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Anything Box Releases An Album To Share

cats writes "Anything Box, the synthpop band from the 80's who had a hit with 'Living in Oblivion' have released an introspective albumn in mp3 format under a 'freeware' style license. Anyone who has ever seen these guys perform know they are just a bunch of nice people trying to make ends meet as musicians. I had the opportunity to hang with Claude before his show in NJ at The Pipe back in 1998. He had some interesting asides about how the music business in general operates. They manipulate the artists' work as well as take huge cuts of musicians' profits. The album is available via download as one big zip file including artwork and is in mp3 format. Very cool."

8 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. I would love to hear this group by Rooked_One · · Score: 3, Interesting

    but anonymous login to download the file is denied. Anyone know if this is just temp to deal with the /. effect?

  2. The Smiths marry the Pet Shop Boys by puto · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Ok, I just downloaded six of their songs from another source(ends with lite)

    Six songs should be enough to pass judgement.

    Listening to this makes me feel like I am the loner in a John Hughes movie that has been forsaken by the popular crowd but I am about to become cool and prove that even the geek can get the girl/friends/car/LAID/ scholarship, papal dispensation.

    It has the poppy vibe of the Pet Shop boys and the whininess of Morrisey after he has spent a night crying on his 'platonic' male friends shoulder(Michael Stipe, anyone else remember their fling, ewwwwww)

    I am an 80s child and love music and went to many concerts(BauHaus, SugarCubes, Cure, Smiths, Escape Club) And Black Flag, Femmes, Dayglow Abortions, Vandals. Did the whole punk thing, and no the Offpsring and Green Day are not punk bands. And the Police were doing ska before most you them were born.

    Cannot remember this band, I remember Kajagoogoo.

    Just when I thought I would never hear another whiney voice like Morrisey, I listen to this and wow, I am back in a dark bar with with everyone all dressed in black eating X and grinding up on each other. Smoking marlboro lights and pretending I am Andrew Macarthy in Less than Zero.

    Honestly it is better than the dance music you here in clubs today, it is soft on the ears and you can shake a leg to it. I could see being in a crowd and bopping to it, and maybe putting the moves on the old lady, kindy scmaltzy and sexy at the same time.

    As for buying it. Dunno, as I write this and I am listening to it and it grows on me. I might order it, cause it brings back some memories, and every now and then the old krewe and I embark on nights out fueled by memories, music, and other remnants of the 80s, and it would be a good cd to slip in.

    I give it an 8, cause you can dance to it. Denny Theriot, theres a man!

    Puto

    --
    The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
    1. Re:The Smiths marry the Pet Shop Boys by Om242 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Just to add to this:

      This has been one of my favorite bands since 1991. I've been to their concerts quite a bit, hung out with the band at an Austin gig, autographs, the works.

      They are mentioned on Slashdot? Freaking WIERD.

      Here's a little history of this band, in case your curious.

      This band is really a one hit wonder when it comes to popularity. Everyone remembers 'Living in Oblivion', their big hit (on their debut album) when their label was Epic.

      After that first album (and one hit) they had a fight with Epic and they got dropped. During this time, they recorded an album titled 'Worth'. It was never officially released, but if you can find it, I strongly recommend it. It was recorded when they visited Germany. Very depressing synthpop with a remake of a Beatles song on it.

      They had one more album after 'Worth', which was called 'Hope' (anyone seeing a trend?), which didnt have near the sales as the one hit wonder from Epic. Its VERY synth-pop-happy music. Almost bubble-gum synth. Very cool album if your into that sort of thing.

      At this point, Dania (the only chick in the band) left, and Claude (the singer, and main songwriter) split off and did a solo album under the band name: 'The Diary'. Very good stuff, I thought. He also released this album (and the previous Hope album) on his own label called 'Orangewerks'.

      Finally, after almost forgetting about this band (and the good times I had with friends at their concerts) they released another album around 1998. They dropped the synth deal, and went guitar (yikes!). It sucks, I thought, EXCEPT the song 'Heaven60', which is available for download now, as per the topic. Heaven60 is one of their best songs, and really shows the band maturing.

      HOWEVER, they tried one last ditch effort to get popular again by making a video for the song on their album titled '45'. Its a 45 second song, you see. Its also the lamest song I've ever heard. Claude hoped that MTV will give them at least 45 seconds of air time. The video is this cheese-fest! The band members are dressed up like robots (or something) playing on a stage in the Nevada desert with some carboard circular spiral thing behind them. uhhh... okay, whatever.

      Havent heard anything since that album until recently (about 2 months ago) I went to yet another Anything Box gig in Houston (at a goth club called 'Spy'). Their show completely sucked. I couldnt believe how far they had sunk. They ripped off the entire audience by singing about 4 songs, and ending the night with 'Living in Oblivion', the only song anyone else even gives a shit about, and walked off the stage. VERY un-Claude-like since he's a very cool person. Ahh well.. everyone has a right to suck every once in a while.

      Anyway, thats probably all the history you wanted (of the band you never heard of) for one night. All in all, the above reviewer pretty much has it right about this band. Its very very very 80s.

      Enjoy Heaven60.

      ++Om242

  3. Re:why do people even bother zipping mp3s? by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Habit maybe, because at one time zipping mp3s was necessary, or at least stopped a lot of inconvenience.

    For a long time, the default mime.types in web servers did not have the .mp3 extension. They were served as the server default, normally text/plain. This was bad, because if it was text/plain the client would then try to translate line endings, gorking the file... (errr "cooking" was the actual parlance). There was a utility called Uncook.exe that was popular for a while. It would try to undo this translation, looking for every CR-LF pair, assuming it came from this "cooking" and return it to a LF. Youcould getthe music, but a P.I.T.A. Eventually, people realized that .zips were pretty much always handled right (application/anything is never linefeed translated) and was a convenient file type for Windows users. Sometimes the files were actually zipped, sometimes they were just renamed to fool the web server into serving it as application/something.

  4. Re:ROI? by swazi · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Who pays the bills during that time?

    Maybe they're hoping for a live show or two getting slashdotted?

  5. Public Enemy did an "Open Source" album by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well, kinda anyway. It was called Revolverlution. They put some tracks out, including the title track and a lot of other old loop tracks that you could sample and mix. There was some deadline, and at the end, Chuck D. and Flav listened to all the tracks and took a couple of them on the album. Not a bad disk, worth getting. If for no other reason the track "Gotta Give The Peeps What They Need" was banned from MTV for the the words "free Mumia and H. Rap Brown". MTV said no, too political. PE said no editing, it goes out as is. Then MTV said "well, if you cut out the word 'free' then it's cool". Chuck said you gotta be crazy telling a black man he can't use the word free, and it never will get aired.

    They're very comfortable with the online stuff. They released their previous 2 albums online. They had a remix album called "Bring the Noise 2000". Def Jam didn't want to release it, didn't think there was a market. So Chuck and Flav said "hey we did the work already, let them hear the music" and released it on MP3, some server somewhere. Def Jam said no, said "even though we're not gonna release it, we OWN you, and you can't release it". Chuck got pissed, didn't like being owned by anyone, pulled the tracks (though a lot of people including me already had the tracks) and released the song "Swindler's Lust" with some pretty harsh elbows thrown at Russel Simmon's chest. This track and a few others got compiled to "There's a Poison Going On" which was released on MP3. Was $8 for a download, $10 if you wanted them to send you a disk - Chuck autographed those. Problem is, this was released on AtomicPop.com, which has since gone under. Was weird having an album you could get from Chuck and Flav for $8 (or like mine, for $10 with autograph) with all the money going to the artists, being sold at Virgin Megastore for $17.99, with maybe a buck going to them. No autograph even, such a gyp.

    Check out http://www.BringTheNoise.com/ for some of the history and some live rap feeds. http://www.PublicEnemy.com/ well, for Public Enemy.

  6. Information Society...? by bergeron76 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Didn't Information Society (Kurt Harland, et al) get them signed? I saw them open up for IS back in the mid 90's; and they were a really great band/show.

    Haven't heard anything from InSoc in the past few years, but I'm glad that there are still some 80's synth-pop-pro-techno's still around making good music and advancing the music industry with advanced distribution methods....

    --
    Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
  7. Re:What percent use a "modern ... decent OS"? by zulux · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In that case, if you claim that the operating system in use on 95+ percent of the audience's computers is not a "modern computing platform", then whether or not tar is bundled with a "modern computing platform" is not all that relevant now, is it?

    95+ ! Hah - more like 90% and falling.

    Windows is marketshare in servers, desktops and developers keeps on sinking. It's will always be a somewhat viable choice for new-users, but the days of it's dominace are over.

    Microsoft has since released Windows XP Home Edition based on the NT kernel, which has fixed many of these issues.

    XP is a good effort against Microsoft's old operating systems, but against to other vendor's - it's a sad joke. Fuck - Apple makes a better Windows-compatable file-serving OS than the people who make Windows. That should tell you somthing.

    No super-computer runs Windows.
    No root domain server runs Windows.
    No satelite runs Windows.
    No large-scale database runs Windows.
    No cave system runs Windows.
    No militaty flight simulator run Windows.
    No bank runs it's federal transations on Windows.

    Of all the important thing that computers do - hardly anthing important runs Windows. There's a reason for this.

    Sure, MS has most the desktop video-game market, most of the simple spread-sheet market and simple document creation market to itself - but nothing really of importance.

    What percent of the band's audience uses a "decent OS" by your definition?

    10%. One in 10. Enough, that they should have a .tar .

    --

    Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.