To spare you the potentially wasted minutes and near-certain embarrassment of acquiring crappy music, let’s put on our driving goggles, take a ride down the information superhighway and listen to some free music. Here’s what you should know about this week’s free songs from iTunes:
“1957”
Milo Greene
Milo Greene has a lush, full, organic sound replete with folky goodness. The juxtaposition of male and female vocalists gets repetitive during the verses but works well at other times; both singers are skilled and listenable individually, but the timbre and octave difference between them can be distracting when they sing together. The instrumentation is very clean and natural sounding — electric guitar, acoustic guitar and drums — but those instruments are used effectively to fill the space. The focus is on the vocals, of course, so there isn’t anything fancy happening on the instrumental side, but it’s solid and pleasant nonetheless. The overall impression is of a simpler, male/female duet version of the kind of indie folk played by Fleet Foxes or Bright Eyes.
Bottom line: Slick folk-pop for fans of artists like Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, or Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.
“Sixpack”
JEFF the Brotherhood
When it comes to garage rock duos, The Black Keys or the unfortunately defunct White Stripes come to mind. “Sixpack” proves that we shouldn’t forget JEFF the Brotherhood. This song opens with a huge, grinding electric guitar and never lets up. The guitar riff becomes murky at times but it never overwhelms the sound, seeming instead to stay at the bottom of the mix like a layer of black mud that the chameleonic vocals and crashing drumbeat skim over. The vocal style is familiar but hard to pin down. Reminiscent of The Clash at times and of The Shins at others, they seem to settle for a less-annoying version of Weezer. At two minutes and 32 seconds long, “Sixpack” is a flash of effective lo-fi rock music. “Get in, blow minds, get out” is the plan of attack here, and it works very well.
Bottom line: This song is for fans of garage rock, lo-fi, or just short-and-sweet rock songs in general.
