GarageBand.com and Soundclick.com are two of the greatest sites on the Internet if you're a music nut. These sites are ground zero for where the MP3 crowbar dismantles the music industry machinery. When I first happened upon them I thought, How exciting! Now, at long last, the music of the People is freed from the "corporations!" Today's Woody Guthries constructing their modern folk music with MIDI drums and POD XT implements, offering their MP3's for free in open defiance of the bloodless mass marketers.

Five minutes on either of these sites will confirm that the music that the Man has been keeping down for so long...sounds pretty much like what you hear on 99X already. If it's guys in their early 20's who look like they shop at Hot Topic it's going to sound like Green Day/Blink 182/Harvey Danger, etc. Guys in their early 20's with a skull anywhere in their artwork are going to be a death metal band with one of those singers who sounds like he's vomiting violently (since all of those bands sound identical they have to compete in the "vulgar song title" competition to stand out). Female artists are almost always Sarah McLaughlin/Tori Amos wanna-be's doing a minor-key grand piano ballad with a side of acoustic guitar. Balding 40-ish white guys? Danger: cheap Casio-esque synth sounds and chorus-laden Michael Hedges new age guitars lay behind that link.

On my first foray onto GarageBand, however, I made a great discovery: a Brooklyn, New York band called Worldclass. I've recommended these guys before but revisited their CD again lately and was moved to remind you they're ou there. They list Weezer and The Cars as two primary influences and indeed I hear both of those, but the thing is almost no one lists those two as influences. Even if they did, you could never predict they would meld like they do in this band's music. Plus I've listened to Worldclass' disc a couple dozen more times than I ever listened to Weezer.

I wrote to their e-mail address to inquire when their next CD would be done and heard back from the singer. He said he had been a little slow in responding because he had been "busy with work." Work! These guys have all the prerequisites for success: a sound that melds with modern alternative radio while retaining it's unique identity, they're in their 20's (I'm guessing) with full heads of hair and most of all, they're in New York where you would just have to be seen by The Right People sometime. Yet I only see about a gig a month on their calendar, and just this 2004 EP with no follow-up. (The singer says he'll send me some more of their stuff. Hooray!) Yeah, yeah, I hear you calling me a groupie...

Anyhow, enough of my yabberin', click here to hear their great song "What You Want." And go to CD Baby and buy their CD. You'll be glad you did. Truly...Worldclass.

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