Little By Little, the new album from American college-rockers Harvey Danger, is the kind of record that gets 3 stars in Q magazine - a solid, honest, but ultimately unspectacular piece of work, which probably won't be winning them the all-expenses-paid trip to the Grammies that they dreamed about in school. So why, then, are we telling anyone who will listen that this is the future of rock'n'roll?

Artistically, two things stand out about Little By Little. Firstly, it is (unusually for a modern rock record) pretty piano-heavy, and by that we mean real piano, calling to mind early Elton John, rather than Keane-style keyboards. Secondly, the lyrics are really worth paying attention to. We were struck by the bleak opening to 'What You Live By':

Meet me up on "99"
Beneath the Marco Polo sign
I'll be the one with the box of wine
And the hundred dollar car

The stand-out track, for us though, is 'War Buddies' which threads together themes of conflict and opposition, and as it rises to an intense crescendo, makes some stark points about our so-called War On Terror:

Let every man who disagrees
Be roughly brought down to his knees
Starved to death and made to bleed
And sentenced to the gulag.
If you've got guns, well now's the time for sticking
Resistance is already forming
The second shot won't be a warning

However, the really significant thing about this album is not the music at all, but the fact that we downloaded it for free from the internet and (more importantly) that we did so quite legally!

Having concluded that they never really made any money from CD sales (with most of the cash you hand over in HMV going to various middle-men, from the store itself, to the record company executives) the band decided to make this album available as a free download from their web site, hoping that in turn this would boost sales of everything from t-shirts to concert tickets, where their margins are much higher.

And this, we think, is the future of rock'n'roll - perhaps not FREE downloads in every case, but certainly direct purchases over the 'net from the artist themselves, which makes sense for everyone involved, except (obviously) the thus-doomed record companies! They won't go down without a fight, of course, and with long-term contracts sealing-in so many of today's biggest artists, it won't happen quickly, but happen it will - this is just the first salvo and, as the man said, the second shot won't be a warning.

You can download Little By Little from www.harveydanger.com