I’ve been a user of eMusic for almost a full year now. Overall, I’ve found it to be a really great service. It’s cheap (I pay something like thirty cents a track), DRM-free MP3 files (192 kbps, variable) and a wide selection of music. However, I’m starting to get really pissed at some things they do (or fail to do).

At times it seems like almost nothing is properly categorized. I understand that in many cases, you can’t really pin down a bands style, but eMusic doesn’t even try. I download a lot of Metal, specifically Black Metal, Doom Metal and its varied sub-genres. I don’t expect eMusic to get that specific, but I find that almost all of this music is classified under “Rock”, which can be argued as somewhat insulting, but they have a Metal category, it’s just not listed there. I find nearly everything I download is categorized incorrectly. I’ll find Death Metal under “Jazz”—shit like that. It makes finding new music you might like a daunting and at times completely retarded experience. To make it more ass-backwards, there has been a number of times where I’ve found bands I like under incorrectly spelled names (rendering it unlikely anyone will easily find them, ever). Tracks are misspelled. Some songs are missing from the album and records from artists who may share the same name are often incorrectly lumped with each other (for example, an album by a Norwegian Jazz ensemble lumped in as being put out by a Suicidal Black Metal group).

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Here’s a collection of albums that I’ve acquired recently since my last album post. Almost all are from eMusic, although I did have to order one or two of some of the more obscure ones. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot more Sludge Doom. This is what I’m liking right now:

At thirty-eight minutes and just three tracks that are basically unnamed, Buried At Sea’s “Migration” is a massive, crushing Sludge Doom album that deserves many, many replays. I had to order it through the mail, which I totally hate doing, but it was well worth it. I love this shit. There needs to be more of it. I would kill to see this band live. I hear that after a retarded amount of years, a new album is finally coming out this October. If true, I will, I must find it and buy it. There can be no other way.

Halo is an Australian duo with a Sludge/Industrial Doom thing going on. “Guattari (From The West Flows Grey Ash And Pestilence)” is some serious skull-fucking shit. Gigantic bass thumping, distortion and noise. Loud and charged. It’s a really good album. Great listening for when you’re totally shit-faced in the middle of the night and about to fall on some subway tracks and end up a smeared mess of multi-colored goo. In other words, you should make sure you have it loaded on your MP3 player because you never know when you might end up as track lubricant. As I’ve been writing this post, I downloaded another album of theirs and a couple tracks in, I’m really liking it.

“Documents Of Grief” is a self-released album by the Sludge Doom band, Graves At Sea (Don’t ask me what the deal is with nautical-themed band names in Doom Metal, I don’t know). With slow, Stoner riffs, super-heavy bass lines and vocals that are reminiscent of Black Metal, I find these dudes often occupying a spot on my playlists. I like ‘em. I dig ‘em. I carry them on my MP3 player and I listen to them often.

I’ve got a lot of good things to say about the eMusic service. I’ve been using it for getting close to one year now and I love it. However, I am totally unimpressed with the new downloader they’re pushing, emusicremote. It’s opensource and cross-platform, which is appreciated, but it’s essentially a customized web browser. I don’t need another browser. I have Firefox. Why would I want to install a whole other program that’s essentially a modified version of the same browser? I want a good, basic downloading program, which eMusic has never been able to deliver for Linux. Instead, I rely on eMusicj which has and continues to work great for me.

I had the same complaint when I gave the media player, Songbird a spin. I don’t need another Mozilla-based browser running. I just need a good media player. Instead of this behemoth of a downloader, eMusic should concentrate on improving the basic program they’ve used in the past. If they want the browser integration, make a Firefox extension.

More tunes from Emusic. This time, it’s metal (big change there)! Specifically some fucking Black Metal madness! I’ve been a fan of Black Metal for a good while. I love it, especially the old shit like Burzum and Darkthrone. Seeing Immortal reunited live at BB Kings about a month ago was one of the most fucking unbelievable head-banging moments of my life (not to mention eardrum damaging). Black Metal is the shit. That said, here are some good albums I’ve nabbed off of Emusic lately:

Carpathian Forest is one of my all-time favorite Black Metal bands. Lead singer, Nattefrost has two solo albums out, “Blood and Vomit” being the first. For some reason, Emusic has the artist’s name misspelled in their database (I even emailed them, geek that I am), so it’s kind of buried. If you can get into raw, fast and lo-fi Black Metal (which, admittedly, not everyone can do), then this is one of those must-have albums. There’s pissing, vomiting (enough to make you fast-forward if you’re eating), plenty of songs about Hell, Satan, whores and fucking. It’s an all-around offensive masterpiece. Music to sexually abuse the elderly with. Get that shit, slap on some black leather, spikes and some corpsepaint and go burn something down!
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Since I’m kind of all over the map on what I like to listen to, for this post I’m going to stick specifically to the Doom Metal genre of albums that I’ve picked up from eMusic that I find praiseworthy.

There’s only one full album that Warhorse ever put out and it’s balls-out awesome Doom. As Heaven Turns to Ash has some of the heaviest, slowest and lowest bass lines I’ve heard. The style leans on the psychedelic side with the main tracks interspersed with light and at times folk-like short instrumentals. It sounds weird as I try to describe it, but it works. Heavily inspired by Black Sabbath and L.S.D., Warhorse ranks right up there with Electric Wizard as one of my favorite Doom bands. If you’re not into Doom Metal, this album will change that. This is really good shit.
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Lately, I’ve been really getting more and more into Doom Metal, especially Drone Doom and Funeral Doom. I’ve also been going apeshit on Dark Ambient, Experimental and Ambient Noise albums. It’s all great shit to zone to. Here’s some of the albums I’ve snagged off of eMusic this past month that I’m really digging:

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Since I’m still loving eMusic and have been racking new albums every month, I thought I’d list some of the better to best shit I’ve accrued lately.

Electric Wizard is by far one the dopest, heaviest bands around. Their Ozzy-era Black Sabbath-inspired, Stoner/Sludge Doom Metal style is straight-up 70’s era evil psychedelia. It’s loud, chunking and very slow. I have all of their albums and my latest addition, “Come My Fanatics“, is by far their best work and definitely one of the best albums I’ve ever owned in my life. It’s low, slow, evil-hippy vibe makes me want to start wearing denim jackets, grow a fu-manchu, contact Satan and start living out a van (complete with air-brushing). I highly recommend this album.

Boris is a Japanese experimental band who are difficult to place in a genre. Though I only have one of their albums, I’ve read they bounce all over the place with different styles of noise/music. “Absolutego” is one 65-minute long track of ambient noise/Drone Doom filled will slowly plodding bass, buzzing guitars, lotsa feedback and heavy usage of the e-bow. There’s no riffs, melodies or anything. Just ambient guitar noise for over an hour and it’s great. Truly creepy, bad acid trip shit. This is a soundtrack to accompany corpses crawling out of graves. I’m definitely going to check out their other albums.

Similar in style and direction is the band Sunn 0)) (pronounced “Sun” and named after the amplifiers they use). Extremely slow and heavy, using droning, heavily-distorted guitars and sound effects to create a dark, malevolent soundscape, Sunn 0)) are prime examples of Drone Doom. The album “Flight of the Behemoth” is five really long tracks of ambient doom, despair and inscrutable evil. I love these guys. To top it all off, the duo that makes up this band wear evil monk robes whenever they perform live! Could it be cooler?

In fact, I love them so much, I bought another one of their albums, called “The Grimm Robe Demos“. It’s exactly the same kind of shit, which is perfect. Evil, weird, down-tuned and long. Lacking any discernible form or structure, it is music for alien landscapes. That said it’s not for everyone. If you’re not into evil, ambient noise then this music is either going to scare you or give you a headache (or quite possibly both), but if you dig the heavy, creepy shit, you’ll love Sunn 0))) and these two albums.

I’m really into Metal. Death Metal, Black Metal, Sludge, Doom, Blackened Death Metal, Viking Metal… on and on. It’s the best shit in the world. But, I will admit I’ve become addicted to the polar opposite. As of late, I’m all about hippy, nature sound recordings.

You know, those CDs that sit in the bargain bin of your local record store’s New Age section. The albums where some geriatric and well-bearded hippy trudges a recording setup out into the middle of some remote and uninhabited area and records whatever natural, ambient noise is going on, slaps it onto a CD and sells it out of the back of his VW bus to keep himself in yogurt and granola.

I’ve always been a fan of ambient noise and these nature sound disks deliver well, but due to their being just a recording of background noise, I can crank it up without being distracted.

Here’s a link to a collection I’ve been downloading off of eMusic. Out of the bunch, the forest one is my favorite so far.

I’ve been reading that gizmodo.com is declaring this March to be “Boyccott the RIAA Month“, asking readers to refrain from purchasing any and all music represented by the Recording Industry Association of America—an attempt to hit them where it hurt the most, which would be the wallet for those not in the know. Personally, i find the whole thing a little on the weak side.

Thirty days without purchasing any big-label vomit? Big fucking deal. It’s like it’s Lent or something. After thirty days, it’s back to scarfing cheeseburgers and buying DRM-crippled Justin Timberlake shit. I get that the main point of Gizmodo’s boycott call is to make a statement, increase awareness to what’s going on and what kind of alternatives are there (like eMusic, which i’m liking a lot), but I think limiting the call to one month is wrong.

The RIAA is evil. One month is nothing. Any label that sleeps with them should be subject to boycott, for life. Or, at the very least, until they wisen up, ditch the RIAA and their bullshit DRM scams and stop treating their customers as thieves by default. Fuck them. Fuck their music. Fuck Windows DRM. Fuck iTunes DRM and fuck the RIAA.

If you can’t live without it, steal it. Other than that, use sane and reasonable music stores like eMusic that sell music from labels that don’t have their heads shoved too far up their asses. Don’t give anyone who uses DRM or hangs with the RIAA a thin fucking dime. If you pay money for that shit, you’re being taken for a ride by a company that assumes you’re a criminal and knows you’re a sucker. Every penny they gain in sales is proof to them that people are sheep and furthers this insane business model of lawsuits, inferior products and consumer abuse.

Here’s a very comprehensive and searchable database of albums released by members of the RIAA. Use it as a tool to know what not to buy and what to steal, if that’s your thing.

I signed up for an account with eMusic this weekend and so far, I’m really liking it. Based on a monthly subscription model, I pay a set fee for a certain number or tracks a month. Right now, I’m doing the 50 tracks for about $15.00 package, which works out to about thirty cents a song. The music is delivered in a DRM-free MP3 format and is encoded in VBR at a median of about 192kbps. Normally, I encode at CBR 192kbps, so this works out totally fine. Once I’ve purchased a track, I can download it as many times as I wish, without affecting my monthly quota, which I love.

Since eMusic sells unlocked, DRM-free music, it doesn’t have everything. If you’re a top-20 loser, stick to Itunes. I find that for my musical leanings, just about 75-80% of the bands I like are on eMusic with at least one album. With over 2 million tracks and new music being added every week, I don’t feel restricted at all. In fact, 24 hours and 4 albums later, I’m in a bit of a Black Metal overdose. A good thing.

eMusic uses a download manager application that has clients for most all operating systems. However, the Linux client sucks major ass. Luckily, some intrepid user created a Java application called EMusicJ that does an excellent job getting my purchased music to my hard drive.

I hate DRM. I refuse to purchase from any label that uses it and as long as media companies try to shove it down people’s throats, I will strongly support piracy. However, I also like to able to support bands I like and eMusic is a great example of a sane and reasonable music store. Piracy to me is a protest not a permanent option. Thirty cents for a high-quality digital file seems about right to me. Ninety-nine cents for a DRM-infected Itunes track that you can only download once is a fucking insult and a rip-off. I hear it a lot and perhaps it’s become a bit of a cliche, but who the hell wakes up in the morning, wanting to pay more money for music with less value and use? Not me.