Reiner just say Al Gore invented The Tap Reunion?