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.
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.