97 Lovers

My weekly Mużika Mod Ieħor series returns to its regular format this week with the 97th edition of the podcast. I'm quite amazed at the amount of new material that's already around this year. Still, there's some stuff I didn't manage to include in last year's podcasts that also need to be included on my playlist. Comparing these early January offerings to previous years I'd say that this should be quite a prolific year.

Mindstate follow-up on their debut single My Adrenaline with a song called Come With Me. It's the noisiest of all the tracks on this week's podcast, so probably just for that reason it's at the very start of the show, followed by the second loudest track. nosnow/noalps is a band that first appeared last summer. It's the new outlet for former Dripht frontman Nick Morales. This band sounds quite different from Dripht, mostly thanks to the multi-talented Sarah Falzon (aka Sarah Snow) who plays keyboards and shares vocal duties with Nick. Their debut single is called Taking My Time. It's quite raw, but not too rough. I like the edgy sound of this band and I'm looking forward to the release of their EP, entitled Just Rock. They're off to Denmark for three gigs in Copenhagen during the last week of this month, so I suppose their EP should appear soon enough. They're serious contenders for any "best newcomers" type accolade in 2008.

Ailas is back with a new single too. This time it's called Town and shows the former boxer in a slightly less vulnerable mood than other recent tracks. It should go down well with his fans. A few days ago he left a comment on my MySpace page saying that he's working on a video for this song as well as his next album.

I was very please to see the return of Bee & Ade in a new guise. They recently recorded a number of songs for their upcoming debut album at the legendary Olympic Studios in Barnes, London. Singer Bianca Caruana and guitarist Adrian Camilleri are now calling themselves SubEgo. My Lullaby is one of the tracks recorded for the The Naming Trees album and you can hear it on this week's edition of Mużika Mod Ieħor. I'm really looking forward to the release of SubEgo's debut album, Adrian is an excellent guitarist and Bianca's voice is very gentle on the ear across the broad range it covers.

The final song on this week's podcast comes from jon lukas/WOODENMAN. Jon is the granddaddy of the Maltese pop and rock music scene; I hope he doesn't mind me saying that. I say it respectfully, of course, because he's been at it for four decades now. His formidable voice sounds as fresh as ever and its a great match for his most recent songs. The most recent track is called Ode to Laura - Far Away, which also comes in a wonderful acoustic version, which I may very well play in a future edition of Mużika Mod Ieħor.

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