Thao Nguyen is a tireless performer. She’s been touring with her band, the Get Down Stay Down, since she graduated from college, and is used to the rigors of the road, including backhanded compliments like, “You play pretty good for a girl.” Anyone who has ever seen her live, or listened to one of her records, knows how far off the mark that comment is. Nguyen is one of the most innovative guitarists around, with a style that blends grinding power chords, the jittery fills of a funkateer, a dash of country twang, clanging rock guitar pyrotechnics and staccato single-note runs that add a skewed melodic feel to her songs that’s halfway between bluegrass and hip hop. After hearing her 2005 debut, Like The Linen, Laura Veirs took her on tour and helped get her signed to Kill Rock Stars for 2008’s We Brave Bee Stings And All and 2009’s Know Better Learn Faster. Between tours, she moved to San Francisco and took a year off to write the songs that became We The Common (Ribbon). Nguyen and bandmates Jason Slota, Adam Thompson and Johanna Kunin will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on them.
Thompson: Crud Crud was one of the coolest mp3 blogs of our time. I was a faithful visitor for years, right ’til the end when the blog’s creator, Mr. Scott Soriano, decided to stop posting for ethical reasons. The idea for the blog is simple: in his words “Crud Crud is a tour through the stacks of records, demo tapes, etc., that surround me. No recycled mp3s, CD tracks or reissues here. Average price paid for the records below is $3. Very few I have spent more than $5 on. I present to you some of my favorites. It keeps the guilt of hording this crud distant.” It was an incredible library of mp3s ripped from vinyl that you would absolutely never ever hear anywhere else on earth, and more often than not you can’t even find information on the track or artist. Mr. Soriano’s stories that accompany each post were wonderful and the songs always hit this musical sweet spot for me. Unfortunately, you can’t download the mp3s anymore because Soriano took David Lowery’s response to a teenage music thieving intern at NPR to heart (I can’t blame him, as I also agree with Mr. Lowery) and decided it was unethical for him to continue posting mp3s without at the bare minimum asking the artist for permission, which would obviously be a problem considering most of the vinyl he blogged about must have emerged from a rift in space and time. But hey, I got the mp3s before he removed the links, and let me tell you, they are all musical treasures. I urge you to visit the site and read his posts. Even if you can’t hear the songs the posts are worth the trip.
