I have spent enough hours in the past few days to find more free, legal music downloads, in order to comprise an ultimate top-100 of such music. Having listened to hundreds (thousands?) of available songs from many labels and band sites, I’ve come to realize that most of the music out there is actually indie rock (as in the genre, with the U.S. meaning), rather than alternative rock.

For example, there are way more copycats of Iron & Wine, Fleet Foxes, or Arcade Fire, than there are of AFI, The Strokes, The Offspring, or Green Day. Thing is, both myself and JBQ are more at the alternative hard/rock side of things than the folk-inspired indie rock that the independent scene is filled up with. There are really not many unsigned bands out there that sound like the kind of music we listen to San Francisco’s alternative FM station “Live 105.3“. The few bands that seem to be able to write such music are snatched immediately by the big-4 majors.

Two things are happening here:
1. The musicians that are able to write the kind of music we want to listen to so we can bang our heads and still keep the melody in-tact, are very few.
2. The world is moving towards a different style of music, and the indie scene is the one that’s driving it. In that case, JBQ and I are just old, and we don’t get it anymore.

There are of course unsigned bands that style-wise are in the middle of these two kinds of music, e.g. Ag Silver, The A-Sides, Capital Lights, The Crash Moderns, Death In The Park, Drist, Longwave, Magnolia Sons, The New Frontiers, Seabird, TV/TV, We Shot The Moon, Wiretree etc, but these good ones are also few. Funnily, these guys aren’t as easily snatched by the majors, and yet their music is — to me — much more accessible than the folk-style indie rock that the internet is filled with.

Finally, there is something very interesting I noticed about me these past few days while digging for good music. The kind of “alternative indie rock” Northern Europeans create is much more pleasant to my ears than the one American musicians do. For example, The Raveonettes, The Caesars, The Sounds, Lykke Li, sound to me much more pleasant than Flight of The Conchords, or The Decemberists do. Maybe there is something to be said about the music influences someone is growing up with, and maybe that’s the reason we don’t like the US-style of folk-sounding indie rock.

Sure enough, we can’t stand country music either. Ok, except the Blitzen Trapper, a band that defies categorization to this day.

The last “Lost” episode of the season was last night, which I watched on my DVR this morning as I am still so jet-lagged since our return from Europe, that I didn’t have the strength to watch it live. The finale was good, but it wasn’t super. Nevertheless, it was definitely better than any other Lost episode this year, and better than any other show on TV in general. Spoilers following.

I think it’s clear right now that the Lost grand story is nothing but a “game” between two ancient, omnipotent but equally strong forces: a benevolent and an evil one. Possibly Osiris and Anubis, or Jacob and Esau, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that through the eons they attract certain people to the island to play their game. The humans are pawns. As Jacob said, there’s only one end to the game, but each time new blood arrives to the island, there’s progress.

Other things we learned: the uber-sexy Richard was made ageless by Jacob, after he arrived with the Black Rock slave ship (although we kind of knew that given the clothes he wore when he meets young Ben in season 3).

For me, the worst part of the finale was the Bernard/Rose scene, which felt like a throwback to all of us who have been asking where they went for the whole season. It was a cheesy scene, and a very unbelievable one too. Either the Dharma or the Hostiles would have found them in 3 years time in that easy to reach cabin. Totally an illogical scene. Bernard/Rose *and* a few more 815 survivors should have simply be part of the Hostiles by now, that would have been a much more natural happening. Either that, or they should have been hiding in the caves, definitely not in that cabin in plain sight.

One more unbelievable point is having the Dharma village built on top of a huge ancient Egyptian temple and never taking notice. That was some stupid writing.

As for what’s going to happen, I think that the “incident” happening will result in our heroes moving forward in time (the ones around the Swan station, so possibly it won’t happen for Rose/Bernard). The fade to white (instead of the usual black), it’s a hint of the heroes jumping back to their regular time. And the detonation of the bomb always happened, Jack didn’t change a thing (the closed captions on TV mentioned the explosion, for those who aren’t sure if it took place). They will end up in 2008 or something, at the same time as everyone else, to take part at the story’s last act. We have enough hints that the nuclear detonation always happened, because of the big cement wall in the Swan, the Hazmat suits, the radiation-affected pregnancies.

This all sounds good, but I feel that having the heroes spending a whole season in the Dharma time just to get back to present time didn’t serve the grand story of Lost. I mean, we just had some people going back to the ’70s, and then coming back. They didn’t change anything that didn’t already happen and we couldn’t have watched via flashbacks. Except some character evolution (namely Sawyer’s), the whole “travel back in time” served no purpose in the grand scheme of things. And I am pretty sure we will never learn why the island pulled Jack/Kate/Sayid/Hurley back in time either — other than just to be able to do some episodes for the sake of making some episodes. The overall mythology/timeline was not affected, so having watched season 5, I feel a bit cheated. Sure, it’s cool to see the Dharma world, but not at the expense of a storyline that doesn’t feel negated at the very end.

Having said all that, Lost remains the best of the best on TV right now. I was watching “24″ on the DVR the other night, and was having iTunes loaded too checking out some songs. JBQ, who was sitting next to me, made the sarcastic remark “oh, I see you enjoy that show a lot, you can’t take your eyes away”.

A new Brazilian series about homosexuality. Shot with an HV30 and a 35mm adapter. It’s so cool to see more serious works using a $500 camera. It’s a new age for video, and the HV series started it. Closed caption and better quality here.

On the subject of homosexuality, here’s another amazingly beautiful video from my online friend Matt.

It’s Fall Out Boy. I can’t get their music at all. It feels like I am eating McDonalds.

The All American Rejects are not great either, but definitely better than Fall Out Boy. I just don’t get why these people are famous. They feel more like sleezy pop than alternative rock to me. Then again, I don’t get hip-hop/rap and Jazz either.

I am listening to quite some music on my iPod Touch recently, and I must say that the only songs that make me tap my toes and bang my head are these from Cloud Cult. Just like with “Lost”, it destroyed my ability to like any new TV shows, Cloud Cult has destroyed my ability to like any other music. Cloud Cult is so complex, twisty, and new, that everything else sounds pedestrian.

From wikipedia: “RCRD LBL is an exclusively-online record label that offers all of its music for free via Mp3 downloads, while generating 100% of its revenue through advertising and sponsorship. Developed and run by Downtown Records CEO Josh Deutsch and Engadget founder Peter Rojas.”

The site adds new songs every day for free, legal, download, very often from well known artists (e.g. recently from Wolfmother, The Sounds etc) as well as indie artists. You can download for example one of the best songs of 2007 (according to critics), Blitzen Trapper’s “Wild Mountain Nation“. Today, I added quite a few of their free songs on my “best free songs list” to save you the hunting for the best of the best.

Recently they also started offering for free Bloc Party’s “Signs” remix, which is a fantastic track, and way better than the original mix. So good, that the band will release the remix as single soon. Here’s the official video for the song, as good as the song. There are a few scenes in it though that are not safe for work, so be aware!

As I am writing this there are tears in my face. I am listening to the song “When Water Comes to Life” from Cloud Cult’s latest album “Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes)”. I don’t know if it’s the sad violin riffs or the lyrics that make me cry, or maybe both. The song was written by the Cloud Cult’s main singer/songwriter, Craig Minowa, for his lost young son. Actually, the whole album is about dealing with that loss. This is one of the few albums that I pay extra attention to the lyrics.

Also, this is one of the best albums I have ever listen to in my life. It is one of the most different albums I have ever encountered. It is experimental alright, but in a good way — it’s actually listenable. It wakes up weird feelings in me, something that other albums just don’t. It accesses weird parts of my brain that other artistic works don’t. Some critics have compared the Cloud Cult to Flaming Lips and Arcade Fire, but I think that the Cloud Cult are one step beyond them with this album. The Flaming Lips’ best album, the “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots”, sounds self-indulgent compared to this album, and Arcade Fire’s both albums just feel “indie rock with a twist” instead. In fact, I *don’t* like the previous albums of Cloud Cult as much as this one, exactly because they were also “indie rock with a twist”. This album instead is more twist than indie rock, but without losing its solid harmony and melody. It is musically complex with many genres popping up in a single song (including classical, rock, hip-hop, electronic, folk), sometimes there’s no repeating chorus, and in general, the songs don’t follow the buildup-chorus/rinse-repeat pattern found on most pop songs. Some critics didn’t get the album at all, but the ones who did, put it up on their list of their top-10 albums of last year, along Blitzen Trapper’s “Furr” (another crazy/good album)! This is the kind of music that people will be listening to in the year 2030.

“Feel Good Ghosts” is of course not for everybody. It’s like sushi. You can’t just “like” sushi when you are over 25 years old and you are tasting it for the first time (like in my case). 95% chance is that you will hate it. Sushi grows on you though. You will have to “get it” to “like it”. Without “getting it”, there’s no “liking it”. Same with this album, you will have to be in the right state of mind, and yes, with the right cultural background to really appreciate it. Best songs in the album: Everybody Here Is a Cloud (free), The Tornado Lessons (free), When Water Comes to Life (also free), Its What You Need (I wish it was longer than its mere 1′:07″), Hurricane and Fire Survival Guide, and Love You All. The rest are also good, but they require extra brain power. But of course, in this specific case, it’s about listening to the whole album, not just a few songs.

The weirdness of the band doesn’t stop in the music though. Check this out:
- Craig Minowa lives in his organic farm, somewhere so far inland that there are no maps (the MTV crew had trouble finding him when they were trying to do a feature for the band).
- He uses recyclable materials for most of his belongings, along geothermal energy rather than electricity.
- His non-profit label uses recycled materials for its CDs and donates all its profits to charity.
- For every 1000 CDs sold, the band plants 10 trees, to absorb any pollutants that their manufacturing might have introduced.
- The band uses a biodiesel van, and it has solar panels on top of it.
- The band also has non-musicians: two painters. They paint while the band is playing live, and then they auction the paintings on the spot.
- This is the last Cloud Cult album, possibly ever. The band members will now focus on family, they said.

JBQ tonight asked me to buy “Use somebody” by Kings of Leon (a popular hit rock song) on iTunes. I was in the midst of listening to the Cloud Cult tonight when I loaded up the iTunes Store to buy the song he requested. I previewed it, as I always do. And while I like rock music a lot, and I like the particular song too, while previewing it amidst the Cloud Cult’s listening session, I felt that I was purchasing some shallow, flat, bad-taste, kits Britney Spears crap. And I even like Kings of Leon.

Once you go Cloud Cult (and sushi), you can’t go back. True story.

I cleaned up my massive indie collection today and kept the songs I like only. My library now consists of 5 GBs of iTunes purchases, 2 GBs of free indie promotional tracks, and ~500 MBs of CD rips. We have 35+ GBs worth of rips from our 400 bought CDs, but I haven’t move them over from JBQ’s library yet — JBQ is the Amazon CD guy and I am the iTunes gal in terms of our music purchases. There’s a small fortune we have spent for music in the last 10 years.

So, while I was cleaning up my indie collection all day today, I thought I should put together a top-60 list with the best of the best for you, complete with download links! The promotional mp3 tracks below are given away, legally as far as I can tell, either by the bands themselves via their site or their iLike/Garageband pages, or by their label, or by their marketing/PR teams.

Please do download these a-m-a-z-i-n-g tracks and check these artists out! And if you like their work, don’t forget to buy too! Alphabetically:

UPDATE: THE MUSIC LIST HAS BEEN MOVED HERE.

Some of the best songs I have heard in the last 1-2 years that most people never heard of. I wish these songs could get some radio play. Check them out on iTunes or youtube.

Let Me Go On – Seabird (alternative rock)
Big Coat – Wiretree (indie pop/rock)
Make Things Happen – Wiretree (alternative progressive)
Better Than Life – People In Planes (alternative progressive)
Jails Everywhere – Magnolia Sons (rock)
Sirens In the Deep Sea – Longwave (shoegazing)
The Devil and the Liar – Longwave (shoegazing)
Fallen – Death In The Park (indie rock)
Nailbiter – Damiera (alternative)
Even Though She Knows – Cold Hot Crash (alternative)
Work It Out – Capital Lights (powerpop)
Mile Away – Capital Lights (powerpop)
Frank Morris – Capital Lights (powerpop)
Save – Timmy Curran (singer/songwriter)
Slow – Timmy Curran (singer/songwriter)
Can You Feel It – Timmy Curran (singer/songwriter)
Sci-Fi Kid – Blitzen Trapper (indie rock)
Gold for Bread – Blitzen Trapper (indie folk rock)
Quiet Nights, Quiet Places – Malbec (electro-pop)
If Looks Could Kill – Music For Animals (pop-rock)
Robot High School – My Robot Friend (electro-rock)
Man Down – The New Frontiers (alternative)
The Keys – Dolorata (classic rock)
Shaky Like The Flu – Loquat (ambient rock)
Harder Hit – Loquat (ambient rock)
Bright Side – Rantings of Eva (alternative melodic rock)
Fracture – Rantings of Eva (alternative melodic rock)
Need – Dangermaker (pop-rock)
Sleep On It – TV/TV (Powerpop)