Holycrapholycrapholycrap! Portishead, one of my all-time favorite bands, has not released an album for eleven years. When I first stumbled across them back in high school, I bought all their albums, I bought their t-shirt, and I thought for sure I’d never see anything else from them. The lead singer, Beth Gibbons, did a solo project a few years back, I think, but it had a completely different sound from Portishead. Now, I just found that they’ve released a new album, Third, just this year. I’m previewing it now on Amazon, which is where I’m probably about to buy the MP3’s. I’m so very excited about this because I think their music is uniquely jarring (see “Cowboys”) and creepy (e.g. “Mourning Air”).
Once again, iTunes is hardly putting up a fight. I can get the album for $10.99 there and it’s not iTunes Plus, so it’s DRMed AAC’s. Whereas Amazon MP3 has it for $8.99 in DRM-free 256 kbps MP3’s. There’s an obvious choice here, and Apple needs to wise up about this competitor.
3 Comments
Portishead is great. “Nobody Loves Me” is probably my favorite song, “Glory Box” is amazing as well (well, all songs are). They have a really unique style and I like that.
I echo what Tracy said! I love “Nobody Loves Me” =] I’ll be sure to give the new stuff a listen, thanks for the heads up.
I do think Apple has been slowly upping their prices on music… more and more albums are getting more and more expensive. If I could handle waiting through the instant gratification, I could wait until the CD went down in price to $13-14 (sometimes cheaper at places like WalMart) and get the benefit of having the cover art and the pamphlet for just a few dollars more.