*BC Series* Review: Cloudkicker - Beacons

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Album

Back to the Bandcamp releases. This was the album that made me aware of the site, having been recommended by some site that I found in a random search for free music. Clearly, I was impressed enough to take great interest in the site, so it would seem I owe a lot to this album.

Cloudkicker is a one-man, instrumental progressive rock/metal project out of Columbus, Ohio. While my preferences in prog-rock are typically based on high-quality instrumentation, I generally lean toward acts with talented vocalists and interesting lyrical themes. It's a genre in which instrumental projects are usually very pretentious, and often boring. Cloudkicker doesn't come off that way to me.

*BC series* New Release: Dragonfly Lingo - Offscreen

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Album

I'm starting off my series of Bandcamp reviews with what is so far my favorite work amongst the electronic stuff I've checked out.

Having designed sound for stage productions and at least one piece for an independent film (which unfortunately didn't make the final cut) gives Dragonfly Lingo's Mitia Wexler a bit of an edge in implementing the concept for his debut album, Offscreen.

Website: Bandcamp

Every now and then, a music-oriented website comes to my attention and really impresses me. MySpace started out as a nifty idea for the independent artist, but the potential for abuse and shift in direction was obvious from the get-go. When I first found mp3.com over a decade ago, it was a fantastic site for discovering lesser-known artists, but they whored themselves out pretty quickly.

I finally found the perfect spiritual successor to mp3.com, and it looks like they've implemented a solid model with great potential. It's the perfect example for the direction the music industry should be taking in the age of the Internet. The name of the site is Bandcamp, and when I first discovered it about two months ago, I decided right away that it should be the subject of my first website review. After giving it some time and thought, here are my observations.