THE STREET BEATS – I Wanna Change

I normally refrain from posting songs hosted on YouTube, but I couldn’t help myself this time.

Plays Like Teen Spirit

Decent Interface

I had come to like the Russian beauty AIMP2 lately, what with its amazing sound quality and decent feature roster. Still, it didn’t completely consume me: it didn’t satisfy my music needs as The KMPlayer satisfied my video needs.

Enter Teen Spirit. I found this little gem floating here on the Internets and it sounds quite similar to Songbird at first: a new-age open-source music player. But it has everything Songbird doesn’t: simplicity, speed, stability and probably most importantly, it is custom-tailored for modern listeners.

The interface is simple, but has just about everything you’d want. I loved how it automatically seeks pictures and info from Last.fm and other places, with a neat fading effect. The player totally feels alive.

Probably what impressed me the most was the blazing speed. I didn’t see one delay in the program, it loads up instantaneously, plays instantaneously, it’s great!

The only qualm I’d say I have is that the lyrics search is kind of manual. You have to right-click and select a lyrics search, which is then stored on disk for future retrieval. Some sort of an auto-search would have helped.

It also boasts in-built Last.fm scrobbling support (but doesn’t use the official Last.fm scrobbler, perhaps saving some of my memory). Best way to sum it up: it’s got what you want, it’s very intuitive to use and it’s just stylish enough!

I’d say it still needs some work in the presentation department. While the interface is great, the “skins” are just colour themes. The panels aren’t movable (although they can be expanded and minimized effectively). Probably worst of all is the name and icon of the project, which sounds kind of amateurish. The icon is pretty boring too, I wonder why they didn’t use this:

New Sigh Content?!

Imaginary Sonicscape

I’m glad how Sigh is always churning out content, all of which is top-of-the-line quality. After Hangman’s Hymn, they did Tribute to Venom which was pretty good in itself. Their latest appears to be hitting next month.

It’s going to be a reissue of what I believe is their best album ever: Imaginary Sonicscape. The reissue is entirely remastered by James Murphy, who remastered Gallows Gallery in that blue-coloured version, and also worked on Hangman’s Hymn, from what I know.

The reissue will also include two new tracks: one of which was included only on the Japanese version. The two are Voices and Born Condemned Criminal. Also, Bring Back the Dead will get an extended version. Since that’s one of my favourite tracks on the album, I can’t wait!

I really loved the style they used on IS, so I’m dying to hear more in the same style. The reissue will hit stores January 20th, 2009. Wonder how long it’ll take for the Internets to pick it up.

There’s also some news of a future project, hell concrete news. The next album will be released in 2009 and is titled Scene from Hell / Tempore Belli / Vanitas. The End Records describes it as “The album will feature massive orchestrations, including a string quartet and brass players.”

Awesome. Brass! String Quartets! Massive orchestrations! Sigh is one of the greatest metal bands I know!

Requiem for a Dream Piano

Techno

Gravity

Gravity, by Maaya Sakamoto on the Wolf’s Rain Soundtrack.

This is a very beautiful song, and easily one of my all-time anime soundtrack favourites. Yoko Kanno never disappoints! While I’m loving every bit of Wolf’s Rain’s background music (and am rather unsure about the opening), the ending is nothing short of perfection.

Been a long road to follow,
Been there and gone tomorrow,
Without saying goodbye to yesterday.
Are the memories I hold still valid,
Or hath the tears deluded them?

Maybe this time tomorrow,
The rain will cease to follow,
And the mist will fade into one more today.
Something somewhere out there keeps calling,

Am I going home?
Will I hear someone singing solace to the silent moon?
Zero gravity what’s it like?
Am I alone? Is somebody there beyond these heavy aching feet?

Still the road keeps on telling me to go on.
Something is pulling me,
I feel the gravity of it all.

Sorg Uten Tårer

Was searching for some good Folk Metal and found Sorg Uten Tårer, a Norwegian one-man project that would actually more of Folk Metal bordering on Melodic Black Metal. Regardless, the sound is very, very good and I’d like to see the artist, Retribution be very big one day.

Meanwhile, all of his songs are available at Last.fm!

Edit: Since downloading off of one server is rather unreliable and lame and 1990s, I’ve taken the liberty to set up a torrent for the entire Sorg Uten Tårer discography to download here at Demonoid, which also becomes my first ever torrent contribution to any site ever. Of course, since the songs are free anyways, the torrent is 100% legal.

Amarok II, where art thou?

Did a check on Amarok 2’s features again and the wait is growing more and more unbearable. Of the jukebox players for Windows out there, the best I’ve seen are Winamp’s latest version (even though I’m not too fond of the media library itself) and Windows Media Player 11 (I still can’t believe Microsoft got it right).

But Amarok on Linux blew me away – it has everything, it’s perfect – radio, performance, instant wikipedia info, instantaneous lyrics search, tag management – crazy! And the new version looks even more awesome!

I really hope they give a general timefram of when the betas and RCs are going to roll out now.

Keep on Galloping!

Turns out the torrent was legit and all of the songs are present, in excellent quality. While I haven’t been through the entire album and taken notes, I can say that the album is as good as any Korpiklaani album, and that is also its biggest problem.

Korven Kuningas retains the usual, unique Korpiklaani sound, rich with violins, accordions and raspy vocals I’m still not very fond of. Still, the songs sort of grow on you with repeated hearings, thanks to their raw catchiness.

And by the way, Korven Kuningas means “King of the Woods”, which is what Korpiklaani claims is a nickname given to Finnish lumberjacks. Not a bad name, and Korpiklaani says that the album is a tribute to them, too!

I listened to Keep on Galloping first on Songza, and it’s an excellent song, perhaps one of the best on the album, maintaining a unique melody and a great riff. Most of the other songs, however, sound more or less similar, which is why I really hope Korpiklaani adds more variety in their next album, or adopts a new twist to their music.

I see that some of the songs have made their way to Songza, so here are their links:

• Tapporauta
• Metsamies
• Gods on Fire
• Paljon On Koskessa Kivia

Korven Kuningas

I see that Korpiklaani is coming out with a new album in 10 days, named “Korven Kuningas”, the meaning of which escapes me, but I have no doubt that somebody at DarkLyrics will help me solve out.

I’ve found a torrent of it here, and am downloading it now (at a shameful 1-digit speed, for some reason) – it’s in a RAR file, so I’m not too sure if its real or not. I can’t imagine a person so vile that he would release a fake of a comparatively non-famous Folk Metal band…

Wikipedia also lists that a video for Metsämies was/is to be released in 2008, but I didn’t find a link on YouTube, and if it isn’t there, it’s nowhere. Hope it comes out soon, though – I love Korpiklaani’s videos.

I also like the album art – while it has that annoying antler-horn-dude mascot, he seems at least bearable, perhaps a little cool. The album art has been hand-painted, which is perhaps why it looks so complete and well-done (all the others were done in Photoshop and looked terrible, except the first two – Voice of Wilderness looked great).

I see that a single for “Keep on Galloping” is out – I’ll go check it out now.