My love weighs a ton
Full disclosure: I get a lot of musical inspiration, including for this here blog, from Salon.com's Audiofile column. Written by Thomas Bartlett, who is in the excellent band Doveman, Audiofile is a column that features not only insightful writing but a daily download, usually from an artist's or label's site.
This is how I recently discovered Portastatic, a band featuring Superchunk's Mac McCaughn. As Conor "Bright Eyes" Oberst writes in his press bio for the band, "[The band's new record] expands on themes of disillusionment, frustration with the world, love of friends and family, the battle between regret and hope, and the blurry stream of events that connect the past to the present and bring an increasingly terrifying future into focus." Sounds fun, right?
Well, it is, if this track is any indication:
Portastatic - I Wanna Know Girls
It's just a solid, solid pop song, and I really like it. Bartlett calls it the "indie summer song of the year", and I'm having a hard time coming up with a better candidate; the jangle is contagious and the singing is sincere and heart-melting. I personally haven't heard the whole record, Bright Ideas, but I have no reason to believe it isn't super awesome.
Why not find out for yourself? You can order Bright Ideas from all sortsa places, like Merge Records and iTunes.