Sam Roberts Band – Shapeshifters

One drawback to my new-old car is the lack of a decent antenna. I’ve decided that must be the reason why I don’t get as many radio stations as I used to and I lose the ones I do get a lot sooner on my drive than I used to.

It hardly seems worth it to buy an antenna but I kind of miss being able to check out something I may not already know. I did have on my local college station the other day and Shazamed a song I liked since I felt sure I’d lose the signal before the dj told me the song. Only now did I get around to looking up the song and the band. This isn’t the same song I heard but it is the band, the Sam Roberts Band from Montreal, I think.

I love that I can find out a song by tapping on an app, then find it online, check out more songs by that band, look up some background about them, all on my phone. The speed and ease of music discovery is fantastic. I do really miss the depth of the old ways though. Even for bands I already know a lot about, I want the liner notes and the album art. I went to a record store in a nearby town yesterday that had lots of new releases on vinyl. My local record store doesn’t get in a lot of new releases and I had a bit of sticker shock looking at some of the album prices. $25-30 for a new record, just a normal length single LP, is not in my budget. I picked up an $8 CD of Superchunk’s Majesty Shredding instead. Of course I don’t have a CD player in the car so I’ll need to rip it to iTunes and transfer it to my iPod which I can use with the cassette adapter I bought. Yeah, I see how just streaming music is easier but I still want to read the booklet and buying an album, even at only $8, is going to mean more money going to the band.

As for Sam Roberts, I’ll do some more listening but so far I like the songs I’ve heard from this album.