Tennis Pro

On one of the podcasts I listen to every week, they recently (well, a few months ago, give me a break) had David Drury - singer of a band called Tennis Pro - on the air. They had previously played a few of their songs, but I hadn't looked up what they were. It turns out, this Seattle band recently made a movie called Big in Japan (watch the trailer), about the band's tour through Japan and the general feeling towards American rock and roll there (hint: they effing love it).


So, Tennis Pro is fantastic. They have one song up on their MySpace page and a few MP3s available at their website. Also, because they're still trying to recoup their tour, you can get all sorts of goodies in exchange for a donation - up to and including a private concert. I recommend "Shelly Gets High" and "Kimberly", but my favorite of their songs is the one backing the trailer that I linked earlier.


Definitely going to need to get more of their music. The actual sound is very standard guitar-bass-drums indie rock/power-pop, done extremely well. Go listen.

Playlist.com

For a while I tried to get into Last.FM, but I never really stuck with it. I use Hype Machine for some songs, but the main way I stream music that I don't own is off of Playlist.com. The site might be covered in ads, but it works really well and the playlist creation and management tools are pretty good. Hype Machine has the better interface, but it's better used for finding new music or listening to a single artist's new stuff.

I've used Playlist.com for a couple years now, off and on, and I just started putting together playlists again. You can find my profile here, and listen to a few of them. The "New Wave" and "Party Time" lists are my favorites - also the newest, so that makes sense.