One of the great blessings of the Internet is it assures indie music will never die.
Labels and online music stores can whine and slap all the restrictions on they want, but upstarts have burrowed their weeds so deep in that particular garden the industry's DDT mentality will mostly just kill off some of their own. S music stores for artists and albums is no longer my first stop - I Google them (and, yes, as of a few days ago that is now officially a verb).
Call it the virtual version of shop local - often the result is a better product, a lower price and/or giving the artist a bigger chunk of the profits.
Independent online retailers seem like a natural match for bands like Contra Public, an "emo, funk and hardcore" quartet active on the Juneau scene for four years before gui-tarists/vocalists Dakota Max and Cole Chitty moved to Portland, Ore., last year. The group is still at the Rock Alaska Records site (www.rockalaskarecords.com), along with a few other bands like Satan's Taint that features former CP bassist Bud Curtis.
Obtaining CP's album False Feeling Of Freedom online is a bit like the recording itself: a bit muddled and rough, but ultimately it works.
The album occupies that vast territory of coarse rock between the remarkable and forgettable, meaning it's a nice accomplishment for a local band but not something likely to wow outsiders. The group has a good sense of harmonics, performs aggressively without overpowering and the recording quality is solid. But the instrumentals are a bit dense for a quartet and forces listeners to strain too hard to distinguish the lyrics, and it turns out they aren't worth setting all other mental activities aside for (they also, by the way, aren't family-friendly).
The density also means a lack of solos that make one think "now there's a killer guitar player." In short, it's fine to throw on a stereo and something locals can appreciate, but lacks showpiece character and talent (see Rory Stitt, reviewed here two weeks ago).
Using the Rock Alaska site involves chasing links that occasionally don't work (www.contrapublic.com no longer exists, for example), which is why the search engine route is the way to go. CP's album is downloadable at www. mp3tunes.com using a process similar to most of the tiny sellers. Create an account with an e-mail address and other information, pay with a credit card and get access to a page with the songs. It takes a couple of minutes and isn't too annoying if you leave all the "alert me about special offers" boxes unchecked and use the same password for all such accounts (presumably not the same one for your online banking).
CP's album is $8.88, a dollar cheaper than the big stores, but not the bargain of many indies. Songs are downloaded individually, a mild pain when many will package them into a single ZIP file. Their particular gimmick is something called a Premium Locker for $40 a year that mostly seems to offer "unlimited online storage" of your music files, although no single one can be over 20MB. Skip it.
Stuff to Google with "MP3" until next time: traditional Native, barynya, Modern Drummer.
• Mark Sabbatini is a professional music critic who can't name a single band in Rolling Stone's top 100.
