I’ve got nearly all Donna Summer’s albums, scored over a long period of time by patient thrifting. 1979’s “Bad Girls” had been proving rather elusive, until I finally found a copy in Oxfam earlier this week, for £1.99, which I thought was exceptional value for a double album in superb condition.

It’s not until you actually have the thing in your hands and you study the sleeve imagery properly that you realize what a bizarre move it must’ve been for a star of Donna’s stature to present herself as a such brazen, tawdry street whore.

I know it’s all meant to relate to the lyrics of the title track (“Bad Girls, Talkin’ about the sad girls, see them out in the street walkin’, picking up all kinds of strangers if the price is right, you can’t score if your pocket’s tight” etc) but Donna sure doesn’t look like a ’sad girl’ here. She looks like she’s having a ball, really relishing the role.

I’d assumed that Donna must’ve been convinced to do this by her manager or something, it’s such a male fantasy idea, and then I notice in the small print: ‘cover concept by Donna Summer‘. Go figure.

And who are those guys posing as her clients in the gatefold? The sailor with the moustache looks suspiciously like producer Giorgio Moroder…

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HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!

George Michael will perform two Australian concerts in February, and the first will be in Perth.                                                          

Rumours had been rife that the Too Funky star was headed down under, and today his Australian trip has been confirmed.

Heading to Australia for the first time since 1988, the Wham! star and solo pop vocalist will perform at Member’s Equity Stadium on February 20.  He will then perform in Sydney at Sydney Football Stadium on February 26.

He will perform tracks from the early days, Wham! and his latest material.

Promoter Paul Dainty said it was thrilling to bring Michael back to the country following his Faith tour in the 80s.

“He is a consummate performer and will deliver a stunning show to his fans who have waited 22 years to see him perform in Australia,” Dainty said.

Michael has performed for more than 2 million fans on this 25 Live arena tour so far. More than 350,000 people flocked to his London performances alone.

Michael has sold more than 100 million pop albums, had six American number one singles and won plenty of awards for tunes including Faith, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, Careless Whisper, One More Try, Freedom, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me and Too Funky.

Tickets will go on sale through TicketMaster on December 8.

Source  :  www.watoday.com.au

Full Album Snippet – (each track snippet = 30 seconds)

tracks:

(01) Full Fledged Strangers (03:33)
(02) Better After All (02:41)
(03) Keep the River on Your Right (03:50)
(04) Je N’Peux pas Te Plaire (03:52)
(05) All You Gotta Do is Touch Me (03:45)
(06) King of My Love (04:15)
(07) My Flowers Grow Green (03:06)
(08) Ten Cent Wings (04:01)
(09) Glass Half Empty (04:04)
(10) Damn Everything But the Circus (04:26)
(11) Back in the Circus (04:00)
(12) No Net Below (02:59)
(13) If Matters Now (03:52)
(14) I’ll Try (03:48)
(15) Eye in the Sky (04:50)
(16) Crumbs (04:30)
(17) Because I Told You So (03:53)
(18) Taste of Danger (03:35)
(19) You and I (03:33)
(20) Sweetest Angel (03:52)

Live Recording – Great Sound

This is a live recording of Jonatha Brooke’s concert in Bremen (Germany), last August. It was previously released by Scene Group OMA (OPEN MUSiC ASSOCiATiON) under the name “Jonatha_Brooke–Live_at_Packhaustheater_Im_Schnoor_(Bremen)-DVBC-08-24-2009-OMA” in a single MP3 file without CUE.

It’s a great show, with an amazing performance by Jonatha, with excellent audio quality, really worth listening and keeping in your collection.

I loved the both the concert and the colorful commentaries by Jonatha in it, but I wanted to have the songs separated with their proper names, mainly to put in a portable device to listen to it when commuting.

So, I created a CUE file, edited it and split the tracks. For this reason, I had to convert from the original VBR-encoded MP3’s to a CBR file, since VBR files are very hard to create accurate cues and further split. I also created a cover image to go with the album.

The Concert

The concert is a live recording of 24 August 2009 from the packing house theater in Schnoor, Bremen. There’s a little bit of info about it here (in german) or here (auto-translated to english).

Quote:
“On a short tour of Germany Jonatha Brooke is solo with acoustic guitar. Just as before in February 2003, the broadcasting studio audience in Bremen fell under her spell… …A wonderful contemporary piece, full of character, with elements of pop, folk, soul, jazz”.

She sings a lot of the songs from her latest album “The Works”, and during the show she explains quite a bit about this project, being around the Woody Guthrie archives (from which the inspiration for the album came from), about being a dancer before, and so on. If you’re a fan, you’re definitely gonna be interested in this (even though you might already know some of those facts she speaks about).

If you (like me) are most likely never to be able to attend one of her live performances, this is close enough to actually being there and, not surprisingly, a very pleasant experience.

Here’s the playlist in PDF format.

There’s also a journal entry in Jonatha’s official site around the same time she played there.

Live at Packhaus-Theater im Schnoor

Getting the Album…

I’m guessing that if you like some of the late modern indie singers/bands (Lisa Loeb, Regina Spektor, Rachael Yamagata, Feist, Emiliana Torrini, Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, Kaki King, Nerina Pallot, Chantal Kreviazuk), or even some of the more pop-ish ones (Colbie Caillat, James Blunt, Paula Cole, David Gray, Sia, Tina Dico, Sara Bareilles, Five for Fighting), you’ll probably like Jonatha Brooke.

This absolutely doesn’t mean they sound equal, but I’m pretty confident that if you like any of those above, there’s good odds that you’ll also like Jonatha’s work.

There might be 2 purposes for you to get this album:

1. You already know Jonatha and are a great fan of her work.

You’ll probably not gonna be able to buy this album anywhere, so grab it here (if you want all the split songs, without speech) or here (if you want the full concert in one big file, with cue).

2. You don’t know her yet.

If you don’t really know Jonatha Brooke, this is an album as good as any other one to discover her work (most – if not all – of her albums are really great). The sound quality of this album is so good, it doesn’t feel as if it was recorded from radio (was it really? – I am not so sure). So, if you’re willing to give it a go, grab it here (split songs) or here (full concert).

And, if I’m right, after listening to this concert, you’re probably gonna want to buy one of her albums on Amazon or iTunes or somewhere else… (just ’cause she is that good…)

Here’s her official site and MySpace, in case you want to know more yet about her and her music.

Get to know a little bit more about Jonatha Brooke’s latest album (“The Works”) on YouTube:

I hope you enjoy this album as much as I do. Since this is not commercial, I guess we can spread this around without feeling guilty. Nonetheless, if you have any concerns, requests or other doubts, please contact me at M8R-0jyc0v@mailinator.com

Ray Charles. The Genius of Ray Charles. Atlantic, 1959. (on CD)

Pretty over-rated as far as Ray Charles goes. These are big band swing versions of standards (some R&B standards, but mostly jazz), arranged by people like Quincy Jones. People probably say it’s great just because there are so many great musicians playing on it. But you know what? They’ve all got nothing on a straight-up Ray Charles recording. If I want to listen to Count Basie’s orchestra, I’ll get a Count Basie album thank you very much. 7/10 (Good).

I’m a big proponent of shopping locally, especially when it comes to music.

This Saturday, November 28th, the Austin Independent Business Alliance presents Austin Unchained, a day of celebrating independent businesses by shopping locally. You can participate simply by doing all your shopping at locally owned businesses on Saturday and throughout the holiday season.

Take the Austin Unchained challenge! Start with one day and unchain yourself by purchasing only from local retailers. No need to purchase additional items, just purchase what you normally would. If everyone in Austin bought their goods and services at locally owned merchants for just one day, it would not only preserve Austin’s local character but it would put $14 million into our local economy!

This is based on actual sales tax figures and illustrates the economic impact of shopping locally owned. Just imagine what $14 million a day would do for our local economy!

Just in time to give thanks to some Hip-Hop legends, Mick Boogie and Terry Urban present LE DA SOUL: 20 Years Of De La Soul!

Inspired by 20 years of greatness from hip-hop’s most consistent group (and our personal favorite), De La Soul, this project unites the cream of the crop in Hip-Hop, including old school legends (Phife, Camp Lo and Skillz), current hitmakers (Talib Kweli and Kardinal Offishall) and future stars (U-N-I, Tanya Morgan and Tabi Bonney) to remake their favorite De La classics.

Originally stemming from Mick Boogie’s popular VH1 Honor Roll mixtape last year, we worked with our favorite artists and producers to create an astounding 20 remakes! One for every year of De La history!

Track List:

1. Intro: Senor Kaos, Von Pea and Homeboy Sandman (produced by Dave West)
2. Me Myself and I: Kardinal Offishall (produced by Diabolic)
3. Pease Porridge: Phife Dawg (produced by Dj Rasta Root)
4. Breakdawn: Tanya Morgan (produced by 6th Sense)
5. Oooh: Fly Union (produced by Fly Union)
6. Baby Phat: Skillz & Colin Monroe (produced by nVMe)
7. Stakes Is High part 1: U-N-I (produced by 6th Sense)
8. Say No Go: Chaundon, Esso + The Kickdrums (produced by The Kickdrums)
9. Rock Co Kane Flow: Shawn Christopher & Pheo (produced by Garbs)
10. Ego Trippin: Asheru (produced by The Els)
11 Ooodles of O’s: Camp Lo (produced by Apple Juice Kid)
12. Sunshine: Christian Rich + Curtains (produced by Christian Rich)
13. Plug Tunin’: Tabi Bonney + Stalley (produced by Judah)
14. Hey Love: Chip Tha Ripper (produced by Remot)
15. The Bizness: Big Pooh, Butta Verses, and 6th Sense (produced by 6th Sense)
16. I Am I Be: 6th Sense (produced by Hasan Insane)
17. Eye Know: Daytona & Mike Maven (produced by 6th Sense)
18. Saturdays: Niko Villamor, Brittany Street & Kidd Neer (produced by SMKA)
19. Watch Out: J.Sands (produced by J. Rawls)
20. Stakes Is High part 2: Talib Kweli (produced by eJones)

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Prop: TSS

^ This dame is the only thing you’ll remember from this film.

What do you do when you’re a bored millionaire who isn’t selling records like you used to and has to resort to cheap stunts to keep his name in the news? You make another shitty movie, that’s what. Unlike 8 Mile Part 2 Get Rich Or Die Trying, where 50 Cent was able to convince Oscar winning director Jim Sheridan to try and deliver something beyond the typical ‘hood’ movie, this time around he’s gone back to basics. That’s right, your boy Curtis Jackson wrote, directed and starred in this future classic of modern cinema…

If you wanted to write the most played-out, cliche-ridden script for a rapsploitation flick, what would some of the key ingredients have to be? Let’s start with a promising basketball player, who has his dreams of making it to the pro cut short short by a knee injury, shall we? Now all we need is some kind of motivation for this kid to enter a life of crime…how about his moms gets killed while she’s buying some milk? Perfect! Right, the next thing we need is someone to show off his caring and sharing side…would a genius-level academic whiz-kid younger brother do the trick? Bingo! OK, so now that out hero has no choice but to become the ultimate hitman, what could possibly be his weakness? How about a hot broad? Boo-ya! This thing writes itself.

To be fair, this film does have it’s moments. The scene in the pool hall, which features Treach and his boy scheming on robbing Curtis’ character – Clarence – is comedy gold, as one dude checks out the dame he’s playing pool with and declares that he plans to ‘lock that bitch in my basement and donkey-fuck her for two weeks!’ Sadly, nothing in Before I Self Destruct ever reaches the level of classic ignorance achieved in Killa Season, so I’m afraid there aren’t any scenes of 50 spitting on little girls or pissing on dudes he just kicked the living shit out of. Watching Clarence in action as a hitman is also pretty amusing, as conducts public executions in broad daylight or in front of dozens of witnesses without anyone so much as calling the cops, but that’s about as good as it gets.

We also catch glimpses of a couple of sub-plots revolving around Clarence’s brother Shocka buying some protection from bullies at school while fielding scholarship offers from every Ivy League college in America (really), as well as Clarence hanging out with his boss/father figure Sean (Clifton Powell, the only decent actor in this clusterfuck), who invites him for a BBQ with the wife and later informs him that he’s slamming her with ‘10 inches of dick and balls every night’ for some bizarre reason. Also disturbing was the scene where Clarence’s girlfriend, Princess, tells him that she should have asked his 13 year-old brother if he knew what her pussy would feel like after failing to stump him with trivia questions…what kind of sicko wrote this thing again? Oh, right…

Another odd moment is early in the film when Clarence is in a car and the guy behind the wheel is bumping a 50 Cent song. The driver declares, ‘This is hot! You don’t like it?’ Clarence ignores him, and appears unimpressed with the music. Is this 50’s attempt to break the fourth wall of cinema? Regardless, if you feel like wasting 80 minutes of your worthless life on our generation’s answer to Citizen Kane, go ahead and do you. You could always play a round of ‘Where’s Lloyd Banks’, as the monotone miracle makes an uncredited cameo

So the NME has named its top 100 albums of the ‘noughties’.  Being the NME they like to be a bit controversial, probably due to the fact that a bit of controversy creates more publicity in the media world.  The full rundown can be read here.  Amazon have kindly listed the top 50 on a page of their own here for those of you who wish to update your music collection with must-have CDs.

Some of my personal favourites:

• Arcade Fire – Funeral at #7
• Arctic Monkeys – Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not at #4
• The White Stripes – Elephant at #18

I’m not gonna spoil it for you and tell who was number one.  To find out click here

The other day, an unexpected message came in over the wire. I was invited by a friend to attend a Puscifer show in Dallas, as Neil Hamburger was opening and this friend knew I’d want to see Neil again. So, whereas many of my friends would have loved to go to this event, I got to enjoy it on a whim for free.

Speaking of free, on the way out of the show, I was given a free copy of Puscifer’s debut CD, V Is For Vagina, so I figured what the hell:

First off, if you haven’t heard of this band before, congratulations, you somehow know less about popular music than I do. By definition, Puscifer is Maynard James Keenan’s solo project. As the lead singer of Tool, Keenan is passive-aggressively resentful of his fans. I can only imagine that he might have tried to start A Perfect Circle (his one-time “other band”) to try and get away from the crazy black-clad obsessed fans who attest that he totally gets them, man. Either way, A Perfect Circle didn’t lose him any fans (I have yet to run into someone who will love one and not also love the other), so I am thinking he figured this Puscifer thing would get him as far away from those fans as possible. Really, I would say it worked, because I saw a few empty seats at the venue I went to, most people in the center section where I sat stayed seated, and oh yeah the sound of the music was different than Tool.

I say “different”, but the old saying is true: you can take the Maynard out of the Tool, but you can never take the Tool out of the Maynard (probably why he’s so grumpy all the time). I went into the show fully expecting something stupid and gross that would at least make a passing shot at humor. Indeed, all of those elements were there, and in fact it was a really fun show for reasons I’ll get into in a minute, but the actual sound is “Tool meets hip hop”.

This summary of the sound really mostly applies to the album. As I listen to it, I am hearing these stale, programmed/processed drums, sludgy bassy instruments, and Maynard singing an octave lower than he should. At the actual show, he not only had a fine drummer who was throwing out some “sick beats”, as they call it, but Tim Alexander (the drummer for Primus for their more successful years) pounding on other, larger drums on the other side of the stage. That, and he was singing in his normal register, which worked a lot better for the songs, and had lots more instrumental assistance. That was a really great sound, and should have really gone on the album that way.

As a side note, I should mention that Maynard figured out a very clever way to get around that whole “having to face the audience” issue that he wrestles with every time he has to look out over that sea of black Tool t-shirts: he stands behind a flat-panel television that is level with his head, and then sings into a microphone with a camera behind the television facing him which is connected to said television, thus his face is being shown on the TV he’s standing behind as he sings. It was an awesome effect, actually, and his backup singing lady did the same thing. I don’t know, I liked it, and it was better than just turning your back on the audience (Johnny Cash he ain’t).

So yeah, the album that I was handed at the end of the concert was a bit of a disappointment after such a good show. Interestingly, I could not tell what Maynard was singing about at the show, and the album is even worse about that. When he’s not singing in an all-too-low register, he’s singing at an all-too-low volume, barely whispering the words out, and sometimes effects are mixed in that make things even more confusing. I would probably search for the lyrics online to make some comment on the themes therein, but really it’s mainly a lot of singing about guns and a lot of singing about sex.

Seriously, the gun thing was a huge part of the show, and I’m not knowledgeable enough about Maynard to know if he’s just being ironic about rap’s obsession with firearms or if he’s genuinely enthusiastic about them. In fact, the “Guns and sex” thing is pretty well wrapped up in the main hook line from “Dozo”: “Show you the difference between my gun and my pistol”. That line is repeated about 800 times.

Of course, since this still the Tool guy we’re talking about, themes of religion and the supernatural are visited, albeit in weirder ways than usual. The song “Indigo Children” is one of the catchiest tracks on the album, and has to do with a believe in the New Age movement about psychic kids. I’d say it’s fascinating, but actually there are about maybe 12 words in the whole song.

The song “Sour Grapes” is a bit of a puzzle. Basically, in the middle of the usual slow-going echoey minor-chord stuff that covers the entire album and the entirety of Maynard’s career, is a goofy impression of a Southern black preacher, talking about being saved and the holy mother and Jesus against a chorus of “Hallelujah” being sung in the background. Of course, one should probably dismiss this one as being intentionally ironic har har he’s really talking about penises or something, but really, the entire song is 7 minutes and roughly 18 stanzas of gospel preaching, word for word. If this wasn’t the Tool guy I would be completely convinced that, except for the stupid voice, there is actually no joke here. Of course, it could be that, like in many, many moments during the show, it is comedy but really poorly executed by a guy who isn’t that good at telling jokes. I don’t know, the song is about as catchy as a Gregorian chant so I’m not going to revisit it any time soon to give an alternative view.

So yeah, go and see Puscifer if you’ve got the means and time (or if you get invited by someone awesome to attend for free), and get this album for free, otherwise I don’t really recommend listening to this one. If you’re a Tool fan, this album seems to be engineered to make you hate it, and if you’re not a Tool fan, well what are you doing reading this blog entry anyway.

I will say that you should definitely purchase any and all Neil Hamburger material you can get your hands on. Though the crowd didn’t hate him all that much (not even when he came out and interrupted the band during a song to tell one more joke), the boos at this show were definitely fuel to his comedy fire. If you want to hear him at his crowd-controlling best, check out the album Hot February Night to hear him tell amazing(ly bad) jokes to 10,000’s of impatient and humorless Tenacious D fans. Until then!

Como todos los años, el 14 de  Noviembre se celebró en Madrid la manifestación estatal, que este año coincidia con la fecha de la firma del Acuerdo Tripartito entre Marruecos, Mauritania y España, en el cual se repartian el territorio del Sáhara Occidental.

Y allí estubo Talha, para apoyar al pueblo saharaui

One thing i didn’t like about the transformer movie is that sound wave didn’t get alot of time. Hes a major character in the transformer universe hopefully he gets some more burn in the next film.

Soundwave

And here is one of the songs from the ninja assassin movie. Sounds like an old wu-tang song to me. The movie looks hot im in there like swimwear..lol

So yea.. umm this lp is ok i think drake and wayne was a must! only reason i coped it was because the olympicks did track 14 on it. just like i told knox this shit will catch dust right next to my ps3 lol

go support the homies

ok kids im back at it and i would like to start by saying go cop this lp not only to support “the Olympicks” but this disk has some nice cuts on it. its missing some bangaz tho idk why they left it off. anywho in stores now!