A Solid Call 2.0

New Artist Profile: The Hong Kong :
I completely stumbled upon this new band at random in an e-mail about some party at SXSW. I've been deleting each of the the 3,000 party invites that I have received in bitter disgust and vicious regret because I can't go to SXSW, but this particular one had a line that caught my eye:

“Pneumatic pop iced with magnetic blend of modal-jazz hosanna and Sixties-girl-group glee...the Hong Kong endures routine comparisons to Stereolab and Blondie.” -Rolling Stone

Pneumatic? Of or relating to air or other gases? Hosanna? Good ol' Rolling Stone… so I had to try and find out about this band. But, good luck trying a Google search for a band called The Hong Kong -- a brief and futile exercise. Somehow I stumbled across their record label site… and lo and behold: there were downloads -- two full tracks in passable 96kbps air-related glory. Plus the PR firm +1 has some pics that don't hurt the eye.

But, it was the music that won me over. So, I hereby tab The Hong Kong as my new favorite band*. Check out the tracks and maybe buy the CD. I might ask my brother in NYC to pick it up locally.

* until next week. Or, ten minutes from now.

Helpful links:

• Official site with downloads: etherdrag.com/thehongkong
• SXSW Profile (with a 128K MP3 or Ogg Vorbis download)
• Buy their CD for $8 at truthflies.com
• Profile & pics at +1

P.S. : Three things that made discovering this band difficult.

1. The name is impossible to search for on Google - so word of mouth promotion becomes tougher. This is made 100x worse by the band not yet having their own URL.

2. Their PR firm is no picnic searching for either - +1? Oh, plusone. Dot-net, no less. And, once you find it, The Hong Kong's link mistakenly goes to stellastarr's Web site! Oops!

3. plusone.net's website is in a frameset! So, I couldn’t easily link directly to their profile page. (I had to look at the Properties of the page - something your average Joe wouldn’t know how to do.)

I'm not perfect myself, but these are just some details that I'd pay attention to if I were paid actual money to do this sort of thing. I would recommend that The Hong Kong get set up at CDbaby.net pronto and get their stuff available in the legal digital download stores.