Welcome to Chromewaves v7.5

Image via Simpsons Viewer Top 8And there we go. This is what I’ve been giving myself headaches over the last few days, dragging this here blog kicking and screaming from the horribly out of date CMS that I’ve been using for the last six years into a sleek, shiny and – most importantly – supported new system. I’ve been meaning to move to WordPress for ages but was daunted by the sheer scope of the task.

And so I must give profuse and immeasurable thanks to Ryan from The Catbirdseat for helping me with almost all the heavy lifting, including migrating over the entirety of my archives from the old system. You have no idea how big a deal that is. As it is, the old posts will remain up as there’s also six years worth of links to them, but they also all exist in the new system. Eventually I hope to come up with some manner of system to repoint all of those old links, but for the meantime, we’ll just run in parallel.

While you probably won’t see or experience much different – if everything works as it should, the only difference you should notice are the slightly changed cosmetics – but rest assured that under the hood is a very different beast. Moving to WordPress also means that I potentially have many more plugins at my disposal to play with and as we move forward, I’ll be doing so but for the immediate term, I’ll just be happy if nothing is horribly broken. I’ve tested a fair bit, but there’ll surely be some weirdness here and there that’ll need to be dealt with. If you find anything amiss, please email me or leave a comment telling me about it.

But enough about me. Here’s some links.

The Black Cab Sessions welcomes Jens Lekman to perform, what else, “Black Cab”.

Boston Music Spotlight and Express Night Out talk to Sam Fogarino of Magnetic Morning, who will play the Horseshoe this Thursday night October 23.

Matt Kadane of The New Year shuffles his ancient iPod for The AV Club.

Yuki Chikudate of Asobi Seksu talks to Chart about losing their second rhythm section in as many albums before the recording of their new one Hush, due in February.

Parts & Labor’s new album Receivers is out today, and is streaming at Spinner. They’re at Sneaky Dee’s on November 21.

MP3: Parts & Labour – “Nowhere’s Nigh”
Stream: Receivers

Also out today and streaming is Missiles, the new one from The Dears. They’ve also released the first video from said record.

Stream: The Dears / Missiles
Video: The Dears – “Money Babies”

While I’m wholly enthused for tonight’s Frightened Rabbit/Spinto Band show at Lee’s, I’m a twinge regretful that I can’t be at The Horseshoe at the same time for the free White Lies show. I keep hearing good things about the London trio, including being declared by SPIN as one of the hottest bands at CMJ this week – I may try to catch them in New York, but I fear the show may exceed my hipster tolerance levels and there’d be violence. Bassist Charles Cave wrote about their recent experience at Iceland Airwaves for The Guardian. Their Death EP is out today.

MP3: White Lies – “Death” (Crystal Castles remix)
Video: White Lies – “Death”
Video: White Lies – “Unfinished Business”

Black Mountain main man Stephen McBean brings his other band – Pink Mountaintops – to the Drake Underground on November 7, tickets $10.