KICK SOME CLOUDS FOR FREE WITH CLOUDKICKER’S NEW [FREE] ALBUM

I love it when budding musicians and bands give away their recorded music for free. Rather than trying to charge $10 (or however much) to collect money from the few diehard fans you have that are willing to spring some dough for your product, you make a potential fan out of anyone who’s willing to download the album for the price of a click and the time it takes to do so. Rather than selling 10 or 100 copies for money, your music reaches hundreds or thousands of people willing to give it a shot, people who will later come to your show or buy a t-shirt if they like the music enough. This, my friends, is smart business.

Enter Cloudkicker, the excellent 1-man band led by Ben Sharp, whose new EP ]]][[[ is currently available for free (along with the rest of his entire catalog). The punctuation-monikered EP only has 3 songs, but they’re jam-packed with a variety of different instru-metal styles that fit together well into one cohesive whole. For the most part Cloudkicker lives in the ambient instru-metal realm but occasionally ventures into other territories. His music is lush, big and complex, but it’s the kind of metal that doesn’t make your head spin or require a lot of listening attention to enjoy. Think the instrumentation of Animals of Leaders with the musicality of Scale the Summit, but with dense layering similar to Jesu… and you’re close to what Cloudkicker sounds like. Download ]]][[[ for free here.

-VN

Thanks: Peter Butter, Josh S.