((SHOW REVIEW)) THE BABIES, Party Boat, & Birthdays at Valentine’s 5/3/13

It was one of the first days of spring — white flowers were blooming hard all over Albany and people were driving by with open windows spilling music on to the streets. At the time of this writing, Albany Medical Center has not taken over this block where Valentine’s stands and hopefully if you are reading this in the future, it has not done so!

It is Friday night, May 3rd, with locals Birthdays and Party Boat opening for THE BABIES. We were all really excited to see The Babies play live – A lot of the rock DJs have played the hell out of Our House on the Hill since it was released in November 2012. One concert-goer proclaimed, “MY HEART IS A JITTERY BUTTERFLY” while we waited for them to start and I forced a “Kodak Moment”:

THE BABIES – I had so much fun during their set – They had lots of energy and played all the hits! Their live show translated well from their studio albums — Seeing them live made me love their songs even more because the instruments sounded bolder all around and it really did it for me. I hope one day I can see them play a basement show. There were a lot of dancers in the audience which made the set even more fun.

They had Our House on the Hill on record, cassette, and CD, their self titled CD, Moonlight Mile/Places 7” (review below), T-Shirt, and an AWESOME TOTE BAG (A++++++)

WCDB Tabling Today: Looking for Summer DJs!

Everyone keep an eye out for us today, we’ll be tabling outside the campus center at the small fountain from 10 AM-4 PM trying to find some future DJs! If you’re into Alternative Music within any genre or would like to get involved with our Sports or News department, stop by and introduce yourself to our current DJs.

This is especially true if you’re going to be in the Albany area over the summer and have interest in hosting your own radio show, because we’re determined to get good programming out to our listeners during summer break!

Become a WCDB DJ

WCDB DJ EVENTS: May and beyond!

WHAT ARE THESE WCDB DJs UP TO? (DJ names and WCDB time slots are in italics):

5/3, Friday: DELLAROCCA BOOKING PRESENTS: THE BABIES (Vivian Girls, Woods) will be here with openers Birthdays and Party Boat. Valentine’s, Albany, NY. FACEBOOK EVENT. (Nicole, Tuesdays, 6-8PM)

5/4, Saturday: WCDB’s DJ AK will be joining Machine in the Garden and JimmyNort for a fun night at Pauly’s Hotel. FACEBOOK EVENT. (DJ AK, Thurs nights/Fri mornings 2AM-4AM)

HEAT’S MINI REVIEWS: Purling Hiss, Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin, Chelsea Light Moving, Bleached

Purling Hiss – Water on Mars 4/2013
ATTN: Dinosaur Jr. Fans, Malkmus, Anybody that loves great dirty delicious guitar tones, solos and flourishes.
I pretty much headbanged, danced, and/or swayed through this whole album. I plan on blasting this in my car with the windows down this summer. Guitar driven album, riffage galore, love all the note bends!!!
Song Picks: “The Harrowing Wind”, “Mercury Retrograde”, “She Calms Me Down”, “Lolita”

Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin – Reverse Shark Attack
And HE’S BACK!!! Ty Segall is churning out albums like crazy the past few years. This album is a collaboration with Mikal Cronin, who is in his current band. THIS IS DIRTY GARAGE ROCK, high throttle, blow your speakers out loud. They literally sound like they recorded this in their garage surrounded by Jay Reatard posters. I like how it sometimes sounds like they are running their instruments through a chainsaw. Tracks 1-6 are fun, loud, and 2 minutes or less while the last track is a 10 minute soundscape and definitely my favorite song on the album. If you like Ty Segall’s music, you will like this. Reverb, distortion, vibrations, underwater kingdom, wild!!

Song Picks: “Reverse Shark Attack”, “Ramona”, “High School”, “Drop Dead Baby”

Chelsea Light Moving – s/t  4/2013
If you are a Sonic Youth fan, don’t worry, you can feel Thurston Moore’s influence on these songs. Sometimes the guitars are creepy sounding, vocals are awkward like they should be from Moore, and these songs are sometimes darker/heavier than Sonic Youth. If you don’t know Sonic Youth, it sounds like weird rock: guitars tuned strange, rambling songs, being on a strange journey that you’re not sure if you should be on. I say that with love!

Song Picks: “Empires of Time”, “Heavenmetal”, “Sleeping Where I Fall”

Bleached – Ride Your Heart

Two sisters bringing you a concoction of reverb guitars and vocals, California, simple and straightforward song structure, titles and lyrical content, catchy and feeling good. I bet they are fun live. It sounds like they had a good time making this album. NO STRESS HERE, they take it easy.

Song Picks: “Looking for a Fight”, “Next Stop”

Helping You Get Your CD Played at College Stations

At WCDB we get a lot of of CDs every week begging to played, whether it’s a major label pushing for one of their premiere bands or a collection of guys from Schenectady who are hoping for a break. In either case it’s nice to help, but the simple fact of it is that we can’t review every CD that comes in because we don’t have the ability to tell our DJs what every single one of those CDs sounds similar to while being decent students. This means that some get skipped over, and for a lot of artists this happens based solely off of the impression that the packaging gives(it’s unfortunate, but true). So how can an artist try and make their CD stand out at college radio stations?

Alt Rock Mixtape V.2

Back in November our Alt. Rock department compiled an Alternative Rock mix tape of our favorite songs that were currently in rotation. Because of the difficulty in compiling a good representation of our department in a small amount of songs, and the even more difficult challenge of making hard copies of the mix tape, we’ve used that experience as something to learn from. The changes this year for the mix tape are going to be that it’s only available on our blog(that makes this exclusive!) and that we release it four times a year.

And so we arrive at our first mix tape of 2013, this one’s representative of everything that has caught our attention so far that’s been released this year. Tune in to WCDB to stay up to date with all of the best new releases!

Kyle’s Favorite 25 Albums of 2012

Hey there everyone, my name’s Kyle and I’m the Alternative Rock director over here at WCDB Albany. I’d like to preface this list by saying that I’m by no means a qualified music critic, I’m solely a college kid who loves music and has a lot of access to it. This being said I’ve been looking forward to making this list forever because comparing albums to each other is an amazingly fun process for me. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to high five me or question if I have ears in the comments below!

WCDB’s Top 35 albums of 2012

WCDB is coming up on it’s 35th Anniversary (which we’ll be celebrating on March 1st at Valentines!).  So it only feels fitting to name our top 35 albums of 2012! This list was compiled from reverse scoring lists from 28 of our DJs and a total of 168 different albums received points. Thanks a ton for listening to WCDB in 2012 and we look forward to playing you more great alternative music in 2013!  Click the jump to find out what albums made the cut!

DJ Survey: What artist(s) inspired your current taste in music?

Pondering what terrible/magnificent force brought our DJs into the station with a desire to share their playlists is always an interesting train of thought. Regardless of the time spent considering this, the only way to know is to ask! Here are some of our DJs sounding off on the prompt:

What artist really “got you into music”?

The Most Played Artists in the History of WCDB

WCDB started charting online in 2002 (8/23/2002 by DJ Starks who played Pharcyde – Passin Me By). Some of us (I) were (was) curious to find out which artists have been played the most on our station since that starting point.  This entire list was constructed through manual searches so there are potential artists that could’ve slipped through the cracks. If you find one make sure to let me know in the comments. (Just know that you have to make sure you don’t count covers of their songs and songs where they were just featured.)

All this being said, I’m proud to present the top 10 artists that I found in WCDB’s charting history!