Last year, on March 8th, Ted Leo was playing in Ann Arbor, at a show I really wanted to see. There was something more important to do, however, and instead of catching Ted live, I saw my son enter life, a little early but more than ready. Not long before the delivery, my wife asked to hear her favorite TL song, “Me and Mia,” and the lyrics were just right: “Do you believe in something beautiful? Then get out and be it.” Maybe this is a good message for today, too, considering Blacksburg. It seems to me that the families of the victims, the students, those in grief and mourning need all of us to be more beautiful, to be better. I haven’t heard the new Ted Leo/RX album Living with the Living yet, but I’m hoping its filled with the powerful songwriting found on “Me and Mia” or “Ghosts” or “Biomusicology” — honest, straightforward and necessary examples of compassion, anger, hope, righteousness.
The Sons of Cain [MP3, 4.5MB, 160kbps]
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.(1954) [MP3, 4.3MB, 192kbps]
Shan’s original post: 04/22/05
This one’s unabashedly from the “New to Me” file. When I first heard of Ted Leo/Pharmacists about a year ago during a two-month stay in Washington D.C., I stayed away because the name sounded too much like some yokel cover band. But everyone around me seemed so pumped that the band was headlining the free concert at our humble film festival that I wandered by to check them out…and was duly impressed. Ted Leo serves D.C. well even if he doesn’t live there anymore, calling on a falsetto’d agit-prop style that may remind you of D.C. indie godfather Ian MacKaye, yet the Pharmacists wrap Leo’s personal-to-political vocals in a pop-inflected shell that’s closer in sound to Capital City vets Unrest and Velocity Girl. The songs aren’t coming to 3hive from straight out of the proverbial wrapper, but there’s plenty of it for the taking (and more on their website), and if it’s new to you too then all the better.
The Metasciences = super-duper lo-fi, boy-girl, brainiac geek-themed pop. There are folks out there who love this already, without even downloading a track, and you know it. The entire Pencils Down album is available for free download (of course) and a fine interview with the band (Ruth Barabe and Daniel Kibbelsmith) is up at 
Like most people, I imagine, I go through serious phases where all I want to do is immerse myself in the Midwest. Living in Michigan and rarely traveling outside my area code makes this quite easy. And so, the landscape (flat), the language (flat), the food (fat), the culture (forlorn) all feel like home to me. Hayward Williams is from Milwaukee, hence he’s a Midwesterner, so it’s kind of like we’re related. That’s why these tracks below, from his albums Trenchfoot and Another Sailor’s Dream sound so right, to me at least. “Redwoods” is my jam for the day, even if we don’t have a tree a third of one’s height here.
Mark Kozelek from Red House Painters. Josh Hayden from Spain. John Prine (without the country). Mazzy Star (but not a girl). Nick Drake. Bob Dylan. Richard Hawley. Classic sad singer-songwriter material, quiet and mellow soul-searching, like the best ’60s slow-pop. These tracks are for the long drive, the deep, dark night, the El trip home from the bar alone. “Darlin” and “The Nights are Cold” are my favorites, or let’s make it favourites, from this forlorn Brit. Cheers.
Like that sullen kid in high school who was aggressively straight edge and pissed off because no one else knew what it meant, the one who deliberately got every question wrong on the ACT because it’s harder than getting every question right, like Minor Threat 25 years earlier (jeez, is it already that long?), The Thermals have something to say and they want to make sure you don’t miss it. Offering loud, sloppy, aggressive “post-pop-punk” as they like to call it, this Portland band’s brand of anti-establishment, high-octane anger is gaining so much ground it made The New York Times a few weeks ago. The top two tracks below are from their most recent effort, The Body, The Blood, The Machine, recorded by Fugazi’s Brendan Canty. (See, there is a Minor Threat connection.)
School of Rock was on cable over the weekend, right about the time I started listening to Martin Sexton’s new album Seeds, and I couldn’t help but make a comparison. Powerful, funky soul-pop instead of face-melting rock, a band of adults (presumably) instead of Dewey’s / Ned’s 10 year olds — well, maybe that which draws Martin Sexton and Jack Black together in my mind is simply a similar physical appearance. Oh yeah, and total sincerity in expressing the joy of music. The five tracks below, from five different albums, are awesomely and gloriously full of Sexton’s soul, and you can take that line any way you want.
Clay’s posting of this 
I’ve been wanting to write up a celebratory post for my 3hive brother Shan, who’s a recently new daddy with a beautiful son. This one isn’t; more accurately, this post does not link to the songs of happy, carefree love that I’d really hoped to offer. The Finches are all about simplicity and sincerity, but often to a degree that is far more forlorn than ecstatic. Even so, “Daniel’s Song” — from the band’s EP Six Songs — is so haunting and powerful and rich that I can’t help but give it to Shan as a grounding device, a reminder that sad realities have their own beauty. I’m an only child, so I’ll never really know the kind of sibling love that Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs and Aaron Morgan sing about here, but I hope to God that my daughter and son get it, understand and feel it, one of these days. And I hope your boy does too, Shan. Peace.
Andrew Bird is back, with a new album — Armchair Apocrypha — to be released in a month or so, a prominent SXSW appearance, late-night TV gigs and a big tour (dates & locales 
Clay’s posting of