i just stumbled over a very funny music video on youtube. someone took a black metal video by immortal (no need to watch this, it is crap, believe me…), recut it, and exchanged the music (the new one has nothing to do with black metal). the result is incredibly ridiculous:
the third video is luna by moonspell, a portugese gothic metal band. the song is rather different than all others on the memorial album, but nonetheless i like it very much. a beautifully animated video. it’s a rather depressing and suicidal video though, so be warned. the lyrics can be found here.
this is very dark (slow) gothic metal. you can give it a try if you want.
i like it because… the first time i saw this song was when i watched the video on moonspell‘s homepage. it’s one of the cases where i really like a music video and the song independently. a beautiful gray world, almost no color, except red. beautifully drawn, moving, growing scenes. and a slow, heavy song. full of melancholy.
(and a note… it’s hard to find metal music videos which i actually like, when it’s not about just showing the band playing the song. and some have very strange content which simply makes no sense, like this one. but luna is a big exception.)
the second video is bitter sweet symphony by the verve. the lyrics can be found here.
this is britpop. you can definitely listen to it :)
edit: apparently it’s impossible to embed the official video. so i just link to it. here’s an embedable version, without video though:
i like it because… of the strings melody at the beginning. if you would take the frist minute of the song and turn it into a ten minute song, i would still listen to it. this is one of the songs where i mostly ignore the vocals, and just enjoy the melody, the harmonics. (and yes, there are some edited versions on youtube without vocals; one of the better ones is this one.)
i also like the video, with the guy walking straight forward, ignoring the world around him as far as possible. i sometimes would like to do that as well…
the first video is of the song leaves by the dutch band the gathering. it’s the first song i ever heard from them, and the song which made me get more. the lyrics can be found here.
this is (slow) gothic metal with clean vocals. you can try it :)
i like it because… it’s so powerful and yet so beautiful. i found this track on a sampler i bought on ebay called “dark winter nights” (in fact, it was the first thing i ever bought on ebay – the second thing was mandylion, the the gathering album on which leaves first appeared); i stumbled about it since i saw it contained a track by sentenced. essentially, some sentenced songs, a stratovarius live album and this cd got me more interested in metal. this song quickly became my favorite song on that sampler, and eventually made me search for more the gathering stuff.
i also like the tree parts of the video a lot, especially the night parts, as at the beginning :-) but then, i first saw this video maybe ten years after i first heard the track?
while watching a video on youtube, i got an idea for a new project. from now on, every day until (at least) december 24th, i will put a music video in my blog at 18:00. i went through the list of bands of whose i own music, and tried to choose one video per band which i really like, which has good quality (if possible) and which is available on youtube. not for every band i could find something, and for very, very few bands, i choose two videos.
sadly, most bands don’t have good videos of the songs i like most, so sometimes having no video for a band just means that i didn’t found anything i both like and which is an acceptable video :-)
well, i hope you enjoy it, or at least parts of it. i’ll add links to lyrics as well as a few comments, which in particular indicate what kind of song this is (i.e. if you want to listen to this if you don’t like strange music as i do).
yesterday i attended a concert by the seattle based power metal band nevermore. (i’m not going to concerts that often anymore… the last one was opeth‘s 20th anniversary on april 1st in bochum, which i never mentioned in this blog so far it seems, and the one by moonsorrow in helsinki in march.) this one was in calgary, on a thursday evening, a concert with four bands, doors opening at 8 pm. not a good idea, in my opinion. in fact, the first band started somewhen after nine, and nevermore didn’t start until short before midnight. so much for getting up early today (my alarm clock was set to 7 in the morning for cake preparations…).
the bands playing before nevermore were (melodic death/thrash) from denmark, blackguard (folk/melodic death) from montreal and (thrash) from the u.s.
warbringer is not making exactly the kind of music i like, and neither is hatesphere, though i liked the latter more. opposed to that, blackguard was really good. (i have to listen to more of their stuff…) but i didn’t go there for the other bands, but because i finally wanted to see nevermore.
eventually, nevermore entered the stage. once again i got reminded that live versions of song sound often different than the studio versions. the show was very nice, but i would have preferred another selection of songs. i should have made more notes yesterday, then i might be able to recover the setlist they played, but i think now it’s too late to get it correct.
one very nice thing about this concert was that i didn’t notice anyone smoking on the inside. that’s really nice. (and it’s a shame that i have to note this, which means that this is not the case by defaut.)
after some silence, bad religion released another album this year, called the dissent of man. the fifteenth in their thirtyone years long career. and a good one, i think.
here’s one rather catchy track:
i just learned about the complaints choirs project: choirs from all over the world create a song complaining about annoying things in their life. here’s the recording from helsinki, which i like best from the few i saw. its sung in finnish, but there are english subtitles:
i upgraded to a new ubuntu a week ago, after buying a new harddisk. this resulted in getting amarok2 instead of amarok1, which i was used to. and it was a complete failure. it ignored my music, didn’t show anything in the collection, and some tries to change this didn’t do anything. well. so i decided to try out exaile. this worked well, until i noticed that changing to the desktop exaile was running on took up to five seconds. i don’t know why. but this is clearly inacceptable, this should take way less than one second. so i started looking around. i tried rhythmbox, the standard gnome player, but it didn’t really managed to read my music collection. then, i tried xmms2 and various frontends. so far, i didn’t really found a frontend which convinced me. but at least the backend is working fine. maybe i should start hacking my own frontend together, to do exactly what i want it to do.
it is not exactly satisfactory, but for the moment, i think i’ll stay with xmms2. at least it works fine so far, accepts my music collection, and has no strange hickups.
