Spunk! and EMI are proud to announce the forthcoming album from songwriter and singer Holly Throsby. The album, ‘A Loud Call’, follows on from 2006′s ‘Under The Town’ and Holly’s 2004 debut, ‘On Night’.
Recorded in Nashville with engineer and producer Mark Nevers [Lambchop, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy], the album includes performances from a handful of very special guests including members of Lambchop, Palace and The Silver Jews. Holly’s long-time band members, Bree van Reyk [drums and many instruments] and Jens Birchall [cello, bass, mandolin], also feature prominently.
‘A Loud Call’ is as stunning as it is embracing -a warm romance of an album where bare folk meets with dreamy bright pop songs and lilting back-porch dirges. Pastoral and nautical imagery and succinct observations -from the everyday to the fantastic -are delivered with Holly’s distinctive phrasing and lyrical twists and turns.
The album features 11 songs including ‘One Of You For Me’, originally found on Holly’s 2007 EP of the same name, and the forthcoming single ‘A Heart Divided’, which will be available for download from iTunes come May 24. ‘A Loud Call’ will be released on July 5 through Spunk!/EMI.
Lunatic Entertainment & Spunk! Present
Newcastle -Sat June 7 – Northern Star Hotel Tix $12 + BF or $15 on the door
New single ‘A Heart Divided’ available May 24 on iTunes
New album ‘A Loud Call’ out July 5th on Spunk!
www.myspace.com/hollythrosby
By Courtney Awesome.
What the fuck happened to the vines? I remember when Highly Evolved came out and I was soo pissed my brother got it for his birthday and I didn’t. Jokes on him because I stole it anyway, so sucked in Jeremy. You also got the Kings of Leon one but you didn’t give a fuck about them either. What a fucking shame.
Anyway I remeber thinking Craig was such a bad ass because im pretty sure I saw him smoking pot in Rolling Stone even though at that point in my life I had no idea what pot was. I loved The Vines. I listened to them for hours on a cassette tape I had made by taping shit off of Rage that was simulcast on Triple J. Sounds like ages ago, but in reality I was just a total melvin and also ‘orphan Annie’ poor. I’m pretty sure I had Bowling for Soup and N.E.R.D on that tape so I wouldn’t exactly rely on my 14 year old musical taste.
This new Vines track is pretty much a piece of shit. That dude left and joined Youth Group right? Well its healthy to say they were fucked from the start then. I have a Youth Group t shirt because I liked like one song but then they like killed Marissa on The OC to the other single. You fucks, you ruined it for yourself.
Craig’s voice is intolerable, so are the lyrics, and the flat, boring, dude you were never like Nirvana ‘yeeeeaaaahs’ are just shit and dated filler. There is no edge and I really don’t think it will resonate with the previous market because like 20 better bands have already come along and done what they did better and didn’t go crazy and shit.
I think they did a dj set at Oxford Art Factory on the weekend but I missed it because I was too busy being an actually bad ass rocker and trashing my hotel room in Kings Cross. (n.b- it was a Formula1 room so technically it was already trashed) not pissing around playing other dudes music because I am aware how much mine sucks.
I give this 4 awesomes out of five, because Craig is still kinda cute, but he needs to hire like Linda Perry or some shit.
After selling out almost every show on their national Other Voices, Other Rooms album tour, THE GETAWAY PLAN are getting ready to embark on their largest headline journey yet. The Where the City Meets The Sea Tour -named after their latest hit single -will run from June to August, taking in seventeen cities and regional centers around the country.
THE GETAWAY PLAN’s debut album Other Voices, Other Rooms (released in February of this year) was greeted with an overwhelming response from the fans and industry alike. Triple J made it their feature album of the week and record crowds flocked to the band’s in-store launches at JB HiFi in Melbourne and Utopia Records in Sydney. The album debuted at an incredible #14 on the National ARIA Charts and #1 on the AIR Independent Charts, surprising many by remaining in both months after it’s release. The band’s first national tour in support of the album sold out in all but one venue, with hundreds of fans turned away from the capacity venues, and hugely energetic responses from the crowds within. The band has since played national support to Millencolin (US) and will embark on Kisschasy’s ‘Skins and Bones’ tour in May / June.
After the success of the album’s first single Streetlight on Triple J and Channel V, THE GETAWAY PLAN have successfully crossed over with their second single Where the City Meets the Sea. The track is now firmly on rotation at Nova and was one of the most played songs on Triple J so far this year – meanwhile it’s highly engaging video has been in the Top 10 most played songs on Channel V for over a month, and has clocked up over 50,000 plays on YouTube and MySpace. The official release date of the single is June 7, when it will be available in all good digital and record stores with exclusive b-sides.
With THE GETAWAY PLAN in line to become one of Australia’s greatest success stories, tickets for the Where The City Meets The Sea tour are sure to sell out. Catch THE GETAWAY PLAN in all their glory and while you can still say you we’re there before the take over.
WEDNESDAY 16 JULY – Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle (NSW) 18+
Tickets from www.bigtix.com.au and at the venue: (02) 4962 2459
THURSDAY 17 JULY – Hoey Moey, Coffs Harbour (NSW) 18+
Tickets from www.boomtown.oztix.com.au or 1300 762 545, the venue on (02) 6652 3833, Park Beach Music on (02) 66523725, Coffs Music (02) 6652 1641 or www.offbeatoperations.com.au
By Courtney Awesome.
This album is a bad omen from the very beginning. from the shitty cover art and packaging that look like they were ripped from a shitty screamo band in 2005 to the retard intro, god knows what inspired that but i hope whatever did dies a fucking hateful death. I like hip hop. Like, hip hop with black dudes and bitches and hoes but not some suburb trash from some shit Aussie ‘burb.
What do they really have to pass on as a message to the youth of today? Fuck all. which is deemed pretty appropriate by today’s samples. I was impressed with the checking of an entourage character and some other random shit but other than that it was just faggoted try hard crap with track names such as ‘$5 steak’ and ‘destiny lane’ shit dudes more like destiny, lame.
If there is nothing worse than bad hip hop, wait to you see its puffer vested body on the picture on the flyer I got with it. Puffer vests. What the fuck? That’s about as gangster as licking strawberry milk off a dudes waxed chest. Not unless you are P. Diddy faggs.
The intro part and the break mid cd were so fucked up because firstly, I thought i had gotten the wrong cd, which I was psyched for, only to be proven wrong, and secondly, with the mid cd break- you fucks tricked me. I thought that shit was over, but oh no, there was more. More awful crappy fucking try hard Aussie hip hop.
Anyway, Bliss n Eso are touring in heaps of shit places like Lismore and Gippsland (where the fuck is that?) this month.
This cd will end up on heavy rotation due to misinformed faggots who take their shirts off during verbal arguments & little girls who get felt up in the school yard and wear fake bape.
Bliss n Eso will surely make it into the hottest 100 because more than one hipster faggot will vote as a joke because they love the cool, safe irony of Australian hip hop.”
I give you three awesomes out of five and an ‘A’ for effort.
After reading my latest article on all the different social networks that I’m involved in my employer, SCHILLER Australia, is wanting to get a little more “social and interactive” on the internet so they have asked me to investigate how they can do that.
The brief that was given to me in a meeting today is that it needs to be easy, it needs to have the ability to be put in front of a large audience, it needs to be secure, and most of all it needs to be user friendly for the CEO. The obvious thing that springs to mind, for me at least, is that they should get involved in a number of different social networking websites.
So here’s what I’m thinking network wise, and some examples of how they can get involved.
Twitter – despite it’s downtime and constant crashing Twitter is actually cool and potentially quite useful to us. One use is to answer service questions and basic medical / cardiac questions. It can also be used for announcing upcoming product releases and other news articles.
Facebook – On Facebook you can setup ‘fan pages’ for companies and / or products. The awareness that could be created for public access level products, ie. at-home defibrillators and CPR training products, could be used to open the market up and have us being seen as a leader in the field.
YouTube – We sell a number of products which are very simple to use and essentially require no training, however there are always a few customers who do require some training. With these products our reps, in most cases, spend more time driving to and from the customer’s to deliver the training than they do actually training the customers. If we were able to avoid all that wasted travel time by being able to deliver the training via You Tube, or similar video site, we could save quite a bit of money and also it would also provide a great reference resource that customers can revert back to, not to mention that it could also be used as pre-sale training so that the potential customer would know a lot more about the particular product.
Last FM – Currently we have one of our old computers plugged into our telephone system and our on-hold music is played in iTunes and streamed out to the phone whenever anyone is on-hold. This is more of a novelty rather than a sales and or brand awareness tool, however it would keep information ticking over on our website as well as giving people an insight into our company persona via the types of music that we listen to.
Flickr – Our sales team is constantly on the road, and also attend a large number of conferences, expos and seminars around the world each year. We could have a company Flickr account setup to showcase these different events we attend, the people we meet, the products we see, and some of the different places we travel to each year for business. Again this is more of a novelty than an actual sales tool however it’s the sort of thing that does bring people on to your website when you’re taking their photos at various events and can show a more human side to the company rather than just being a ‘faceless organisation’.
Upcoming – Upcoming can be used as an events calendar where our customers can see where we will be displaying our product range at the various conferences, expos and other events we attend. People can subscribe to it and also contact us to book personal product demonstrations and alike.
There’s a handful of other social networking websites that I’ve also considered but am still undecided on. The reason I’m undecided on these ones varies but mostly it’s because of privacy concerns for our staff, and in the case of Linked In there is the potential that it can be used by companies to ‘head hunt’ our staff and while they could probably achieve that anyway I don’t want to make it any easier for them
So that’s what I’m thinking at the moment, and from here I will be making a presentation of this to the boss in the next couple of days so I’m eager to here from you guys think and if there are other potential social networks are out there that could be worth taking a look at as well.
Recently we’ve been ringing around confirming all of our bookings for Cath and my wedding in August, yesterday I rang the venue to confirm our booking and pay it all. No one answered so I left a message.
Lastnight we got a phone call at around 10pm, it was the venue. They’ve double booked that day and we can’t have the venue. When I informed her that we had made a booking last year I was told that it was “only a tentative booking and you haven’t confirmed it prior to now”
She also added, “we would’ve called you when the other party booked to see if you still wanted it but no one returned our call”.
I asked her what number she called and she proceeded to rattle off some random number that I’ve not heard of. So basically we have everything else booked, confirmed and a number of things completely paid for, but we have no venue! Arghhh!!
Today’s priority is to shortlist possible alternatives and to start ringing around!
If anyone out there knows of a function room, surf lifesaving club, or some other venue, in the Newcastle area that is nice let me know.
So far the list is;
- Cooks Hill Surf Lifesaving Club
- Nobbys Surf Lifesaving Club
- Blacksmiths Surf Liefsavving Club
There’s an absolute plethora of social networking websites out there now. They come in many different shapes and sizes, abilities, disabilities, problems, solutions, and cover pretty well every subject under the sun.
But which ones should I join up to?
That’s a reasonably easy question to answer. All of them! Well maybe not every single social networking site that rears its head on Mashable, but you should get yourself signed up on all the sites that are specific to your interests and / or blogging topics.
For example, I blog about photography, video, product reviews, cooking, social networking and a few other random things so I’m on social networking sites like Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.TV, Flickr, Last.FM, Facebook, Myspace, Virb, Friend Feed, LinkedIn and errmm I’m probably forgetting some but those are the core sites that I post to, stream to, link to, republish to and whatever else to.
Going through the above list there’s quite a number of overlaps, eg. Digg vs. StumbleUpon, YouTube vs. Vimeo vs. BlipTV, and Facebook vs. Myspace vs. Virb.
So why all the overlaps?
Everybody is different and well different people are on different websites for different reasons, eg. I really like the way BlipTV handles the videos I post and that I just have a simple block of code for my channel and whenever I publish a new video to BlipTV it automatically hits the front page of my blog, however I know more people use YouTube and Vimeo so to still bring solid traffic in from those sites I also publish the video there.
Another example would be the Facebook vs. Myspace vs. Virb network, all of them have very different user demographics so to actually get the most value out of the potential traffic you get involved with all of them.
Of course being involved in so many different websites can be very time consuming keeping people updated with your blogging and what not, not to mention quite a big distraction. Which is where websites like Friend Feed popup which basically allows you to network the updates from all your endeavors onto a single page. You can also subscribe / friend other people so you can easily keep up with the goings on in their worlds.
Aside from Friend Feed you’ve also got plenty of different browser plugins for Firefox, and even better is the browser that’s built to handle pretty well all of these websites Flock. Flock allows you to enter all of your different usernames and passwords into some handy forms and from there whenever you and your friends update one of your social accounts you get the update in Flock.
And lastly, for those not wanting to further slow Firefox down with plugins, or who don’t like the look of Flock, most of these social networking websites have many different RSS feed options that you can subscribe to in your reader of choice.
Pretty well everyday a new social networking website pops up, and every second day another one disappears. Choose wisely, stick to the core ones that have been around for a while, but also don’t be afraid to jump onto one of the new ones if it feels like it might last.
Anyway, if you’re on one of the previously mentioned websites and we’re not friends, go and friend me now!
Catch you around the web somewhere.
To really capture your audience and to get them to relate to you more I believe it is crucial to have a few key things on your blog / website. One of the most crucial ones is the ‘About‘ page.
Apart from letting your readers know a bit more about your blog, you can also tell them a little more about yourself so that your readers have a better connection with you and what you write about. You don’t need to get intimately personal, but share what you’re comfortable with.
Here’s what I put on mine;
My name is Mathew Packer, my friends call me Matt or Packer. I live on the east coast of Australia in a beautiful city called Newcastle with my fiance Cath, and our dog Cherry Bomb.
I’m a fiance, photographer, blogger, entrepreneur, freelance web designer, marketing genius, editor, 9-5 worker, golfer, sometimes-handy man, and generally a pretty nice guy.
Another thing that I think is very important these days in blogging, particularly when their is advertising revenue involved, is to actually write a disclosure statement.
Time and time again I read articles on peoples blogs where they’re promoting some form of advertising or the latest and greatest pyramid scam / scheme but they don’t actually use it themselves or even worse they’re just signed up as an affiliate to promote it to their readers who in turn are the ones who actually put the time and dollars into the scheme.
When it comes to reviewing products and making recommendations on them, inform your readers if have an existing relationship with the company who have sent you the product. Recently I’ve seen a couple of fairly high profile bloggers recommending products of brands who were advertisers on their websites, yet they failed to inform their readers of that existing relationship and were scrutinized for potentially providing a very bias review.
As an example, here’s my statement;
I will not write about advertising channels, search engine marketing techniques, or even products, that I do not use. This won’t change under any circumstances so please do not contact me about endorsing anything unless you’re prepared to send me a free sample, and unless you’re prepared to receive genuine and honest feedback about it.
The reviews that i have published are based on time I’ve spent with the product and are very honest. If I don’t like it I do inform my readers, and on the flip side if I receive excellent service or I’ve found a product that is very good I also tell me readers. This has always been the case, and will continue to be the case. The banners on my blog are all companies that I have bought things from and received excellent service, they are companies I am happy to recommend based on that and that alone.
What other things can you put on your ‘About’ page. The list is endless really, but for some ideas here are a bunch of different ‘About’ pages from other bloggers who I think understand the importance of having the About page;
This article has been one of the hardest to write for me. The reason it’s incredibly tough to write is because I’m not a quitter, I really don’t like to give up on things.
So why now?
Well it’s actually quite a simple reason, dollars. Basically I’m With The Band is costing too much to run on a weekly basis and the return is no where near enough to keep the website going.
Currently the website costs about $15 a week to keep up and running, this includes the hosting, postage of CDs and assorted things to my reviewers, and phone calls to organise photo and review access to events we cover.
This doesn’t sound like much at all, but please note that it doesn’t include time!
Time is an important, and expensive thing, these days and I’m With The Band has grown to the point that it actually requires someone to work on it almost full time, ie. 30+ hours per week. Up until now I’ve just been putting the hard work in and trying to grow I’m With The Band to the point where the advertising revenue would be enough to employ someone. For a while the numbers were growing in terms of daily hits and page views (we’re currently receiving around 50,000 hits per month) but the advertising dollars from Google Adsense and our affiliate advertising never amounted to more than $7 a week.
To run the website and to hire someone to work full time I’ve worked out that it will cost me around $500 a week, that leaves me $493.00 out of pocket per week! OUCH!
So where to now?
Well I will continue to keep the website up and running until mid-June continuing to publish the reviews and press releases that I receive in the hope that someone will come along and dump some dollars in my lap, a corporate sponsor perhaps? Failing that I’m With The Band will stop publishing new articles and will remain as it is until the hosting runs out early next year.
If any businesses are reading this and would like to talk about getting involved with I’m With The Band as a sponsor then send me an email (mathew.packer@gmail.com).
Just a quick note to let you know that I’ve just finished up the recording and editing of my review on the HP Pavillion HDX-9200 notebook computer. It’s in the process of being uploaded now so hopefully it should be live a little later this afternoon.