The reason Unreality Music’s been so quiet is a combination of a couple of days being sick and a weekend in lovely Prague.

There don’t seem to be any Czech pop stars, or I would devote a post to their work. Needless to say, the place was very beautiful and very cold.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled programming. I’ll repeat the call for contributors yet again - if you love music and you can write witty, interesting words about it, get in touch with me. We’re always looking for other bloggers to help out on the blogs.

Pundits are predicting a big year for pop acts in this year’s Brit Awards, and the voting so far implies that Take That are on course for the gold. If you haven’t voted yet - now’s your chance!

Where’s all the good music?

It’s not in the charts. Much as I love the pop charts, sometimes they bore me to tears. The most exciting band I’ve heard this year were the Diablo Swing Orchestra. They pretty much blew everything else out of the water for me.

Anyway, I’ve decided to try and find more good music online. Which is where you come in.

Friends

In the immortal words of Led Zeppelin’s Friends:

Without a friend, there’s no denying,
You’re incomplete, they’ll be no finding
Looking for what you knew.

I usually hang out around a number of social networking sites focused around music. If you’re on any of the following services, look me up and give me your recommendation for new music:

1. Virb.com
2. PureVolume.com
3. MySpace.com
4. Last.fm

So come on dear readers…enlighten me with some good new music that won’t make me feel like the whole scene’s a-crumblin down. Blues, rock, metal, opera, pop, hip-hop, gangsta rap. I don’t care. As long as it sounds fresh, let me have it.

Otherwise, I’ll just have to look for myself….

Because of my absence, this blog hasn’t been updated in over a week.

I’d like to make sure that doesn’t happen again - if you’re interested in becoming a contributor to Unreality Music, then drop me a line to gerard at unrealitytv.co.uk.

In Hot, she’s taken the tempo up a bit and dabbles a bit in S&M lyrics - “I wanna lock you up in my closet” etc. Apparently, the song’s a dribbling tribute to her new husband Deryck Whibley (of Sum 41 fame).

“You’re so fabulous”, she croons, “You’re so good to me. Bay-bee. Bay-bee…” It’s all very cutesy. Don’t you just love all this lovey-dovey stuff? No? Me neither.

On a positive note, the chorus isn’t too bad: a kind of stomping, arms in the air type of track. Unfortunately, that edge that you associate with Avril Lavigne is nowhere to be found. What’s replacing it is lacklustre songwriting and performing. Avril’s becoming more the manufactured pop star with each new release - despite the perfect punk princess facade, she’s failing to convince us anymore.

This single’s not so much Hot as lukewarm.

Here’s video evidence for you…from The Friday Night Project:

I think legally no publication in the UK is allowed to criticise the Gossip or Beth Ditto at the moment. Ditto seems to have become an overnight sensation and media darling in the UK. It’s not without substance either, because while you’ll read a lot about her view on weight issues, she’s a disarmingly funny and entertaining personality. I watched her guest stint on the Friday Night Project, and loved her sense of humour.

Having addressed the cult of Ditto, Gossip are in the unfortunate position of having masses of tabloid coverage, but little in the way of musical legacy for us to refer to. The biggest release to date was Standing In The Way Of Control, a punk/disco anthem that had virtually universal appeal.

In fairness, if Gossip had released another song like Standing In The Way, I’d have written them off as an unimaginative gimmick act. Other commentators have said that Jealous Girls lacks the substance of the other track, but I’d argue that it shows they have some diversity.

This song is much more minimalist, with a basic drum beat and basic bas and guitar backing, allowing Ditto’s excellent vocal to shine through. It may not have the immediacy of its predecessor, but I reckon folk will warm to it.

By the way, loved the quote over on Fake DIY about how

finally ‘Jealous Girls’ is seeing the light of day, and hopefully about to rescue Gossip’s much-touted credibility. Or, at least convince Beth Ditto’s New Look fanbase she’s not just ‘that girl what sings that song off tv’”

The Jealous Girls Video

WTF? Venetian blinds and a red and blue lighting scheme from the 80’s. Denim jacket and white bow in Ms Ditto’s hair. The Jealous Girls video is a celebration of all things lo-fi.

The bowl haircut makes her look a bit too much like her mucker, Kelly Osbourne:

As well as being able to search for music via the website, you can download a piece of software that plugs into your iTunes or Windows Media Player and it’ll give you recommendations based on your MP3 collection.

I tried a random sample and chose some old Alice Cooper songs in iTunes and it trawled my music database and pulled out related material I’d forgotten I even had! And I have to say, the relevance was pretty good.

As well as determining the related music, The Filter helpfully creates a playlist for you in iTunes and it looks like it can export your music to an iPod or any connected USB storage device.

The interface has some neat tricks to help you find related artists, albums and reviews on the web. For music discovery it tied into my iTunes music store and found the albums I needed to complete my collection. All very neat tricks.

The Filter seems to avoid unsigned, non-mainstream bands though. That’s something I’ve like to see addresses at some stage, perhaps also with social voting to allow good quality music to rise to the top whether it has big label backing or not.

Then she has the double problem that her sound is very like the aforementioned Miss Knowles.

I can’t explain, but I consider Amerie the fresher sounding artist in this particular showdown. Maybe it’s because she’s got a distinctive, throaty vocal and sounds a little bit edgy in comparison with Beyonce’s smooth multi-layered recordings.

In other respects, the two artists are extremely similar: big, funky R&B sounds, have a very eclectic dance style and love to show off their legs. Still, I think Amerie wins on two counts: hotpants and attitude.

Anyway, I’m backing Amerie for the moment. But she’s got to start differentiating herself from Beyonce. Those last three singles: 1 Thing, Take Control and now Gotta Work all sound pretty similar to each other. She needs to show us another side before it gets stale.

There’s a lyric in Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) where Jimi sings “’scuse me while I kiss the sky“. For decades people have heard this as “kiss this guy“, which unfortunately leads to speculation about Jimi’s sexual orientation instead of just enjoying the damned song!

Well, some bright spark (who obviously suffered from the same problem) started a site where you can share your lyrical faux pas with other hard-of-hearing types. The site is called The Archive Of Misheard Lyrics and rather brilliantly, the domain is kissthisguy.com!

Where else could you discover that someone had translated the lyrics for Summer Of ‘69 from “I got my first real six-string, bought it at the five and dime” into “Got my first real sex dream, I was 5 at the time.”

This’d be a great place to fact-check your favourite songs before you ever sing them in front of human beings… :)

Pandora

Pandora is the most well-known. Billed as a music discovery service, Pandora allows you to discover new and old tunes via a little flash player. I don’t think it’s available outside the US yet, but it’s easy enough to get an account if you know any ZIP codes;).

Pandora comes from the Music Genone Project, which tries to classify and link music according to common attributes. So, if you tell Pandora that you like Metallica, then it will queue up songs that are similar in style that you’ll probably also like! This can include music you’ve heard before and totally new artists, and it’s great if you’re in the mood for a particular kind of music, but can’t think of a specific artist or album you want to hear.

The graphic below shows the kind of channel Pandora builds based on Metallica:

last.fm

last.fm is one of the new breed of ’social’ music services which allows you search for styles of music by either artist or genre and build a playlist of music.

It’s slightly more advanced though, because it can plug into your music player and record the type of music you’re already listening to and then ‘tune in’ to your preferences, recommending other artists or songs you might like. There’s also a full forum and community for real diehards who want to discuss music in greater detail.

Finally, last.fm has a standalone music player that you can download and create radio stations on the fly with. It allows you to flag up songs you liked, which refines the program’s understanding of your preferences.

Musicovery

I discovered Musicovery this evening. It’s a French site that allows you to select music based on a selection of styles, then sub-categorise this into light, dark, energetic and calm for each style. You can also select a decade to refine the type of music played.

When you make your selection, Musicovery displays a winding playlist for you showing the songs it will play, and allows you to skip tracks. Another nice feature is the ability to restrict it to play hits/non-hits. I’ve been listening to a couple of channels this evening and so far it’s been brilliant.

So there you go, a few cool new ways to get music online. Has anybody tried out any similar services?