Thea Gilmore’s new album, Liejacker is available from today, and is getting good reviews with five stars from the Guardian yesterday. Thea’s website gives some background to the inspiration to the album here.  This is an album I’ll be checking out.

The EELS LIVE AND IN PERSON! London 2006 live CD & DVD package previously only available at the Eel’s 2008 concerts is now available exclusively at the band’s online store (here). It’s a limited edition two disc package containing a CD and a DVD priced at £12.

Initial announcements about Elvis Costello’s latest album Momofuku was that it would only available as vinyl or download – no CD.  As I blogged here, it seemed a strange decision given Elvis’ fanbase.  Either this was a marketing ploy, which is based on column inches generated was successful, or Lost Highway have had a change of heart as the album will be made available on CD, as can be seen by the Amazon listing here.

Following Nine Inch Nails Ghosts album earlier in the year with it would seem that Trent Reznor can’t give away his music quick enough with another free album download,  (in MP3, Flac or M4A formats) called The Slip. According to Filter Magazine (here) there will be a CD release of the album later in the year.

It appears that the major record labels have managed to  effectively kill off a new start up Sonific who tried to create a business around properly licensing music for podcasting & blogging sites thus creating a more controlled environment revenue rather than the currently Wild West situation that predominates outside of the top tier of blogs not to mention revenue for the record labels. According to Sonific they have wound things up because of the licensing situation with the record labels. Tragic that the record industry again appears to have architected a situation where they may potentially earn some revenue and at least slow the amount of unlicensed music flying around has failed.

Sonific announcement here.

According to Coldplay ….

We’re very pleased to announce that Coldplay’s new single, ‘Violet Hill’, will be available as a free download exclusively from Coldplay.com for one week starting tomorrow, Tuesday April 29th, at 12.15pm UK time. This is a full week ahead of the single’s conventional paid-for digital release, on Tuesday May 6th.