Hats off to James Brown

Bad news for Christmas.
JAMES BROWN, one of the biggest soul singers, the inventor of funky, and an influence on any music with some kind of rhythm, from disco to rap, has died.
I'm a big fan of punk-funk (A Certain Ratio, Gang Of Four, Bush Tetras etc.) and I just know these bands wouldn't ever have existed without James Brown.
But the legend, while being remembered for his influence on decades of music, did his own great songs as well... masterpieces like Cold Sweat or Get Up Off That Thang.
Obituary on Yahoo!

The Best Of 2006 (and Merry Christmas)

01 GABRIELLES WISH
Reformer
02 DONALD FAGEN
Morph The Cat
03 MEW
And The Glass Handed Kites
04 SKARNEMURTA
Oilà Masnada
05 DELTA V
Pioggia Rosso Acciaio
06 MARLENE KUNTZ : S-Low
07 PET SHOP BOYS : Fundamental
08 FRANK BLACK : Fast Man Raider Man
09 MORRISSEY : Ringleader Of The Tormentors
10 FEDERICO FIUMANI : Donne Mie



Not many records this year, I wish I could have heard more, this chart is obviously based on the few I've heard.
I guess there have been other great records released this year but my priority was on the artists I already love, I've bought quite some other albums but they've all been released in the past.
For example how could I buy an album released this year by anyone when I hadn't yet the excellent Fin by Crispy Ambulance?
Also no New Order as we were expecting, in fact the band seems about to split, as you can read on New Order Online.
Still, I don't complain as Gabrielles Wish came back with what's probably the best record released in this decade so far, and I don't say this because I'm their webmaster, honest!
I also do the site for Skarnemurta but they're not number 2... well, their excellent album couldn't appear nowhere below number 5 in this chart, actually. It's packed with killer tunes and it's the first for a proper label and distributed nation-wide so they're a sort of best new band for the general audience in Italy.
Personally, Mew have been a great find. Describing them as My Bloody Valentine going prog while meeting Prefab Sprout doesn't even do justice to the innovative vision of pop and rock they have, they're that rare. They've made other albums before, which are definitely worth to have.
Few records, but high quality. And if you're going to talk about high quality you're going to mention the god of quality pop, Donald Fagen from the mighty Steely Dan. Other great frontmen made their solo comebacks: Frank Black from the legendary Pixies, Morrissey (20 years ago The Smiths were about to split) and Federico Fiumani, usually known as Diaframma.
Marlene Kuntz released a fantastic live album and Riccardo Tesio found the time to produce Un Altro Giorno D'Amore, the wonderful debut album by Kessler which almost made the Top 10.
Another great album bubbling under is Incontri A Metà Strada by Riccardo Sinigallia, the genius behind many beautiful records of the Roman scene (from Tiromancino to Niccolò Fabi and Max Gazzè).
The top 10 is completed by two fabulous synth pop albums: from England we have the return to form of Pet Shop Boys and in Italy we've had yet another great album from Delta V.
I've also downloaded quite some tracks from iTunes, both old and new, for example I have the original vinyl of Crispy Ambulance's The Plateau Phase, which doesn't include the bonus tracks of the CD, which I have downloaded from iTunes, I'm definitely more willing to spend 3 Euros on tracks I want than buying the entire CD or downloading them from illegal file sharing. Also, while I'm not entirely convinced to buy the new Robbie Williams album I firmly believe his cover of Lewis Taylor's Lovelight is one of the best songs of the year, definitely worth to be downloaded.

Merry Christmas and a Happy 2007, hoping to continue the tradition seeing every year finishing with 7 bringing great music.
Check the Records Of The Years section in Mick's Mix to see the previous years charts since 2001.

I Section 25 in Italia!

I Section 25, leggendaria band della Factory Records riformatasi da poco, suoneranno giovedì 7 dicembre al Club Iroko a Salerno (in Via Largo Campo). Ecco il programma completo del club. Un'occasione unica per vedere uno storico gruppo post punk.
Qui sotto potete vedere il video di New Horizon, (un brano tratto dal loro album di debutto Always Now, prodotto da Martin Hannett), registrato dal vivo in maggio a Poulton, al loro primo concerto dopo 20 anni!
Il video proviene dal loro sito ufficiale, da cui è linkato anche il video di Friendly Fires.
Per maggiori informazioni sui Section 25 (discografia inclusa) è consigliatissima una visita su Cerysmatic Factory.
I loro album sono stati ripubblicati, con l'aggiunta dei singoli e dei B sides, dalla LTM Records.

Internet Explorer 7 vs. Firefox 2 vs. Opera 9

You may have read many browser reviews. The problem is that even the professional gurus often take a very simplistic approach, and the summary usually is there's two browsers, Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 and Firefox is the coolest. But is it really so simple? I'm no professional, I'm just a seasoned web surfer, but I'll take a deeper look in the browsers offer, following Microsoft's latest release, the first in five years and the first truly innovative in ages.

There's more than IE7 and FF2, as we'll call them from now on.
Not only Opera 9, a totally indipendent browser who's been pioneering almost every single innovation imitated much later in Microsoft's and Mozilla's browsers (if there was a copyright for browser features Opera programmers would be much richer).

But also whithin the IE7 and FF2 fields, there have been browsers based on their engines adding different features.

Take tabbed browsing for example. Your average reviewer, until now, praised Firefox for having tabs and complained that IE hadn't. A more objective perspective would suggest that firstly tabs were introduced by Opera years and years earlier than in Netscape, the first browser to power the Mozilla Gecko engine. Then, many browsers have been available for years based on the IE core and featuring tabs. I think we still had IE4 seven years ago when Netcaptor emerged. Then came Crazy Browser and many others, not all of them good, but if you wanted IE with tabs, you could have it.
Probably the best of all the tabbed IEs is Maxthon, which has a good RSS client, introduced pop up blocker and ad hunter to IE users, and I think it's the only one to have its own extensions, one of which, BlogEX, is a great blog editor (though it doesn't support Blogger Beta yet).
And we can expect a further improvement wih Maxthon 2 (beware, it's still in pre-alpha stage though it doesn't seem really dangerous).
It will be totally redesigned and will feature the IE7 innovations like Quick Tabs, a tab where there's a sort of gallery of thumbnails previewing the sites you've opened in the other tabs.
Anyway Internet Explorer 7 now has tabbed browsing too, and it's optional, you can choose to disable it. The close tab button is only on the active tab and this is good because it prevents you from accidentally closing a tab you want to activate in fact. There's also a way to close the other tabs, simply by middle clicking on them. The new tab button is comfortably placed next to the most right sided tab. The only feature missing from FF2 and Opera 9 is the undo close tab, which lets you reopen a tab you've accidentally closed.

There are browsers based on Firefox too. Not only Netscape, which still survives but has lost attractiveness from a while, but now comes Flock (still in Beta), a browser with a nice design and a great RSS reader and heavily oriented to the social activity of Web 2.0. You can upload pictures to Photobucket and Flickr, write blog posts (again, not yet to Blogger Beta) and tag favourites to Delicious. They better fix the bookmark management, it had a negative response from users since it doesn't allow to create subfolders, but here's a browser which will challenge even its parent, given the constant growth of Web 2.0.
Then there's Opera 9, as ever so underrated. For example if you right click a link and copy it, then go to the address bar of a tab you have already opened and right click you can select 'Paste and go' so you save the time taken by pressing the Enter key or the Go button. We'll see this feature only on Maxthon 2. I never read a review mentioning all the important innovations of Opera, like the page zoom button, only now adopted by IE7 and still missing in the cooler Firefox.
When reviewers write under the main influence of what's cool between the majority they lose reliability.
Take another myth, the IE vulnerability and FF safety. Well, IE was and will be more vulnerable simply because the very most of the people use it, so criminal hackers code their viruses for IE rather than wasting time for Opera. But now that Firefox has increased its share of users, here they come the viruses which work on Firefox too.
The difference is Microsoft releases system updates to patch the vulnerability (since IE is part of the system and not a standalone multiplatform application), while FF releases new versions of the program.
I'm not saying Firefox is a bad browser, it is indeed cooler than IE, being alternative, open source etc., but does the fact it's cooler automatically involve it's better? And why people still ignore Opera?
Not that Opera is perfect, its main problem is the rendering engine (the main factor to judge a browser, by the way, much more than the interface design or the extra features). Actually, it would be the best in theory, being the one to be fully standard compliant, it perfectly displays the most modern sites. But it forgets a lot of sites out there are still coded on old standards, they're deprecated, but people visit them anyway, and with Opera, sometimes, they have problems seeing them properly, while this issue has been improved in Firefox, which enriched its compatibility with the version 1.5, while you may remember there was a time when seeing a site on Netscape was totally different than seeing it on IE.
Usually, rendering problems are the fault of the webmasters, myself included, we just don't code totally respecting the latest W3C standards. Ultimately, when people have problems visiting a site, they just switch the browser. This has been made easier in Firefox (through the IE View extension) and especially Netscape (natively), with a button you can switch the rendering engine from IE to Mozilla's Gecko.
Back to Internet Explorer 7, the first thing you'll notice is the radical brave redesign of the interface. Dummies who got used to the familiar toolbars they've seen for years (even on IE6 the only difference where the new icons replacing the old ones in the same positions) will complain but with a little effort they can get used to the new interface, which is more intelligent, and also has a pleasant look. Once again, Opera has been experimenting the concept of breaking the long tradition which saw the buttons of the toolbar lined and same sized, though IE7 offers less customization options. Where Opera 9 hides by deafult even the main toolbar, with only the essential buttons loaded in the address bar, IE7 hides the menu bar, though you can see in the screenshot I recalled it, a nice break between the icons of the address and tabs toolbars, and you can place the Links next to that, which look cool with the improved favicon support.
The back and forward buttons have been placed closer, and the recent pages have been merged in one drop down menu. Then comes the address field and the buttons you need after you've written the URL, Go (merged with Refresh) and Stop. The integrated search, where you can choose your engine, completes the upper bar.
The tabs bar also has the Favorites icons, though bookmark management hasn't been improved and it's still way better in FF and Opera, and it's closed by the new commands bar, which allows you to do without the menu bar if you wish, the menu items are rearranged below icons like Page and Tools. Other icons are Home Page and Feeds.
The new Feeds client of IE7 is rather good, I'd have preferred a three pane window like in proper RSS clients as RSSOwl (Opera gets closer to that), but still you have the subscribed feeds in a section of the side bar, the titles with summaries in the middle and the filter on the right (by date, title or category). Firefox is really limited with feeds, showing only titles in the Bookmarks menu, but the Sage extension is a better client than the one embedded in IE7.
The new browser from Microsoft has enhanced the security, as FF2 and Opera 9 now includes Pop up blocker and Phishing Filter.
The commands bar shows the add-ons as well. For example the default download manager has remained very basic (the one in FF2 is slightly better but the most complete is definitely in Opera), still you can plug in a program like Well Get.
IE hasn't extensions like FF2 or widgets like Opera, there are add-ons and plug-ins, but they're third party applications listed by CNet on IE Add-ons, and some of them are shareware.
Now IE7 allows to turn on for the browser only (previously it could be applied only to the whole system) ClearType, which renders the fonts much smoother, similarly to the quality you see on PDF files. Sometimes the smallest fonts might look a bit blurred, and it would be better a quick option to switch Clear Type on and off rather than having to dig in the Internet Options (and restart the browser too), but mostly the fonts are really enhanced and more readable, and you can always tune ClearType if you download this PowerToy.

The look of Firefox hasn't changed much (now it's the most familiar looking and this could actually attract people who don't like the IE7 toolbars), it has finally added a close button for each tab, but the new toolbar icons are disappointing, they look like drawn with a pencil, the previous were much clearer and nicer (but it's still available between the many themes). Tabs can be horizontally scrolled and there's a menu of them, though with no preview image.
There's a couple of interesting innovations like spell checking in text fields and search term suggestion (of related terms as well).

But talk about innovations and you really talk about Opera, which now features BitTorrent support, the Fast Forward navigation between pages of sites, Kiosk mode, mobile browser simulation (remember Opera Mini is the best mobile browser), the site preview on tabs (introduced much earlier than in IE7, though there's not a page with all the previews), IRC client, notes, E Mail client (though it doesn't support HTML, but this is another story, we're not comparing Opera to websuites like SeaMonkey or related programs like Thunderbird).
The page download progress bar is really useful when visiting slow sites and it's not been imitated by the rivals yet.

So what's the verdict then? I don't think there's a browser which is absolutely better than the others, each has its interesting features and its flaws. You just have to download them all and see which one is best for your surfing style.
I see the nice aspects in Firefox, but my ideal browser would be a mix of IE and Opera.
The rendering engine, the Quick Tabs feature and the new toolbar keep me on the IE side.
I've been using Maxthon for years and I'm just waiting for a stable and full featured Maxthon 2 to include the innovations of IE7 and be further inspired by Opera. Until then, it'll be Internet Explorer 7.

Flickr4Writer and Flickr Uploadr vs. Photobucket

Flickr4Writer is a plugin for Windows Live Writer which is simply activated from the 'Insert' menu and lets you browse the Flickr public accounts (starting with your own, obviously) and insert pictures into the post you're writing.
This is really useful since the web interface of Flickr is not so intelligent and you have to click each image to get the codes to use on blog posts or to directly blog the images.
The plugin requires an updated .NET Framework, a component of Windows which is not installed by default, but you can easily obtain it through Windows Update.


Flickr Uploadr is a light and simple program to upload pictures from your computer to your Flickr account.
Using these two tools allows you to totally bypass the Flickr website and upload a picture to your account and insert the uploaded picture into the post.

All would be really interesting, but after a while you may wonder why just not stick to Photobucket which gives you all the codes you need on the page of your album (as you can see from the part of the site screenshot on the right), and most of all has a monthly bandwidth limit of 10 GB as opposed to the poor 20 MB of Flickr. As a bonus you also can share videos and create nice presentation widgets and slideshows. You just have to log in to your album, copy the URL of the image and paste it in the 'Insert - Picture From Web' dialog of WLV and then edit the image properties on the side bar.

Windows Live Writer supports Blogger Beta

Windows Live Writer is a huge progress in blog posts editing software. At the moment it's still in beta and free, but already it's the only software to support Blogger Beta.
It doesn't support the labels/categories yet, but using it is worth the little extra effort of editing the post on Blogger just to add the label.
The interface looks familiar (looks like a small Office application) and yet has quite some interesting features which makes this the most advanced blog post editor.
The most impressive innovation is the Web Layout of the post editor. WLV downloads the style sheet from the blog host and applies it to the editor. So while the other programs let you see the HTML code, the preview, or a visual editor with basic formatting (here called Normal view) here you can also see the post as you write it just as it will look in the published post. Just check this current screenshot:
 
This is the real What You See Is What You Get, quite an improvement from the rendering of visual editors we used to know, FrontPage included, it's the closest thing to updating the page on the browser, and way better than the original Blogger visual editor.
There is some crazy lack, for example the center alignment is available only on a sub-menu and to apply that to an image you have to select it as a paragraph (so highlight it as if it was a phrase, don't select it like you do for the properties). And when you increase the font size a traditional HTML tag is coded rather than a modern style command. But I'm sure the future final releases will fix these problems.
This program opens posts from the Blogger server (you can edit past posts as well) and saves drafts (but you can't open them outside WLV, if you really want to save them you better save the HTML code on text files).
Windows Live Writer gives you also a lot of extra options when you insert links or pictures. It does not allow you to upload images to Blogger, you need an FTP account which allows the links to images only or you have to insert the images from web hosts like Photobucket selecting this command from the menu. What's really useful here is you can customize three different sizes other than the original for the display.
When you write the URL of the link you have a drop down list from your chronology just like in your browser address bar.
You can also insert maps from Windows Live Local and tags like those you can see below for Technorati.
For those of you anti-Microsoft the Performancing extension for Firefox is still a very valid option, you can still write posts better than you'd do on the visual Blogger editor. But for those nice extra features Windows Live Writer will become essential and will require some more serious competition from the opposing field. I hope we can expect an effort like this from the Mozilla community soon.

Performancing, blog post editor

I'm testing Performancing, a good editor for blog posts, it can't connect to Blogger Beta yet, but I can always copy the code and paste it on the Blogger editor. Performancing has all the features of the visual Blogger editor (which has given me some problems, especially when uploading images which always appear at the top of the post, no matter where my cursor actually is) but it doesn't mess the code though it's not strictly pure XHTML (it still uses the b tag for bold instead of the correct strong). Oh yes, the only missing feature is the font choice, but don't we all keep our default? It can even save the drafts (here called "notes"), but be sure to save them before clicking on any other note you already saved otherwise the content you're editing will go lost (it doesn't prompt you to save)...

Here's a screenshot of the Firefox window divided in two after activating the extension from the icon at the bottom right of the browser, in the upper half there's the code editor of Blogger where I'll just paste the code...

We Are The Champions

Eccolo, in questa foto presa dal sito del Corriere Della Sera, il nostro capitano Fabio Cannavaro mentre alza la Coppa del Mondo vinta ieri sera dall'Italia nella finale di Berlino contro la Francia ai rigori, ma certamente con merito.
Un evento storico che mi fa tornare volentieri ad occuparmi di questo blog dopo un periodo in cui sono stato ancora più occupato del solito. Con merito, dicevamo, perchè non c'è dubbio che l'Italia era la squadra più forte dei Mondiali, con giocatori incredibili come Buffon (forse il portiere migliore della storia), col suo immenso talento per le parate impossibili, come Cannavaro e Materazzi, che portano via la palla agli attaccanti avversari come se fossero bambini, come 'Ringhio' Gattuso, gladiatore che vale per tre, come Grosso che in pratica decide semifinale e finale dopo aver giocato per anni in Serie C.

Squadre più favorite sulla carta, come Brasile, Argentina, Germania e la stessa Francia (che pure ci ha reso difficile la vittoria approfittando della nostra stanchezza nella ripresa dopo un primo tempo quasi totalmente dominato dagli azzurri), hanno dimostrato di non avere giocatori all'altezza dei nostri, di potersi solamente affidare alle giocate episodiche dei singoli ma di faticare ad esprimere un irresistibile gioco da campioni, gioco invece espresso dall'Italia con le sole eccezioni delle partite contro Stati Uniti e Australia.
Un gruppo straordinario tanto più se si considera che la vittoria è stata ottenuta in un campionato in cui gli attaccanti che avrebbero dovuto splendere, come Totti, Gilardino e Toni, hanno faticato invece molto più del dovuto, sebbene siano almeno riusciti a segnare goal determinanti.
Non ho ancora ben capito come Totti abbia contagiato milioni di tifosi italiani con Seven Nation Army dei White Stripes, ma sono sicuro che quella linea di basso ce la ricorderemo per tutta la vita!

SPYMOB - Sitting Around Keeping Scores

You know how I love unlucky bands, or better, bands which have a good chance and then everything goes wrong. But they, in face of adversity, keep on doing the best music around, unknown to the masses for those lucky few who can follow them, so better than the bands featured in the establishment's media.
Of course, the classic example is Gabrielles Wish. If you've been on this blog before, you probably know the story: simply the best band of the last 15 years, get signed by New Order's manager, but then Rob Gretton dies and the world becomes deaf all of a sudden. Can't you hear when music is really special? The scene is classic as well: a post-punk band in Manchester.
But in a parallel universe, on the other face of earth, there's a similar story: Spymob, a sophisticated pop band from Minnesota. They release their debut album, Townhouse Stereo, in 1996, which is now unfortunately unavailable.

Then they slowly build a strong fanbase and get signed by Epic, but then dropped without any release.
Still, at the start of this decade they get noticed by The Neptunes, which make them the backing band of their project N.E.R.D.. Everything seems to finally take the right direction, with an album recorded and scheduled for a release on Arista's subsidiary, Star Trak, owned by The Neptunes.
Something goes probably wrong again, Spymob seem to disappear but the album misteriously emerges on Ruthless Records, distributed by Sony's Red (though I higly suspect the distribution and availability is strongly limited). That's all we know about Spymob since the release.
We also know that Sitting Around Keeping Scores is an absolute masterpiece which would deserve to shine all over the charts. It was released two years ago and only now I review it, but all can I say is that two years later I never get tired of this album, I've heard these songs hundreds of times and they even grow on me. There's not a train trip without a Spymob tune on my MP3 player and each time it sounds great.
Basically, here we have Steely Dan coming from the future.
I've loved Steely Dan, but since them nobody has made such a music, nobody dared to explore so deeply the possibilities of sophisticated pop harmony and arrangements. Prefab Sprout did a similar thing, but from a totally different perspective, much more British. In fact here we have a band sounding like Steely Dan with vintage instruments but also through a totally contemporary attitude, which is the most special thing about Spymob.
It doesn't sound like listening to a retro band, this music stands out so much from all the other derivative music being made today. Yeah, everyone is being inspired from the past today, you have bands inspired by punk, new wave, electro, but we missed a band inspired by the most creative pop ever seen in music history. But Spymob go much further and you often feel like listening to something innovative, as their instrumental and melodic approach is so fresh... and I haven't mentioned the lyrics, a work of genius.
The band is a perfect mix of a strong rhythm section and a sharp guitar combined with John Ostby's talent for emotional piano, beautiful vocals (really reminiscent of Donald Fagen) and imaginative lyrics.
It's difficult to single out tracks from this flawless album. It could be the powerful beginning of 2040, the song from the point of view of a dog It Gets Me Going, the splendidly orchestrated I Still Live At Home ('I guess we're supposed to meet, it said so on a printout sheet'), the soul-funk delight of the title track, the almost glam positivity of Stand Up And Win, the wonderful On Pilot Mountain, National Holidays which talks about divorced parents, the fantastic harmony of Walking Under Green Leaves... or you should hear Thinking Of Someone Else to understand why Ostby can spend an excellent chorus to sing 'Hold me mother, cuddle me closely. Hold me mother, talk to me softly'. The closing German Test Drive really makes you feel like being in the passenger seat, the music does express motion, especially the keyboard pattern and the rollercoasting chorus. But maybe the best track of the album is the astonishing Fly Fly Fishing Poles, a chorus as huge as Jupiter, Steely Dan meet the Beach Boys on the best vocal harmony arrangement heard in this century on 'paddle boats pull up close to the band shell on the shoreline'.
There's still the Spymob official site. It's not been updated since the album release, but you can hear the streaming samples of all the songs.
While you still can buy the album you better check its page on Amazon, from which the album cover is taken.
Check the misteryous page of the band on My Space - Spymob, where you can hear four streaming tracks, the most interesting of which is certainly Give Us A Chance To Call from the lost debut album, Townhouse Stereo.
Eric Fawcett, Spymob's drummer, is also on My Space, with the streaming tracks of his work with N.E.R.D., Kubla Kahn, Mike Doughty and of course Spymob (the title track, Sitting Around Keeping Scores, is even available for download).
There's still a Spymob Yahoo! Group where fans are wondering what happened since the album. I'll try to find out, because we'd really like to hear more from such a talented band. And unique, nobody else is doing music like this while they're away, so they better get back.

The Go-Betweens' frontman dies

Just a quick post to share the shock of hearing Grant McLennan, singer of The Go-Betweens, has suddenly died in his sleep aged only 48, one year after releasing Oceans Apart, the latest album of the band, once again critically acclaimed and well received by the audience. The Australian band went from the new wave success of Cattle And Cane to the guitar pop hit of Streets Of Your Town, with a break between the late 80s and the late 90s which gave space to the solo careers of Mc Lennan and Robert Foster.

I don't have all their albums, but their compilation '1978-1990' is one of my favourite records and I've always liked the most of the stuff I've heard, the earlier sounding like quality new wave and then developing into something which could have been placed between the lighter guitar pop of The Smiths and the sophisticated approach of Prefab Sprout.
Their music always sounded like anticipating the next step in the trend of alternative guitar pop and has been influential to bands like REM and Belle And Sebastian, though I've always found The Go-Betweens far superior in talent and style...
Read more on The Go-Betweens website.

Gabrielles Wish - Reformer

You won't believe me, I know. But I won't change my mind just because of this. It's quite a paradox, sometimes to be honest you gotta lose your credibility. I'm just writing what I feel. I feel Reformer by Gabrielles Wish is the album of the decade. So far. But we're already in the second half. Yes, even New Order's masterpieces of these years, Get Ready and Waiting For the Sirens Call, have a tough time against this astonishing record.
You know I'm a Gabrielles Wish fan. I started a fan site three years ago and they asked me to make it official. But this is all a coincidence. Or maybe not. Of course, if they hadn't blown me away so much when they supported New Order in 1998, I wouldn't have discovered them, and I wouldn't have become such a fan. Everything that happened since then made me an even bigger fan. I bought the first two EPs, and they were even better than the expected. When I started the site, they sent me some records I hadn't found yet, and those were still even better than the expected. But what I mean here is if I hadn't ever heard about them and I heard Reformer by accident, I'd be still totally blown away, even more than the first time I saw them.

Because Reformer is even a major further improvement to anything they've released before, the absolute beauty of this record, from the first minute to the last, is truly amazing. It's virtually flawless, and there are so many different sound and emotions here. I'm getting used to the fact the best bands are remaining a secret kept in underground cults, but once again I can only wonder why people are wasting time and money with bands which won't ever give them anything remotely comparable to the majesty of Reformer.
You won't believe me. Well, believe your ears at least. You still know when music is good, don't you? On the Gabrielles Wish official site there's a section named Sounds, packed with downloadable MP3 files, mostly full length singles, rarities and live material. There's also a special page for the Reformer Sampler. This link opens into another window, so you can download and hear the files and read my post at the same time and get an idea of what I mean.
I had been lucky enough to hear recordings of recent Gabrielles Wish gigs and I had been already impressed by the new songs. The best of the new songs, for me, was definitely Claw (check file 07 for the full live version and 01 for the album sample), and I'm happy they've chosen it as the first track on Reformer. In the live version Rob's voice was filtered like through a megaphone and the chorus choir resembled a bunch of drunk hooligans and I found it really cool. The studio version is much cleaner and is the best example of the excellent production of the whole album, the choir has been changed to an equally fabulous ethereal choir backeded by female vocals. The sound is fantastic, great bass and guitar... we just gotta hope Paul Ryan has still time for the band though he has announced he has been forced to reduce it because of work commitments, but his guitar plays an essential role in Reformer... and you also gotta notice, in the whole album as well, that the entry of Karen Leatham (formerly in Wonky Alice, The Fall and The Sons Of God, the band of The Chameleons' Mark Burgess) in the band has brought a further improvement. She plays bass and guitar too, but it's her keyboard which really stands out on the whole album.
After such an epic start Gazelle (sample 05) brings us back to the angular post punk we can expect from Gabrielles Wish at their best, enhanced by a liquid bass which echoes New Order's Peter Hook and a minimal trumpet (unusual for this band) which recalls the best A Certain Ratio.
Unfortunately there's no sample for the sound hurricane which is 2 Much (so you'll discover new songs when hearing the album you can buy at Piccadilly and Vox Pop), where the guitar goes from the merciless noise of the verse to the delicate harmonics of the chorus..
Flu Jab has a strong rhythm in the verse and spooky noises in the melancholic chorus, with the bonus of a wonderful piano in the interlude, it's like Brian Eno producing Happy Mondays jamming with Red Hot Chili Peppers, but the result is better than what you could ever expect.
Say (sample 02) is a perfect example of the incredible variety of sounds and emotions in this album, it's an acoustic song enriched by atmospheric sounds, touching female backing vocals and a wonderful violin.
This delicate moment is brutally followed by New York Girl (sample 06), a heavy rock monster and a growing grand finale pumped by a trumpet bringing the tension to the max.
A similar technique in Elizabeth, where a long instrumental part growing slowly to a powerful ending brings us to Rob's emotional voice.
The 12 minutes of Optical One have the essence of the whole album in one song, it's a powerful rock song with an ambient interlude which reaches moments of astonishing grace like this passage (sample 03) from the heavenly raindrops of the keyboard to a delicate guitar recalling the best Vini Reilly from The Durutti Column.
The album is closed by the instrumental Position Oldham St Manchester (sample 04), the fabulous late night trip of a guitar in the most lively street of Manchester, between atmospheres recalling Robert Fripp, clear sounds and acid noises. Once again Gabrielles Wish make the perfect soundtrack for their own city, just like they did with the electronic Hood in the Golded Up EP... when you hear music like this you just can see again Manchester, if you've ever been there... if you haven't, you can hear what it looks like, or see what it sounds like... you know what I mean.
The vast audiences have missed 10 years of great music by Gabrielles Wish. They'll probably miss this masterpiece too. But what about you, are you going to miss the album of the decade? Maybe it won't be your album of the decade, but are you sure you're going to hear anything better this year at least?

Psychedelic Furs' leader's solo album

Preview Richard Butler's CD, download rarities and win signed stuff!
In the post-punk scene, The Psychedelic Furs were a truly special band. Sounding like David Bowie (with a kinda sexy sore throat after too many smokes) fronting a punk band, they enjoyed mainstream success mantaining credibility and a rock sound at a time when 'rock-ism' was an offence. The songs kept an alternative attitude, but had a great talent for accessible tunes, a powerful deep bass, acid noise guitars and most of all a fabulous saxophone player. Their self-titled debut album remains a masterpiece more than 25 years later and still sounds fresh. An interesting frontman, an interesting sound, songs balanced between the innovative and the commercial, the hits came with Sister Europe, Pretty In Pink and Love My Way...

In the late 80s the Furs started having a tough time in a scene which was rapidly evolving and the cruel mainstream system didn't wait too long to reject them. Richard Butler founded Love Spit Love but while the scene kept changing the cult of The Psychedelic Furs didn't cease, it did increase actually. Successful artists like Annie Lennox and Elvis Costello, established and emerging bands like Buffalo Tom, Counting Crows and The Rapture, and a techno guru like William Orbit, they all covered the Furs' songs. The mainstream realised that while they weren't going to sell like in their golden years they still had a considerable following and so their albums got reissued and the band reunited for a tour.
Butler, though, never gave up the idea of a solo career. After a couple of soundtracks, in 2004 he recorded a song for the ironic Johnny Bravo cartoon with Vince Clark from Erasure. Nothing strange if you think 20 years before he was doing synth-pop versions of Kurt Weill's The Three Penny Opera. How cool is daring to be so different?

This year finally sees the release of his debut solo album, simply self-titled Richard Butler (out April 18th), on Kock Records, one of the biggest and most varied indie labels in America (Ringo Starr, Howard Jones, The Kinks' reissues, classical, jazz, country, rap, and... Barney the cartoon!). What we can hear so far is really promising, emotional music and a sophisticated sound for sensitive lyrics and just a more intimate feel than The Psychedelic Furs. Butler wrote and produced the record with Jon Carin, a musician who worked with artists like Bryan Ferry and David Gilmour, and says he had a great influence on this sound.
You can hear the excellent single Good Days Bad Days streaming from a special page on his site, Richard Butler Online.

There's also a contest where you can win handwritten lyrics (framed and signed, with a CD cover), signed promo singles and signed photos.
Check also Richard Butler on MySpace, where you can hear three songs streaming: the single (you also find the breath-taking lyrics, dealing with the concept of undoing your life, rewinding back everything, with words like 'I want to unread every book that my eyes laid on, unsay everything I've said'), Broken Aeroplanes and most of all the amazing California, a touching song with a wonderful keyboard which could be on Bowie and Eno's Low if it was made today.
The Psychedelic Furs site Burned Down Days is also recommended. In the media section you'll find the covers by Costello etc. I've mentioned above and another page with Richard Butler's acoustic sets, interviews, soundtracks and yes, that Kurt Weill song and even that Johnny Bravo thing.

Opium - Under A Daylight Moon

Alright, you might guess my excuses for writing the first post of the year by half March, so I better not give any. Right to the subject of the post, which is a forgotten gem of the Opium discography, their debut album which was released back in 1995, already on the Neuropa label. Now you can rediscover it by catching one of the few copies which are still left directly from the core of the project, Alex Macpherson (formerly a bassist of The Wake, a great Factory band). Just write him here: neuropa@talk21.com
You can bet it's really worth it, the quality of this early release is amazing. The first two tracks will be re-released on the Atlantean single in 2003 (reviewed here almost one year ago), with Mirage being retitled TranSaharan.


But it's the following Nocturne the best song on the album, and probably Opium's best song ever, the one that should definitely get a re-release on the next Opium album we hope to see soon as 11 years is quite a long wait, though there have been some excellent singles in the meantime... This song is extremely emotional, with touching vocals from Jane Jardin Love and a wonderful deep bass which somehow reminds New Order's Peter Hook's best works when he plays the rhythm bass. You could almost think it's Vini Reilly from the Durutti Column playing that delicate guitar solo in the middle...
Macpherson shows almost a classical sensitivity in songs like Morpheus, graced by a piano which could have been composed by a romantic artist of the 19th century, like Chopin or Liszt.
It's the dub of Monsoon and Slowlove which brings us back to the modernity, though there's always a dreamy atmosphere which goes from the ethnic to the esoteric.
The modern and yet mysterious beauty of the woman on the artwork of the cover is a good metaphor for Opium's sound.
The eclectic and original inspiration from this album is shown once again at the end, when the surreal glockenspiel Ostraloid introduces a fabulous cover of Wild Is The Wind, a song brought to success by such artists as Nina Simone and David Bowie.
You find much of what the current music scene is missing on this album (which is closed by the hidden extra of the instrumental of Atlantean), the experimental attitude of bringing the most various influences to make modern music which is looking forward, mantaining the accessibility and the emotional power of the music. You'll wonder where this album has been all these years while you bought a lot of disappointing records and you didn't know it existed. Well, now you know it does, so get it while you still can.