Recently in music Category

I cheerfully admit I was prompted into buying some ELO by watching Love and Monsters on Doctor Who last year. The reason I bought this one was that I've actually got it on vinyl from back when I was in school and picked it up cheap. It's a very sci-fi album, lots of songs about the end of the world, robots, time, etc with synthesizers, vocoders and other high tech (for the mid-70's) music equipment. But all done in the usual ELO (over the top, singalong) style.

A mark of its impact is that the first few times I played it, Joe pretty much ignored it. Then I put it in the CD carousel in the car when we went home at Christmas. It didn't get played then, in fact, but it did a while later when he was on his own and on the way back from Chelmsford and was a big hit. Thinking about it, it is kind of designed for playing in cars, catchy tunes and production that plays well on small speakers and really cuts through the car noise in the way that more delicate music can't.

I stumbled across a new music download store, MusicGiants HD Music Downloads. It's interesting because they sell you albums in WMA Lossless format. So for once it's a download that says it's CD quality and really is. Unfortunately as always the price does not reflect what you care getting. $15.29 is the average price for a single disc album. Now that's reasonably cheap for us given the exchange rate, although I suspect not that cheap for the US. However against that you have to put the fact that the files come with DRM and so will only play on your Windows PC or a portable player.

Strangely apparently you can burn the files to a CD - which means you can then re-rip in a sensible format (eg FLAC) without any loss in quality. Unless WM DRM downgrades the quality when you burn it, which is quite possible.

So in the end it's still just as easy, and probably cheaper, to carry on buying on CD and ripping as before.

I haven't been buying much music recently - most unusually - other than the monthly eMusic downloads. Mainly because there's been nothing new recently that has caught my eye. So I decided to splash out and start picking up some of the music I've only got on scratchy vinyl or cassette. This tends to be the stuff I listened to a lot in college - so much so in fact that it kind of got burned into my brain. Which is part of the reason why I've never bothered buying it - it had become so familiar it wasn't really necessary.

So here are two albums by a German band called Eloy. They ran throughout the seventies and early eighties and also had brief revivals in the nineties (a new album with a lot of original members in 1998). Remastered copies of their albums have been released by EMI over the last few years (these two are from 2005) however their website hasn't been updated since 2003. As with a number of european (prog) rock bands, when listening to them for the first time you notice a lot of similarities with the more well known names like Yes and Pink Floyd, however they do have a charm all of their own. These two are from their late phase (81,82) when they'd had an almost complete change of lineup and moved from the guitar + hammond organ basis to a much more electronic style, but also with a real string section in places.

Yes, in fact this is part one and two of a double concept album about an alien race on the planet Salta - but really, who listens to the lyrics anyway? The music mixes lush electronic (and real) orchestral sections with more traditional rock based songs with a bit of an anthemic feel. They benefit greatly from a superb bass player who had been with them for some years and has a really fluid style that bounces along all the time and really drives the pulse of the faster numbers. Standout tracks? Maybe Queen of the Night and Carried By Cosmic Winds from Planets. The last 30 seconds of Carried... (and the album) is a lovely snippet which says to be continued.... From Time to Turn, the opening track Through A Somber Galaxy for its pulsing bass line.

Special attractions of these releases are that they include the original artwork rather than the Rodney Matthews versions previously released in the UK. Actually the Matthews versions are probably better but I haven't seen these ones before - and anyway they all lose out to being CD sized. Also there is one track I'd never heard before on Time To Turn, Magic Mirrors which for some reason on all UK versions had been replaced by a track from the album that preceded these two, Colours. The story of Planets is printed in the booklet, however the history of the band and the story of the sequel are only in German. Lastly both discs feature Copy Control technology which appears to have zero affect on my ability to rip them.

Klaus Schulze is a bit of a favourite of mine. It's hard to explain why as I'm sure to many people 70 minute tracks based around just a couple of ideas may seem a little... dull. But not to me. I have most - but not all - of his albums plus the limited edition box sets that came out over the last few years. So the news last year that a new label was going to be re-releasing all of his albums seemed great. They came in nice digibox sleeves with the original artwork and liner notes and bonus tracks to fill out the CD's. Which is where the problem comes. There's a great temptation to re-buy all the CD's to get hold of the bonus tracks, which of course is silly given that I have a 50 CD box set of "previously unreleased material" already. So I'm limiting myself to items I haven't already got - or that have significant extra material - to keep the madness at bay. This album is the first one out that I didn't have. It's a sound track album and so, like most sound tracks - but unlike nearly all other Schulze albums, has around 20 short tracks. The pieces for the most part seem to reflect the period (1994) recalling Beyond Recall and the Royal Festival Hall concert. but the division into such short segments robs the album of the flow that the "proper" albums have. The bonus track is an interesting piece, a 20 minute track from a very limited edition giveaway sampler album done for (I think) the Alesis corporation to show off their new keyboards.

I've just stumbled across a new source of legal MP3 downloads, http://www.playlouder.com/. It's an interesting looking place worthy of a browse. It only sells MP3's and they are decent quality (192-256kbps VBR) - much the same as eMusic. It's all indie labels as you'd expect but it seems to have the more current/popular bands that eMusic doesn't and it seems to have a better range of those albums, plus more singles.