Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Contest: Grieves at Stubb's


Ho ho ho! In the spirit of the Rick Perry's war on Christmas, I have some tickets to giveaway. Tomorrow night you can catch some live hip-hop at Stubb's inside room. Grieves is hitting Austin with his On the Rocks tour, you can buy tickets or you could win some from me. This could be your chance to see a star on the rise in an intimate space. His album, Together/Apart was released on the Ryhmesayers label and it features classic boom-bap hip-hop beats with tight, introspective rhymes over the top. If you haven't heard it yet, you can check it out on Spotify. Since I was so wrapped up in year-end lists I only have the rest of the day to pick a winner so send an e-mail to contest@austinbloggylimits.com if you want to win. All you have to do is put GRIEVES in the subject and give me a brief reason why you should be picked. One person will get on the guest list with a +1 for tonight's show.


Grieves - On the Rocks video via YouTube

Like I said I only have a few hours to choose a winner for this contest so make sure you enter the contest and/or tell your friends about it NOW.
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Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Shivvy's Best of 2011

This was my first complete year of not working in radio, but I got back into music in a big way. In the months that followed WOXY's demise, I honestly tuned a lot of music out. I was never big on indie buzz and the flavor of the month style way that indie bands are consumed these days, but I was exposed to pretty much all of it while working for the station. Now, with a rekindled passion in my heart, I find that my biggest sources for discovering music are Austin Bloggy and Spotify.

While I have friends who swear up and down that Rdio and other services are better, I subscribed to Spotify when it finally launched here the states earlier this year. Now that I'm working a more traditional office job, I have plenty of time to listen to whatever I want. I put my headphones on and listen to everything from old faves to the the newest releases. I can say that, as a result, my listening has moved back more to being album-based. My preference is always to support my local indie record stores by buying as much vinyl as I can. There is a happy medium there for me - I stream at work and in the car and play records at home.

However you are discovering new music, please make an effort to support the artists that create it. If possible, do it at the local stores that we want to thrive in our communities for a long time. For me, Record Store Day is a year-round event. If you aren't fortunate enough to live close to a great store like End Of An Ear or Waterloo Records here in Austin, there are links embedded here to buy from the artists/labels or from Insound.


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Monday, December 12, 2011

Bloggy's Best of 2011

First off, I want to note that I think ranking art is ridiculous but, at the same time, I adore lists. It is always harder for me to decide what will be excluded rather than what will be included whenever I'm making these lists. It is so hard to say what deserves to be attached to what number, especially in a year that Radiohead have an album release. In the end, I had to make this a top 20 list since I had such a hard time narrowing it down to 10 or 15, but I could just have easily made this a top 50. I can assure you that I loved every album on this list and I ranked them based on how much I listened to them. In other words, this represents what my favorites were just as much as it represents albums with artistic merit. I have developed an evolving playlist that has samples from all of the albums I considered contenders for this list, which you can listen to on Spotify.

The last thing I want to mention involves the format of this post. Just as I did with my Best of 2011: Locals Only post, if you click the name of the artist it will bring you to their homepage, if you click the album title you will be brought to a page to purchase the album. Also, with one or two entries you'll see I have both an LP and EP listed under one spot. My reasoning for this is EP stands for "Extended Play" so I'm considering it to be an extension of the album. Now, with that all said here it is, The Bloggy Best of 2011:


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