Each week Playlist’s Glenn Peoples looks at exclusive and featured tracks from the iTunes Music Store and other online music services. Check out these tracks for the week of May 2nd.
The Gang of Four reunited after they had become a reference point for new bands like Franz Ferdinand and The Rapture. Rare is an album review these days that doesn’t name drop the influential group. They just played the Coachella Festival, they’ve got a new album coming out on V2 Records, are reissuing their classic album Entertainment and, right now, they’ve got a new song on iTunes called “To Hell With Poverty (2005).”
Canadian duo Tegan & Sara are identical twin sisters with East Village haircuts who play the kind of rock songs that gets the hipsters humming. The hipsters will be glad to know they’ve got an exclusive live EP at iTunes, the five-track Live At The Phoenix.
A few more exclusives at iTunes come from names not heard too often for a few years. Bow Wow is joined by former B2K lead singer Omarion on the single “Let Me Hold You.” Santa Barbara’s Dishwalla, whose big hit “Counting Blue Cars” came in the mid ’90s, is back with a self-titled album.
The free iTunes single of the week is “Sunshine” by Billy Miles, a sunny R&B- and trip-hop-flavored song that is likely to draw a few comparisons to Macy Gray. KCRW DJ Nic Harcourt says of Billy, “one of my favorite discoveries of last year.”
Wal-Mart has an exclusive Killers song—the club mix of “Mr. Brightside.” This is different than the other version that’s been available at online stores for some time, Jacque Lu Cont’s Thin White Duke mix.
MSN Music has a special deal that runs until July 10th: Buy one song and get five songs free. Click here for details.
Rhapsody has gone and added quite a few great albums: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ Let Love In , Commodores’ Hits Volume 1 , My Morning Jacket’s Ch. 1 The Sandworm Cometh: Early Recordings and two albums by industrial legends Front 242, Pulse and Re:boot .
Bleep.com recently added albums by electronic pioneers Autechre—including their new one, Untitled —in the FLAC format. MP3 versions of the albums are also available.
One very notable exclusive at Rhapsody is Fat Joe’s Rolling Stone Original EP . It has five songs, and, yes, his anthem “Lean Back” is one of them.
PureVolume has two downloads available from Rock ‘n’ Roll Soliders, a garage-ish band from Oregon that signed to Warner Bros. last year. Check out “Funny Little Feeling” and “Anthem.”
For world music fans, Calabash Music has a free download of “Dida” by Manou Gallo, a singer and percussionist who has played bass for Zap Mama and Tambours de Brazza.
Finally, there’s a new online music store on the Internet: SongTouch.com. The “Christian Napster,” as it’s called, has over 18,000 songs by Christian artists.