Free legal albums!

The Mural And The Mint is a an indie/indie-pop band from Philadelphia in the United States, and it is honestly some of the best indie-pop I have heard in a good while.

In total, they have two full-length releases available for free on their website, and so if you enjoy this I highly recommend checking them out further and downloading their other album, Private Pockets – here.

As for this album, it is pretty impressive instrumentally. There is a good deal of variation between tracks and although it has a DIY sound to it, it never feels amateur at all. There is a male and a female vocalist. Sometimes they sign together, sometimes they don’t. Something for everyone! Instrument wise, we’ve got guitars, drums and pianos mostly, but also something I am sure is a ukelale at some points of the album. And it all sounds great together.

Unlike a lot of music one could classify has indie-pop, this is far from being a HAPPY YAY YAY album – but to me this is a good thing! It has its emotive moments, although there are upbeat tracks too if that’s all you want from this type of music. Something for everyone, pretty much.

This is an album that really can appeal to a hell of a lot of people.

The influences are diverse and it’s hard to fully classify it into just one or two genres. Art Boys Collection are from Austria…or rather, they were. You might notice when you start to listen to this that the sound quality isn’t amazing, and I am quite sure that reason is because this is a DIY-ish sounding release from the ’70s! And sadly, this is their only release.

But that’s OK because hey, it’s really good. The influences clearly range from The Beatles to psychedelic and progressive rock. Most songs however have enough of a pop aesthetic to keep them open to anyone enjoying.

The sound is very ’70s music wise. If you can get past the quality of the recording, this is a great album and something anyone who likes music from that era really needs to check out!

The Living Daylights are a pop-punk/rock band from England, and although they seem to be relatively popular, they’ve been kind enough to give us their album for free, yay!

Their website describes them as melodic hardcore – which they verge on at times, especially during the small moments that the vocalist becomes a bit gruffer – but mostly they’re closer to pop-punk, although a lot of that is due to the vocals, I admit, and I suppose if they could keep up the roughness I’d at least call it punk rather than pop-punk.

Regardless, they’re a very professional, well put together band and this is a good album. If you like a lot of pop-punk music these days, I’d go for this. I listen to a lot of this kind of music so its something I feel I can make judgements on better than most stuff I post, and although it doesn’t stand out above a lot of the stuff I listen to, it does fit well into it, and as such it’s a very worthwhile listen. The guys clearly have talent, and I very much look forward to seeing what they put out in the future.

But don’t just take my word for it. They’ve been endorsed by Mike Davis of Radio 1 and have even played Reading and Leeds festivals. If you think I talk shit and have no taste, then hopefully you can’t argue too much about what that means!

OK so I know I’ve been posting artists I’ve already posted before recently, but that’s only because so many are worth it! Loudog are a really awesome ska/punk band from Germany, and although they have only released stuff for free online, they seem to be becoming pretty well known, and have almost 70,000 listens on last.fm.

I’m posting about their earliest album here, but they have a more recent album on their website for download, which I assume is possibly even better than this if anything. You can find their albums here.

So yes, this is a typical ska/ska-punk record. Argubly it’s a bit more on the ska side than their later stuff, but it’s still punk enough to be ska-punk…in places.

As I said before, they are clearly very heavily influenced by Sublime, and that sound comes across strongest on this album. I guess they maybe drifted from that eventually and formed their own sound, but I’m not complaining about this record at all. The instrumentation is awesome and it’s got a very chilled sound. Highly enjoyable to listen to.

So this collection of songs confuses me slightly. All evidance I can find points to it being a legal download, but it’s so massive part of me thinks it just cannot be!

So for the first time I’m not 100% sure of a release I’m posting about, but there are no paid-for versions of it, and since the download link has been posted on many sites that would delete illegal stuff instantly, I’m 95% sure it’s OK.

I’ve posted a number of artists on this blog that I say sound a bit like Elliott Smith, or are clearly influenced by him, such as Matthew Solberg and Andy Wagner. If you’re a fan of Smith, you should check these artists out as you are jumping for joy over this collection.

So this is a massive collection of songs. It’s 6.55 hours long and comprises of 8 “discs”, which is a whopping 127 songs! Listening to it is no small undertaking, but if you’re an Elliott Smith fan, it is very much recommended.

You can get more information from the picture link. I don’t normally post updates as close to one another as these past two, but I figured this was worth getting excited about.

I was slightly torn about posting this album. I always wanted to keep this blog as accessible as possible, but sometimes one comes across an album that is very much good, but clearly not for everyone…and this is one such album.

Long Hair are well, I have no idea. I cannot for the life of me find out anything about this band, and thus have no idea who they are, where they’re from or how many are in the band. I can however tell you that their music is somewhat hard to define, although I’d say it’s a mixture of shoegaze, psychedelic rock (not all the way through, the the influence is definitely there in a lot of the electric guitar parts) and lo-fi folk.

It’s a pretty instrumental album, and is over an hour long. Vocals appear plenty, but each track is long and there’s a lot of focus on the instruments – which range from pianos to acoustic and electric guitars. In places it becomes almost dreamlike, while it others it becomes more noisy and will bring you back into full consciousness again (although never in a rough or shocking way; it’s very much progressive).

For some people, this is the type of thing you can turn up really loud and either lose yourself in or relax to. It’s good for having on in the background, but you’ll find you’re pulled to giving it your full attention time and time again. The highlight for me is Cross the Land. All songs have their appeal, however the guitar in this one I found stayed with me all night, and I was just itching to listen again with more attention.

The band has a good few other albums, but I’ll stick to posting this one for now as it seems to be the most well-executed.

I’ve posted a Crete Boom release before, and it was awesome, so I’m posting another one. You can find the other album here.

This one is pretty different genre-wise. While the previous one was swing, this is completely different. It’s got a blues/folk feel to it. I’m not sure why they decided to diverge away from the swing sound, but as much as I love swing, this is a pretty damn great album. There a slight jazz feel thrown in there too (and some rockabilly), and the different genres occasionally merge together – and always pretty well.

Maybe the band figured no one in this modern world is overly interested in seeing swing bands perform, which I guess is true. I hope they get a bit more well-known as a result. Despite the genre change, the track “Navy and Grey” from the swing release of the same title is on here, although I’d call it rockabilly more than I’d call it swing. I’m pretty sure it’s a somewhat different version anyway – with the swinginess possibly toned down (but not the fun).

You’ll notice on the download link there are a few other releases listed by the band. I haven’t got round to listening to them, but they’re all free to download if you want to try out more. If you want the free download, remember to enter 0 for the amount you wanna pay – although of course I encourage you to make a small donation if you have the funds!

Elzhi is a decent well-established rapper from Detroit. He has released a few albums in the past, and this one is a mixtape he released this year for free download; yay!

The music itself is conscious hip-hop, something verging on a slight hint of jazz rap. The lyrics are interesting and the background music is a lot better than on a lot of rap records. The overall sound is great and this is something any rap fan needs to check out.

From what I gather, he’s a very well respected artist, and the reviews and ratings I have seen of this record have all been very positive; some of which have put him up alongside rap legends such as Nas. I don’t think their sounds are similar, but he’s a good rapper and worth giving a bit of attention to!

R. Stevie Moore is a very prolific artist from the US, and in addition to releasing many albums on labels, he has self-released hundreds of recordings, many of which he has available for free download on his website.

I was gonna just post one album at the moment, then maybe post a few more at a late date, but since his back catalog is so huge, I figured it would be best just to recommend the whole lot to you at once.

The music is varied, and although a common label for it is “low-fi”, that’s clearly useless as a genre. Rock and post-punk seem to be used to describe it a fair amount, so that’s what we’ll say it is. The music itself is somewhat eccentric and experimental, although I wouldn’t say it’s hard to get into, at least from what I’ve listened to thus far.

I am definitely gonna check out more of R. Stevie Moore’s stuff soon, and part of me even wants to listen to it all (big ambitions). Either way, perfectly enjoyable and worth at least sampling!

The Meaner is an indie/pop/rock/electronica band from Malmo in Sweden. I’m feeling quite lazy today so I’m not going to get all descriptive, but it’s a highly varied album and probably falls somewhat on the experimental side of things and although the sound quality isn’t great, I feel this is another case where that only adds to the sound, providing a sense of atmosphere that would otherwise be lost.