I met Chris Lombardi once. Back in ’07 I was helping some friends from Australia, who were then signed to Matador, the label he co-founded, get around the United States. When the tour came through New York City the label invited us to stop by the office for a visit. We dropped in for about half an hour—about as long as we could afford to rent a parking spot in Manhattan—shook hands, grabbed some CDs, and split.

Given the brevity of this encounter, I can’t claim to know much about the guy. However, were I to set up a Fake Michael Bay–style Twitter account for him based on first impressions and trivial details–he had a jar of formaldehyde on his desk with a coiled rattlesnake inside—it would probably revolve around slurred words, fine dining, and pharmaceuticals.

In other worlds, it would be much like this actual Twitter account, which a friend passed along to me today. I guess this could be a hoax, but who else would brag about drinking a nice Côte de Beaune AND be Twitter friends with John Agnello? Seems pretty convincing.

Various 140 character slices of rock living after the jump:

Read More “Matador Owner’s Twitter Account Pretty Much Lives Up to Expectations” »

Mp3 blogs are teetering on the edge of irrelevance. Thanks to Twitter an artist can cut out that middleman completely and deliver new songs directly to fans and followers. From the studio to the tweets in just minutes. The DC hip hop community in particular has been taking great advantage of this approach. Here are some recent zshare jams, as tweeted by a few of the area’s most promising emcees. (You can’t keep this middleman out the game, dammit!) Read More “Digging For Tweets” »

Earlier this week, the upcoming Grizzly Bear album, Veckatimest, leaked. We gave our first-impressions of the album. While a colleague joked that the much-anticipated LP was all texture and scaffolding and no melody, we disagree! We love the album more and more with each listen no matter the bootleg’s sound quality.

Yesterday, the band responded in a blog item about the leak:

“So yeah, we are kind of bummed this leaked so early. We know it’s not the 90’s anymore and times have changed, and we’re super grateful for all the support people have shown us on the blogs and internet, but we were kind of hoping it wouldn’t happen this soon.

Ultimately we feel like we put out a great album and hope people enjoy it, and we really hope people take the time to pre-order and support the good one-and-a-half years it took to write and record it.

I promise you the album art for both CD and vinyl is going to be gorgeous. And a bonus: all vinyl people will get a high quality download coupon with their purchase.

Leaking is a tricky subject; as we all know, I’ve had my run ins with the law O__o (Hi, Mr. Sheriff!) I have conflicting opinions about it, as it’s really complicated, but ultimately it saddens me that a bummer-quality version of Veckatimest is going around. Please consider putting your energies into a pre-order or into waiting till May 26 for the album the way we intend it to be presented.

Not to get all mushy, but we definitely put a lot of love and work into this one and are just excited to hit the road and tour it again.”

The band’s singer/songwriter Ed Droste was more fun on Twitter.

Read More “Ed Droste Responds To Grizzly Bear Album Leak” »

We’ll try to keep this under 140 words characters: Black Plastic Bag and City Paper music updates are now available on Twitter. (We have feeds for City Desk and the Sexist too.)