Hindustan Times
Last weekend, I did something that is totally at odds with what Download Central is supposed to do. Instead of sitting at my computer and scouring the Internet for downloads or streams of new music, I actually went out and watched a rock band performing live. The gig was at Delhi’s kitschy Hard Rock Café (but then aren’t all HRCs meant to be kitschy?) and the band was Hurricane Bells who hail from Brooklyn, New York.
About Sanjoy Narayan
Sanjoy Narayan has a day job as Hindustan Times’ Editor-in-Chief but he’s incurably addicted to discovering new music via the Internet. His tastes run towards independent and lesser known musicians and he likes to check out almost every genre that is served up by today’s mushrooming breed of rock and pop ensembles.
He’s been collecting music ever since his teens—beginning with vinyls and then cassette tapes. Now, he samples, tastes and downloads music off the Internet, picking up podcasts, rare bands and unsigned musicians with big potential. With the bits and bytes burgeoniong, Sanjoy is slowly running out of place to store his growing hoard of disk drives but, thankfully, not his obsessive enthusiasm to hear new music.
(2 votes, average: 3.5 out of 5)
Loading ...Posted by Sanjoy Narayan on Saturday, February 6, 2010 at 4:58 pm
Filed under Download Central · Tagged Blockhead, Cat Power, Download Central, Eddie Vedder, Generation Sex, Gonna See My Friend, Hard Rock Café, Hurricane Bells, Kiss The Anus of A Black Cat, Longwave, Morrissey, Nummer 3, Pearl Jam, Pitchfork, PopMatters, Rolling Stones, Secrets Are Sinister, Steve Schiltz, Talking Heads Live, The Cold Has Killed Us, The Divine Comedy, The Hold Steady, The Killers, The Kings of Leon, The National, The Smiths, Tonight Is The Ghost, U2, Which One of You Jerks Drank My Arnold Palmer, ‘Satisfaction’
The first Sigur Rós album I heard was Ágætis byrjun, which means ‘an all right start’ in Icelandic. Sigur Rós are an Icelandic band that plays a genre of music that is classified (by those who love to classify such things) as post-rock, minimalist, ethereal music. I found Sigur Rós’s music mainly downtempo and soothing but also sad at times. I heard several of their albums, including the curiously named () (released in 2002), Takk (in 2005) and Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (2008). That last title translates into ‘with a buzz in our ears we play endlessly’. Nice, isn’t it? I don’t know why, but the band’s music sometimes reminded me of a huge, widescreen film where the camera is static and the visual is of a wide open landscape.
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(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5) Loading ...Posted by Sanjoy Narayan on Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 8:03 pm
Filed under Download Central · Tagged (), Ágætis byrjun, All Songs Considered, Audience of One, Behave Yourself, Bobby Charles, Boy Lilikoi, Britt Daniel, Cold War Kids, Contra, Daniel and Eno, David "Honeyboy" Edwards, David Edwards, ethereal, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Gimme Fiction, Go, Hospital Beds, Jim Eno, Jónsi Birgisson, Loyalty to Loyalty, Martin Scorcese, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, minimalist, NPR, Pitchfork, post-rock, Radiohead, Roamin' and Ramblin Blues', Sigur Rós, Sonic Youth, Spoon, Street People, Takk, The Band, The Last Waltz, Thom Yorke, Transference, Vampire Weekend
Does Jeffrey Simmons ring a bell? No? What about Frank Zappa? I’m sure you know Zappa. His blistering guitar, sarcastic lyrics and the let-it-all-hang-out attitude? The connection between Simmons and Zappa came up when I chanced upon a solo album by Simmons called Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up.
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(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5) Loading ...Posted by Sanjoy Narayan on Saturday, January 23, 2010 at 7:32 pm
Filed under Download Central · Tagged A Girl Like You, Contra, Cream, Download Central, Edwyn Collins, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Hurricane Bells, I Feel Free, Jack Bruce, Jeff Simmons, Jeffrey Simmons, Joe's Garage, Kafka, La Marr Bruister, Let 'Em Roll, Living Life Backwards, Longwave, Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up, Pete Brown & Piblokto!, Piblokto!, Steve Schiltz, Straight Records, Sunshine of Your Life, Things May Come and Things May Go but the Art School Dance Goes on Forever, Unchained Melody, Vampire Weekend, White Room
After a rather loud beginning to the New Year, when I spent a week blasting the cobwebs of my mind out with heavy black metal bands (as I wrote last time), things have turned much mellower. I’ve turned to alternative folk, blues-infused rock and even some experimental music.
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(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5) Loading ...Posted by Sanjoy Narayan on Saturday, January 16, 2010 at 6:13 pm
Filed under Download Central · Tagged Adultcontemporaryrootsrockbluesjazzfunk, All Hour Cymbals, Aloha, Ambling Alp, Animal Collective, Billy Martin, blues-rock, Chris Wood, Combustication, East Nashville Skyline, electronica, Excitement Plan, funk, hip-hop, Hot Fish Laundry Mat, Hot Fish…, Jim White, John Medeski, King Johnson, Loaded, Martin & Wood’s, Medeski, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Moonless March, Odd Blood, Oliver Wood, The Talking Heads, The Wound That Never Heals, Todd Snider, Tom Waits, Uninivisible, Vic Chestnutt, Ways Not to Lose, Yeasayer
I’m an earphones junkie. Ninety-nine percent of the time I spend listening to music I do it by using earphones. It wasn’t always like that. The move to earphones came with the advent of the mp3 format and the pretty swift move from collecting music in physical formats (CDs, vinyl and tapes) to collecting them in mp3, FLAC and other non-physical formats.
(5 votes, average: 4.6 out of 5) Loading ...Posted by Sanjoy Narayan on Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Filed under Download Central · Tagged Attila Csihar, Behold…The Arctopus, Big Church, Black Metal, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Dimensional Bleedthrough. Long Legged Woman, Download Central, Dysrhythmia, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Krallice, Led Zep, Led Zeppelin, Mayhem, Metal, Monoliths & Dimensions, Neil Young, Nirvana, Nobody Knows This Is Nowhere, Orthrelm, Sun, Sunn O))), tech metal
