Joyless Pleasure – The Horrorist by thingstocome

As I slept last night my new album Joyless Pleasure was moved from the iTunes staging area where new MP3s get prepared for their lives on people harddrives and marked available. Each song took more inspiration and effort than I care to share. You my dear listener are supposed to think it was effortless and that I possess some magic music making power. Truthfully I picked the times when I was feeling the most crazy, upset or happy and forced myself into the corner studio.

I love to talk about songwriting and music tech so it was difficult not to post each one of these songs here as I finished them and tell you the story behind the lyrics and what production techniques I used. In the following couple of weeks if you don’t mind I will go into detail on some of the songs. Of course this is part promotion but it’s also to keep the “I released an new album” feeling going a little longer. So as younger folk say plz leave comments and plz retweet! Buy it or steal it but whatever you do please help me spread it around.

“The Horrorist new album “Joyless pleasure” is out today on Things to Come records. Softer and surprisingly romantic but still full of energy and extremely tortured. You can’t put one style tag on the album. In the 1st track “Modern” the voice will make you think of Ian Curtis, Joy Division. “Joyless pleasure” has a high Depeche Mode feel with ultra pure and detailed synths sounds and effects. “Darkling Lullaby”, “Love sick” and “Lovely Sweet” are islands in The Horrorist universe as they are not dance tracks. “Hostage” takes us on an electroclash direction and “I stand with you” in pure EBM style with a Nitzer Ebb impression. An album more mature than ever, more melancholic. Even if we can compare some songs to other people’s sounds, there is one thing that will always belong to The Horrorist and be unique like this album: it’s his strange stories. Joyless Pleasure is like a jewelry piece but in electronic music.” – morganistik.com

Available now: iTunes Amazon MP3 Amazon CD

We all love blogs because they give us a quick fix of hot info. A little more than a blurb a little less than an article. A break from the sequencer and comping vocals. Yes we all take too many of these breaks but hey it’s fun and sometimes we actually learn something! Do you know about music blogs? MP3 blogs? Blog labels? Honestly I’ve just been turned on to these in a big way. This is where the hip cool people hang (I think?!). I’m not going to delve into copyright stuff here because it doesn’t take too much time viewing any of these blogs to realize you can steal the music off the sites easily. If you want to get into that discussion head over to my post titled “What if music should be free?“.

A great example of a hip music blog is missingtoof.com. Bright graphics, flyer’s for events where everyone is on cocaine and DJ mixes compressed so loudly your teeth hurt are the norm here. At first the lingo will make you wonder if it’s an English speaking website. Despite that, keep reading because these are music lovers sharing with you! I’ve discovered more new music here than searching Amazon.com by a long shot. I also now have a never ending supply of said DJ mixes for the gym.

Want something more indie? Stereogum.com is the place. It’s basically the Austin, Texas, Seattle and any other cool rock town music scene in blog form. The writers here always let you into the story with a bit of history on the band. Forget the pretentious Pitchfork review site and crew and spend more time at Stereogum.

Want a user driven music blog Digg style? Then run to Fairtilizer.com where I recently discovered the Swedish band Six Figure Transatlantic and their incredible cover version of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. I hope Fairtilizer keeps growing because with a voting system good music gets noticed without big marketing budgets. This is the way it should be no?

Here’s a few more I know of:

• bigstereo.net
• discobelle.net
• blog.electriksuicide.com
• getweird.wordpress.com
• drdrt.com

There is a master music blog site that grabs audio from all over the music blogoshpere called The Hype Machine. It’s a bit more aggregator and impersonal but if new audio is all that matters to you then its a must view.

Lastly, I would like to point out that some of these blogs are highly influential and as a musician it could do you a lot of good to have your music on them. Apparently many musicians are already fighting to get noticed by bloggers. Check out this article at Puddlegum.com titled “Ten ways to get music bloggers to notice your email”.

Do you know any cool music blogs not listed here?

photo credit: gtmcknight