Our good friend Sean Klassen has posted our first non-staff Mix CD in our newly created Mix CD Club. You can check it out by following this link:

Sean Klassen’s “The Working Mix”

I just finished listening to the mix and like it quite a bit. Please consider picking it up with your next order at Dead Format.

Don’t forget that you can make your very own Mix CD and have a chance to win a $100 gift certificate at Dead Format just in time for holiday shopping! Click here to find out all the rules with posting your own Mix CD.

We have just added a new category on the Dead Format blog, AbsEss. AbsEss is short for Absolutely Essential and will feature albums that we think that everyone should own. If you have an album you think needs to be in AbsEss, let us know, we might just post it. My first contribution is Nada Surf’s “Let Go”.

I first heard “Let Go” at a party. Chris Fogal, formerly of the Gamits, put it on and said, you have to listen to this album. From the very first second, I was sold. The record rocks, has hooks, and has that special ingredient you can’t pinpoint, but makes you long to hear the record again. I immediately bought the CD at my local mom and pop record store, Wax Trax, and have listened to this album more than any album I have ever listened to.

I can say without hesitation that Nada Surf is my all-time favorite band. This album hooked me and I now celebrate their entire catalog with the exception of their one-hit wonder album “High/Low” which features their super hit “Popular”. Everything else is top-notch, but I recommend starting with this album. It just starts off so beautifully and is the kind of record that is essential on a road trip. I have put it on with friends and have had every single person in the car singing along.

This album makes you wonder why Nada Surf are not dominating the radio airwaves while so many gimmicky bands are. My son was actually born to the song “Inside of Love” which happened to make my wife’s birth mix which she named “Labor Jams”. I couldn’t have picked a more perfect song for my son’s first song.

If you don’t own this album, stop what you are doing and buy it now. I use this album as a measure of whether or not someone has good taste in music and would seriously reconsider my friendships if I had a friend who did not also love this album!

Heavens features Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio and Jonah Steinbrick. While the release features the standard Alkaline Trio lyrical metaphors of love, death and the dark side of life, it also embraces something rich and lighter. Beautiful strings contributed by producer Ben Lovett, perfectly minimal guitars by Jonah and a softer vocal presence of Matt Skiba offer something that Alkaline Trio followers will appreciate and fans of more mellow indie genres will like as well.

RIYL: Joy Division, Alkaline Trio, Sisters Of Mercy and Interpol.

We are very excited to share with you the latest feature at Dead Format dot com. We want to help those smaller bands out there who do not yet have an outlet for online sales. What we offer is pretty simple. You fill out a form with all the info on your release(s), we ask you to send us some copies of your CDs, we mark it up a little bit, and then we sell your CD(s) alongside the many great titles we currently sell.

If your CDs sell well on Dead Format, there are potential options for us to help distribute your CD more widely. We also offer help with digital distribution with places like Itunes, Rhapsody, Napster, Emusic, and more.

For more information, check out the page we set up for Sell Your Own CDs.  We are very excited about this!