Thoughts From My Lunch Hour

Hello there,

For those of you who may have been wondering where in the hell I, your wonderful editor Andrew Daniels, have been around these parts as of late, I apologize. I've been 9-to-5-ing it as an entertainment reporter at The Morning Call in Allentown, PA, and the job hardly leaves me any time for Stark. Fortunately, the blog is left in the great hands of my two fellow editors who are smarter than me for figuring out how to juggle two things at once. Time management!

Anyway, the only time I seem to ever have to dedicate to our baby is during this, my lunch hour. So I figured that the least I can do to contribute is to offer little bits and pieces of goodness that I stumble across throughout the day - mostly via Twitter - and compile them here, with the more-than-occasional misguided musing about my irrelevant topic of choice. Let's call it Thoughts From My Lunch Hour. You can actually call it whatever you want. Today's inaugural edition begins after the jump with a surprise!

Okay, so first item of business is a good one. Thanks for following me after the jump. Your reward is a new mp3 from The Duke & The King, the folky new project from Simone Felice of the Felice Brothers. It's called "The Morning That I Get To Hell," and it's pretty much great. The band's album, Nothing Gold Can Stay hits stores August 4 via Ramseur, and I can't wait for it. Grab it: "The Morning That I Get To Hell."

Twitter told me that The Dodos' new one, Time to Die, leaked. Bummer. It's not due until September 15, so I hope the early leak doesn't hurt them. In terms of popularity, they're not quite on par with bands like Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear, whose recent albums both saw leaks month before their release but still put up great opening week sales.

My most anticipated record of the year finally has a release date and title. Brand New's fourth LP will be called And One Head Can Never Die (?!?) and is out September 22 on Interscope. Don't know what the title is in reference to, but it's appropriate for a band whose last one was titled The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me. Really can't wait. These guys change pretty drastically with every album, so I have no idea what this will sound like.

I have to give a shoutout to my favorite blog as of late: Intensities In Ten Suburbs. Former Stylus writer Andrew Unterberger has been counting down his top 200 singles of the last decade every day. The whole thing is superbly written, and has made me see afterthought pop songs - like Matchbox 20's "Bent", yesterday's pick - in an entirely different light thanks to excellent analysis and reflection.

...Shit. It's 3 p.m. already. That's it for me today. Back to Vince and Matt's regularly scheduled programming.