I visit Bandcamp.com on a regular basis to find new artists and music, and I also have my music on there. If you haven’t heard of Bandcamp, it’s a website where you are able to stream music by artists who post their music. If you like what you hear, you can purchase that song or the entire album for the price indicated, or sometimes they’ll offer the music for free. You are able to download the music as MP3, OGG, FLAC, or other files that are to your liking. Some of the reviews I’ve done this year are of albums that are available on Bandcamp. If you are a fan of hard copy as I am, then you may also have the option to buy the music on vinyl, CD, or cassette when available.
I wish I could take credit for coming up with this idea, but I actually saw a “Bandcamp Recommendations” section at a great hard rock/metal blog called The Soda Shop. I’ve wanted to do a similar idea for my site, so when I saw The Soda Shop do it, I figured I could incorporate it here too. So allow me to give credit where credit is due.
For what I will call Bandcamp Suggestions, it will cover a wide range of musical styles, just like the music regularly covered here at ThisIsBooksMusic.com. As with my reviews and anything else I cover, if the cover, artist name, or title may not offer hints, you can see what genre the artist creates by looking at the header information.
Let’s begin with my first official “Bandcamp Suggestion”, with this one being hip-hop.
This one was suggested to me on Sunday evening by Twitter member PoSafeTweets. It is a rapper from St. Louis named Fletch, and what I immediately noticed about the cover to Conversations is its resemblance to album covers on the CTI label. I had to take a listen.
The tracks range from being highly polished to songs with a nice demo feel, not too raw but enough to where a listen will make you say “nah, I like how it sounds as is, no improvements necessary.” On one side, he’ll be funny and get into a deep discussion about penile implants, but on the flip side he’ll mark a new chapter in his life and get serious about the anticipation of fatherhood. It’s a decent basement-type album that doesn’t get big-headed, arrogant, or corny, just a casual “day in the life of” someone putting his thoughts into music and sharing it with the world. His 2001 album, Erase The Hate, is on the page too, and I love the confidence he shows off there. Download both for free.
http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=804172890/size=venti/bgcol=FFFFFF/linkcol=4285BB//
This Is Book's Music 