i'm not even sure how i found this; maybe insomnia, maybe boredom.  but either way, other than real ultimate power, it is the greatest thing i've ever seen on the world wide internet.

pterodactyl squad is a record label who describe themselves as "a video game music netlabel".  basically, that means they are an online record label that distributes music inspired by video games, for free.  they recently released an album called weezer - the 8-bit album.

for those of you not in the know, weezer, fronted by rivers cuomo, is a geeky, rather significant band that formed in early 1990's l.a.  they've released six l.p.'s, sold over eight million records, and are now considered big time arena rockers.

anyway, included in this album are 14 weezer covers ("island in the sun", "el scorcho", "buddy holly", "we are all on drugs", among others) from an "all-star line-up of video game musicians", and like pterodactyl squad says on their website,  if you only have one 8-bit album in your collection, this should be the one.

listening to this album takes me back to the wonder years of early 1980's childhood.  more specifically to piggy's place on pasadena avenue: a smelly, dark arcade that found it's glory days circa 1984-1986 and sold soggy pizza, whatchamacallit, and coke with that awesome crushed ice.  i think it's a dunkin doughnuts now.  for somewhat obvious reasons, it also reminds me of napoleon dynamite.  for less obvious reasons, it reminds me of the long defunct zayre's department store (as an aside, the store was originally named "zayre gut" meaning "very good" in yiddish).

back to pterodactyl squad, some of the songs have vocals, either rivers cuomo, or others.  honestly, i'm not crazy for those songs, they sound more like remixes and not 8-bit recordings.  although i'm not totally clear what an 8-bit is, i think that the addition of  vocals into songs equals at least 9- or possibly even 10-bit.  i'm not sure.  but the album and all of the songs on it are still totally tubular.

incidentally, i've always wanted to use the picture of that old computer you see up and to the right of your screen on wednesday-music, but never had the opportunity.  who said dreams don't come true?  by the way, is that steering wheel thing is a mouse?  i mean seriously, that's ridiculous.

click here to download weezer - the 8-bit album for free.  click here to download previous pterodactyl squad releases.

since pterodactyl squad is giving their music away for free, visit here and make a donation, if you do, they'll send you a free plastic dinosaur (possibly a pterodactyl), sweet!  boilerplate: as always, please buy albums (except for this one) from your local independent music store by people who know and love music and not from retailers like wal-mart (soulless, globally-homogenizing, community-killers) or i-tunes (albums should be listened to as an entire composition with album cover and liner notes in hand).  incidentally, these two companies sell more music than any other retailer in the united states.  that my friend, bites.