Roxy Music – Love Is The Drug

I have a long commute, normally spending between 2 and 2.5 hours in the car daily. While I do listen to my share of radio programming, it is often the case that I revert to per-recorded music when I grow bored with on-air offerings.

One of the MP3 discs that I recorded for October’s Pacific-Northwest trip of last year contained a greatest hits collection from Roxy Music. I honestly can’t get into much of the music but one of the tracks is spectacular. The 1975 track Love is the Drug has some great elements including the intro walking/driving sequence taken from the movie Duel, a fantastic bass line, simplistic yet effective guitar, and Bryan Ferry’s vocals. The elements are interesting individually but are even stronger when combined.

As a bonus, the official video for the song is a spotlight on excesses of the past, not one of them looks completely sober or drug free.

Spotify

I really like Spotify, I understand why there is so much hype about it.  That hype is well deserved.

I’ve been on other cloud based music services and all of them had at least one thing that made me go back to collecting mp3s.  Last.fm had a somewhat limited catalog, Slacker was the same.  The main deterrent always seems to be the fact that although I could skip songs on playlists, I couldn’t choose specific songs.  It was almost like a mandatory party-mix mode with no repeat functionality.

The Spotify catalog is impressive enough that I can forgive the few holes I found.  I quickly found music I hadn’t heard in years (Wire – Pink Flag album for example) which made me smile  And the best part of the service is that I can easily choose specific versions of songs to play immediately.

Another thing that I think has been done well in this roll-out of Spotify is the ability to actively tie into today’s social networking apps. Facebook users can easily tie into their friends public music lists, and info about tracks can be posted to Twitter and Facebook. One thing that I hope is developed at time moves on is either a WordPress.com widget or the ability to export recently played tracks to a RSS feed (Last.fm holds edge there for now), either of which would push Spotify into even more information channels.

Spotify comes with different pricing plans including the free plan which I am currently on.  Paid services removes ads, can increase audio quality, provides mobile support, and allows storage of playlist tracks on either computer or mobile platforms.  I have a link to bypass the invite process (which has a several day queue at this point), contact me and I’ll shoot you the link.

Justin Timberlake – My Love (Oakenfold Remix)

I’m not a Justin Timberlake fan.  I have none of his albums, singles, or work physically or digitally.  I don’t dislike him either, I just realized a long time ago that his brand of pop both while in ‘N Sync and as a solo artist didn’t interest me.

I do have some of Paul Oakenfold’s stuff however.  Oakenfold’s remixes aren’t always better than the originals he starts with, but he does some interesting work.  I recently picked up the US version of Greatest Hits & Remixes and fired up Oakenfold’s remix of Justin Timberlake’s “My Love” (track 5).

Wow.

I’m not in the market for any more Timberlake nor any more Oakenfold either.  But this was an amazing effort that IMO made the song interesting and slightly addictive.  Give it a listen, its good!