I’m a dad, and my four year old son loves music, but it’s hard to find him stuff that isn’t cutesy and annoying for adults. Here’s one artist that satisfies the toddlers and doesn’t offend the ears of the grownups.

I first met Enzo Garcia when he graciously let me stay in his room while I was visiting his brother and sister-in-law in San Francisco. He’s a great guy, and we got along well. He was trying to break it as a roots musician, but the banjo and fiddle scene is small even in the US, and just didn’t have room for Enzo, even though he was clearly talented.

Later, through gigging at a restaurant where young families were regulars, Enzo discovered he could make a better living performing and writing music for young kids.

His latest album, Pink, has his trademark touch of a little roots-style picking and lots of non-smarmy friendliness. It’s featured on the homepage of CDBaby.com right now, and here’s an excerpt from the CDBaby.com review:

“Few genres at CD Baby face the daunting challenge of having to appeal to such a wide age range in their fans. With the Kids/Family section, these artists not only have to keep the young ones interested but they also have to keep the adults from running out the door for pain killers. That responsibility can be quite a task. However, Enzo Garcia has a memorable way of being “cute” and catchy without dropping all integrity and conviction. It’s like he’s honed the playful and goofy elements of adult music and tweaked them to fit perfectly within kids’music.” Listen to it with your own young ones - CDBaby delivers worldwide! ;-)

Got an email from Apple today to let me know there’s a new version of iTunes Producer available to download. iTunes Producer is a simple application used to enter and upload the audio files for each track and the metadata (track name, album name, songwriter, etc…). I’d like to tell you what’s new about the software, but Apple has taken the unusual step of warning record labels not to. The email from Apple states, “We ask that you do not give this information to anyone under any circumstance, as it is covered under your agreement with Apple Computer, Inc. “ Not sure which agreement they’re referring to, as there’s nothing about it in the license agreement you agree to when you install the software. Perhaps they mean the massive iTunes label agreement you sign in order to sell music on iTunes? Anyway, you know me, I’m not a trouble-maker, so I’ll leave it to bolder folk than me to disclose what’s new. I’ll just say this: there are some new features, but it’s still not a very impressive piece of software from a company betting so much of its future on online content sales.

Brendan Gallagher of Karma County and Dead Marines has finally finished building his studio, recording his first solo album, and now he’s completed mastering it in the final mastering session at the famed Studio 301 with Don “Is Good” Bartley - it’s been a big year for him!
I can’t wait to hear the album and I wish I could be there to see it performed live for the first time. There’s two dates (neither of which I can get to): With Bernie Hayes at Rose Of Australia Hotel, Erskineville Wed 21st June; With Liz Martin and Jesse Younan at Supper Club Fairfield RSL thur 22nd June.
Be there if you can!

(Don is the small hairy one at left, Brendan is the big hairy one at right)

I can’t remember how I happened across GOTYE’s album Like Drawing Blood exactly, but it must have been online, because the artist has released the album independently online, and although he’s had some great reviews and the album has been nominated for an award by TripleJ, most of his exposure has been online to-date.

Like Drawing Blood isn’t really the kind of thing we release on Littoral, but I love it personally and feel you need to know about it. If you’re a fan of Lemon Jelly, BT or Thievery Corporation, this is for you.

I’d recommend listening to Thanks For Your Time, a bitterly funny comment on telephone customer service, and Learnalilgivinanlovin (I think I’ve spelled that right) which is a mashup of Phil Collins which makes him not just listenable, but downright funky and danceable again.

Almost everything on the album’s a potential successful single - GOTYE’s writing, multi-musicianship, vocals and production work are top-class.

You can buy the album online from www.gotye.com and he has some samples there and on http://www.myspace.com/gotye. Judging by the reviews he’s getting on MySpace I think he’s probably starting to make good money from track sales too, which is great to see. Awesome to see the artist reaping 100% of the reward.

US indie music mag The Fader is one of a small number of specialist magazines starting to make PDFs of their magazines available via RSS feeds in iTunes.

Will it work? Well, there’s a couple of niggly issues to work out. For starters, limited merchandising space in the iTunes interface mean it’s not likely that magazines are going to be actively promoted in iTunes by Apple. Magazines will need to drive their own traffic, which means many magazines will be reluctant to experiment for fear of cannibalising their print subscribers (not that this will actually happen, but it’s a publisher’s worst, most scary nightmare.) There’s also no navigation to magazines in the current version of iTunes. The PDFs of the mags actually live in the podcast directory as RSS feeds with PDF attachments. To the RSS feed reader element of iTunes, this makes perfect sense, but to Joe Consumer, compute it does not. Magazines would need their own spot in iTunes’ left hand side navigation for much repeat traffic to come back. PDFs, of course, can only be viewed on your Mac or PC, not your iPod, which is where many consumers consume the content they download in iTunes. There’s a good chance many people will subscribe to a magazine feed, and then never come back to read issue two because it doesn’t appear in their iPod or in their regular playlists. File size is a problem too. PDF is a great format for high-fidelity rendering and printing, but it’s lousy for data compression. I don’t actually know how big the PDF file is for the latest issue of The Fader, because the whole time I’ve been writing this, it’s been downloading on iTunes, and 10 minutes later, it’s still downloading. Do you get excited about downloading magazines overnight so that you can read them tomorrow? Latest-release movies maybe, but not magazines. Not unless they’re top shelf import mags that I’d otherwise have to wait a week or two for the airmail copy to arrive. In summary, pushing magazines through iTunes is a great example of outside-the-box thinking, but it’s not going to change the magazine publishing industry or the iTunes business for some time yet.

We’re delighted to announce the second artist to join the Littoral family is Australian singer/songwriter James Cooper, whose debut album, Second Season will be released on Littoral just as soon as we can get the discs pressed, retailers stocked and press… err.. pressed to review it.

James is an Aussie ex-pat living and working as an art director and musician in London. He makes a good living most days producing the art for other people’s album covers, including some of the biggest names in the business. But making his own music is his real passion, and this debut album shines with a professionalism and maturity that suggests he should keep indulging this passion. He’s been compared to Jeff Tweedy (Wilco), Bright Eyes, and sometimes he’s a bit Paul Kelly. He’s often along the same lines as Tim Freedman (The Whitlams) which is hardly surprising, since James and Tim are friends. James supported The Whitlams most recently for sold-out London shows, and co-wrote a song on The Whitlams’ most recent album. Already released in the UK, US and Japan to very positive reviews, Second Season includes a wide range of styles that will leave you wondering if maybe you’re listening to a cover compilation album, but no, they’re all by the one guy. If this is a first album, James is truly going places, and hopefully he won’t forget the little micro-label that helped him downunder. Look for release dates to be announced here shortly, and in the meantime, find out more about James at www.james-cooper.com and his myspace page.

I can’t be the only one with a fetish for a bit of franco-gypsy accordion, especially when it’s used to adorn the fringes of a dance song. After all, how many people bought Grace Jones’ classic Nightclubbing for the track ‘I’ve Seen That Face Before”? If you’re a closet dance accordion fan too, you’ll dig the Gotan Project’s ‘Lunatico’, which I found on Word UK magazine’s monthly sampler, but which is also available now on iTunes. Read the reviews in Word and the album’s an atttempt to update the classic genre of tango music, originating in the latin world, and certainly most of the song titles are latin, but mostly it sounds French to me. Many of the songs have just a soupçon of accordion, and all are redolent of Paris in the early hours of the morning, after a night spent in the headlong pursuit of, well, hedonism. There’s up-tempo dancefloor numbers and more than a few of the slow, piano-and-bass-driven late night jazz types in-between. Highlight of the latter being ‘Celos’ and of the former, ‘Criminal’. But the highlight of the album is surely ‘Diferente’, a modern-day interpretation of Jones’ classic ‘I’ve Seen That Face Before.’ If I were Jones I’d be telling my publicist to get on the phone, because if Gotan Project goes Top 10, she’s going to be back in the limelight. For all the right reasons - ‘Nightclubbing’ is a timeless classic too.