2011 Michigan Brewer's Guild Festival

The annual Brewer's Guild  Beer Fest held at Riverside Park in Ypsilanti is by far of my favorites summer events in the Ann Arbor area. Sure it's usually Sold Out and crowded, and there's a good chance you'll get your shoes muddy as it often rains in late July, but there's no better way to truly get a taste of the range of beer Michigan has to offer.

So this year I took a cab over to the 14th annual festival with much anticipation. As the even usually fills to capacity, the lines can be long at certain brewer's tables. Luckily (and surprisingly), it's usually the big breweries that attract the biggest lines - Arcadia, New Holland, Short's. I can try these beers at any self-respecting Ann Arbor bar, so this year I adopted the strategy of going to whichever table had the shorter line. I must say, although it helped me try  ton of stuff I haven't before, the success rate was quite low...

How do you share your music?

After a couple of weeks playing with Turntable.fm and Spotify I still haven't found a music service that makes it easy and fun sharing music with your friends. Turntable comes close, but a lot of time it's too much work for people who have full-time jobs. Both services let you share and link your FB friends, but both suffer from the Google + complex - there aren't enough people using them to make it interesting. So, I ask you - how do you find new music and share it with friends?

If you know me, you know I'm not a big hip hop fan. However, there have always been certain songs I liked and I knew there must be 'good' and 'bad' hip hop, and if I filter out most of the stuff on the radio, there will be some gold dust down there somewhere. In the past few weeks, thanks to both turntable and spotify I've gotten a lot of exposure to a lot of good new and old hip hop. So if you're not a hip hop fan, and you trust my music tastes (I'm looking at you Dad), here are 5 rap/hip hop albums that I think are indispensable, and more importantly - a lot of fun! This will be a duh for those who listen to this kind of stuff, I'm not going for obscurity points.

1. Deltron 3030 - Del tha Funkee Homosapien, Kid Koala and Dan the Automator
2. Danger Doom - Danger Mouse, MF Doom
3. Doggystyle - Snoop Dogg
4. The Chronic - Dr. Dre
5  Bizarre Ride II - The Pharcyde

So there you go, two fairly recent ones and 3 classics. What's your favorite? And where do you play and share your music?

A million ways to die

This is why I usually don't read the news in the mornings. You're enjoying your cup of coffee and then realize...

You can be shot with a high powered rifle and be left near a water well, 

cheat death and then fall off a roller coaster,

go out to the ball game and go off the rails,

give up technology and passenger airbags, since they wouldn't help anyway,

push the emergency break and make it all worse.

And that's only a day's worth of news.

Life Fantastic Indeed (Man Man, Life Fantastic; May 2011)

Man Man, originally from Philly, recorded their latest album, Life Fantastic, in a studio in Nebraska. Perhaps there's something about this combination of Eastern indie noodle-ing and Midwestern sensibility that helps hold this whole album together. Man Man to me was always a band that teetered on the edge of chaos in terms of their musicality, especially during their live show. Despite many visits to the big stage, they're still not a band that makes singles, and sometimes the dissonant creepy keyboards are, well, creepy. But in the studio it seems they have a way of channeling their disorder to make fun songs you can actually hum and sing along to. Some songs on this album read like Tom Waits, others remind me of Firewater, but you can always tell it's Man Man (largely thanks to Honus Honus' raspy vocals). There's a few snoozers, ("Oh La Brea,") but there are plenty that will get stuck in your head - "Life fantastic," "Pirahnnas Club . So although wikipedia still brands them as an 'experimental' band, I believe by now they know what they're doing quite well, and their experiments come with a clear hypothesis and lots of grant quality specific aims.