The AllMusic Guide, one of the most useful and informative sites on the internet, the data provider to your music app of choice and without question my favorite website since the mid-1990s, will be adding a few features soon – and dramatically updating its interface. On surface it appears the site will become more, well, app-like. Power users will experience an adjustment period. The site is in beta this very minute, and I am about to fire off an email to Hollywood Steve Huey to make sure he is beta testing and sending bugs over to the Rovi QA department.

I’m a bit of a UX junkie. Give me an organization that knows it has a format that works, avoids frivolousness, and only chooses to update its face when it has truly useful, necessary features coupled with serious business justification. (Losanjealous by contrast has never, ever updated our interface after nearly seven years as a blog. We have also never added truly useful features. In fact, over the years we’ve gotten truly skilled at the opposite. I hereby challenge any organization to become more skilled at removing helpful features more quickly and effectively than Losanjealous LLC.)

Design aesthetics aside, here’s the AMG one-pager regarding what will change, and what will stay the same, on an encyclopaedic music website near you soon:
»continue reading AMG to Update Interface

Cut it out already! File under favorite/most puzzling press release of the day. This might even beat the one from the psychic we were sent last week. Pullquote of note:

““Eileen Carey’s voice is a droplet of honey dangling from a hive: glistening, all natural, and inviting…but don’t be fooled by the coating because the woman beneath is strong, confident, and just a little bit sassy!”

Country-Pop Recording Artist Selected To Supercuts Rock The Cut Artist Ambassador Program

Supercuts, one of the nation’s largest hair salon chains, has selected award-winning Country-Pop recording artist Eileen Carey as one of their newly-named “Rock The Cut” Artist Ambassadors.
As a “Rock The Cut” Artist Ambassador, Carey gets to share up-to-the-minute news, tour dates, and music with both her current fans and new ones via Supercut’s vast worldwide Social Media Network.
Log onto Eileen Carey’s Supercuts Rock The Cut page here and download her song “Faith” for free.
Carey will make a special appearance at the 4th Annual Summer Fest concert in Venice Beach this July and the Sawdust Art Festival in Laguna Beach in August, as well as releasing the follow-up album to her critically-acclaimed “Movin’ On.”

What The Press Is Saying About Eileen Carey And Her CD “Movin’ On:
»continue reading Supercuts Ambassador to Play Venice Beach July 29

Underneath the Sunset overpass and here I am now, back door, curbside, Glendale Boulevard, tri-wristband Echoplex guantlet chafing, regulating the blood to and fro my right hand. Three! Y’get one wristband to get in, one for the boozin’, one for the camera. Band it up and the fuck inside we go. Brian Lopez is finishing an opening set. He sounds alright. He is dressed flashy. The place is not too crowded. David Vandervelde is on next and he sounds great. And loud. His hair is one big long stringy mess of rock and roll, and he wears shades at 10pm, indoors. The place is moderately crowded. The next time I look up, Heartless Bastards have completed two songs and I am unable to move, for the front of the house is wall-to-wall people. Gone is the breezy elbow room of the Austin Convention Center’s Radio Day Stage, where I caught the band a couple weeks prior. I pick a trajectory near the side wall, do a sort of shuffly shoving-sidestep maneuver two dozen times in a row, veer slightly left and eventually find myself near the back bar. This is both a good and a bad thing: Good, it’s not suffocatingly crowded. Bad, the retaining wall directly in front of of the soundboard hides much of the stage, and one is forced to stare at an artistic rendition of Colonel Sanders in a g-string instead of the band providing the soundtrack.

G-stringed Sanders and fire marshall concerns aside, Erika Wennerstrom is top of it with this lineup tonight, belting it out, beefy vocals front and center, comfortably and confidently surfing on a trapezoidal soundspace incorporating Marc Bolan’s riffs, Joan Jett’s vocal punch (if Joan Jett could be slightly mysterious, lyrically speaking), Ann Wilson’s fearless wails and perhaps Bonnie Raitt’s common sense and down-home sensibilities. Goodness! This sound is waist-deep in the 1970s. Guitarist Mark Nathan pulls off a tasteful solo now and again – harnessed, restrained, maybe, but it works wonders and let’s face it, who on that stage would not be playing second fiddle to Erika’s voice? The entire band sounds tight and polished as they work their way through a set heavy with songs from Arrow, the new album on Partisan label. Those songs are more or less translated live note for note, inflection for inflection, and as that’s what we’ve all more or less assembled to hear, we all enjoy ourselves. Even the Colonel. Expect 2012 to be a breakout year for Erika and company.

Heartless Bastards play Conan tonight.

• It is fun to tell people “!!! will rock the Doritos Machine at midnight.”
• Jesus and Mary Chain were great; no chance for photos. It was so crowded I focused on drinking vodka.
• A great moment was running into Jim DeRogatis in the elevator and chatting about my home state and his Lips book.
• I would like back a portion of the hour of life that I spent in the Jack White line.
• Lionel Richie trotted out Kenny Rogers to sing “Lady” and the crowd went nuts. Afterward, Lionel then had to tell the crowd to stop screaming for Kenny because they’d come for Commodores songs.
• Sleigh Bells played the same hall as Lionel – but filled it. Where is the justice.
• Nothing says SXSW Thursday like a Fader Fort VIP BBQ, the Wunderbar lunch, SESAC brunch, British Embassy, Oklahoma Party and more filling your gut within a half-hour timeframe as you run from venue to venue between 12 and 12:30pm
• My favorite bites came from the Squarespace truck, Taste of Hamburg shack, and the backyard food truck at CTC Garden on Thursday, March 15.
• I may have in fact retired my SXSW career at 1AM, Sunday morning 18 March 2012. (I say this every year.)

»continue reading SXSW Music 2012 Photos: Leftover Cuties, Made in Israel Tel Aviv Beach Party, Brush Park East Tent, Friday March 16

»continue reading SXSW Music 2012 Photos: Tribes @ Buffalo Billiards, Frye Day Party, Friday March 16