Here’s a bunch of cool music-related blog posts I’ve come across recently.

The RIAA plays Grinch - Is this the end of Muxtape?

It looks like Jimmy’s got tired of the short hair he’s been sporting for the last few years. Is it worth reminding you that we’re among the biggest Led Zeppelin fans on the planet, so just watching Jimmy strut his stuff onstage brings on an attack of the goosebumps!

In what Idolator described as an Aguilera-like performance, Leona Lewis did an awesome performance of the song. OK, it wasn’t quite Robert-Plant-squeezing-lemons quality, but it cements Lewis’s position as a class act. And doesn’t she look hot?

Maybe it’s time to start some rumours about Lewis taking Plant’s place for a reformation of Led Zeppelin? Perhaps we’ll get that world tour after all…

Although the best bit by far was Beckham launching a ball into the audience and knocking over some Chinese audience member!

Pandora On the Verge of Closing Shop

Web-based radio takes a hit as Pandora may have to close their doors in the near future.

10 Common frontman (and woman) styles

I mean, some singers defy classification or bleed from one category to another (Liam Gallagher’s both a Pseudo Diva AND a Stoic), but you can pretty much lump most leading men (and ladies!) into one of these categories. Allow me to present you with The Field Guide To The 10 Most Common Frontman Styles.

Top 10: Led Zeppelin Rip-Off Bands

While Led Zeppelin might be the perfect gateway initiation to rock, there’s no denying their influence - and here are 10 rip-off bands that prove our case.

Wolfmother Split Official

It shouldn’t come as any surprise considering reports earlier this week, but Wolfmother has called it a day.Andrew Stockdale Bass/keyboard player Chris Ross and drummer Myles Heskett cited long-standing personal and musical differences as the reason for the split.

Rock’n'roll damnation - Wal-Mart style

AC/DC might actually be on their way to Hell. The group have revealed that their forthcoming album will be available in the US only at branches of Wal-Mart. No independent record shop will carry the CD - in fact, no shop at all will sell it.

He’s Just Bein’ Weiland-y: Stone Temple Pilots Tour Going About As Well As You Expected

Scott Weiland drags the Stone Temple Pilots into disrepute (yet again). Idolator say the tour’s not going so well.

10 Things You Didn’t Know About Classic Rock

Some interesting bits of trivia about classic rockers that we’re betting you didn’t know. Oh, and that rather icky Bill Wyman/Mandy Smith story…

11 Things we just learned about Prince

Here’s a few little nuggets of things you didn’t know about little Prince…

We used to cover a lot of new music here on Unreality Music, taking some highly recommended bands on MySpace and reviewing them for your pleasure.

And what with all this talk about the dire state of the Indie scene, we thought it might be a good time to start looking out cool new bands. However, this time we’re not waiting on you guys to make recommendations. Oh no. We’re going on a tour of MySpace, one friend at a time.

How It Works

It’s not rocket science - we’ll take one band to start with and review them. That’s stop #1 on the tour. Then we’ll look through their friends for another talented act and make them stop #2. We’ll review them and do the same thing again, hopefully exposing ourselves (not in a dirty mac kind of way) to some new bands, and bringing you guys along for the ride.

This won’t be exclusive to unsigned or Indie label bands. But we’ll try and bring you the absolute best music we can.

How We’re Starting

Alright, to make the starting point of this tour as random as possible, we’re using StumbleUpon’s StumbleThru feature to pick a random band from MySpace. Once that’s done, we’re limited to the friends of the bands we review from that point on!

Sound like fun? Let’s get started then. We’re counting on you guys to get commenting and give your venerable opinions on all the acts we feature on our tour!

35 Beautiful Music Album Covers

Album cover art is often considered to be one of the extinct fields in modern graphics design. Smashing Magazine take a look at some amazing cover art in music - I’m sure you can think of some of your own favourites.

Here’s a bunch of cool music-related blog posts I’ve come across recently.

‘Bigger than Jesus? The Beatles were a Christian band

Was John Lennon’s remark about The Beatle’s popularity more about the waning influence of Christianity in the face of pop culture? This article claims that Lennon was religious, but against the institution of the Church.

Once Naked For Nirvana, Now A Teen Spirit

Imagine if millions of people had seen you naked before you were old enough to say “embarrassing.” That’s the story of Spencer Elden, whom you may know as the little baby floating towards a dollar bill on the cover of Nirvana’s 1991 album, Nevermind.

The Lost tapes from the Dr. Who engineer

Fascinating find - secret recordings made by the engineer behind the Doctor Who theme tune.

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Oh dear. It seems that The Zutons had an ice cold reception from fans at their recent T4 On The Beach gig.

We’ve always had a soft spot for The Zutons here at Unreality Music, and were looking forward to the release of their third album. However, with the release of Always Right Behind You, we got that sinking feeling that the band had made some bad musical decisions.

Frontman Dave McCabe has acknowledged the lacklustre reception the album has received, but seems to be putting it down to fate…

I wanted it to go to No.1 and sell millions. I’m gutted. Maybe it’s just our time to fall out of favour. But we’ll just keep gigging. That’s what we love doing the most.

“Time to fall out of favour”? How about “We ballsed up and wrote some bad songs. We got complacent. We misjudged our fanbase.” Three much more valid explanations for the performance of You Can Do Anything - ironically named because apparently they can’t please their fans. Oops.

We’ll keep hoping for an improvement in their fortunes, but as our earlier single review said, if the first track from an album is a flop, the rest is likely to be a disappointment as well.

Dear Reader (yeah, you)

We’ve never hid the fact that Unreality TV has a forum, but if you’re a music fan, you’ll definitely enjoy our music board.

The cool thing about the music forum is that you can start your own topics - as opposed to reading what we have to say here on the blog - and you can share your opinions with other music fans.

You can talk about bands you like, and the types of music that you love. There are even ‘guess the lyric‘ games and much more.

If you’re a member of the forum, you can also receive our monthly newsletter which lets you know what’s going on around Unreality TV and what we’re chatting about.

Click here to join the forum now!

What’s hot on the music forum?

We’re glad you asked! Here’s a few hot topics that people have been chatting about recently:

• Songs you absolutely loathe…
• How do you organise your records and are CDs becoming obsolete?
• Talk about Oasis, Metallica or…The Osmonds?
• Share your favourite single of all time.
• What are the 10 essential albums you couldn’t live without?

Anything else?

We’ve got other boards for reality TV (naturally) and mainstream television and movies discussion boards for when you get tired talking about music (as if!).

Plus, you get to chat directly to the blog authors, so you can maybe help shape the direction Unreality TV goes in!

We’d love to see you over on the forum, it’s a great place to chat and talk about things you love. Click here to sign up!

How fitting that The Independent newspaper should be laying the smackdown on Indie music:

John Niven was an indie fan in the 1980s, an A&R man in the Britpopping 1990s, and is now the author of Kill Your Friends, a sadistic satire of the record industry of which he was once an enthusiastic member. “I was in Gap a few weeks ago and there was some sort of generic indie music playing,” he says. “I was with a friend who’s a promoter and a bit younger than me. After about three or four tracks I asked him: ‘Whose LP is this?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s a compilation.’ Every track sounded identical. The guitars, the production; all these bands sound like they’re made in the same studio with the same producer. It’s such a ball-less, soulless, generic whitewashed indie sound. You could probably take a member from each band and throw them together in a new group and no one would be able to tell the difference. They’re completely interchangeable. Scouting for Girls are like the sound of Satan’s scrotum emptying. They’re abysmal.”

Another excellent quote about the new wave of Indie bands choking the charts…

When I glance around the bands that are supposedly ‘indie’ today, I don’t see any attitude. I don’t see any content in their records, any political interest in the band members. They’re a terrible generation, unfortunately, but they’re becoming famous overnight and selling a lot of records.

Plenty of scathing remarks about Scouting For Girls, and an impressive history of the Indie scene and its slow death (culminating in another scathing remark about Scouting For Girls), this article makes a lot of sense.

But there’s one question remaining - who will reclaim Indie for the people? Or should we just give up now and pre-order the new Britney album?