Music

The Police & KT Tunstall live in Belfast

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Went to see The Police and KT Tunstall at Stormont last night. It was brilliant. KT Tunstall is excellent live. Especially Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, which she does mostly solo using echo loops. The Police were excellent as well. They played several tracks that I didn’t recognise that were really heavy and good. The famous singles that everyone knows were good as well.

Here are some pictures (taken on an iPhone). BTW the concert was on the back cricket square at Stormont. This is shown in this picture from 2005.

KT Tunstall on screen ThePoliceBelfast1.JPG Click Pictures for larger view

Playing along

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Love the drum kit. You can plug an iPod in and play along to your favourite tracks. This is so much fun its probably illegal. Plus it seems to be good exercise.

New Nina Kinert album

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Just got the new Nina Kinert album. It’s on my iPhone, but I haven’t listened to it yet (apart from snippets on her MySpace page). The last album was brilliant. I mentioned it here. Looking forward to hearing the new one, Pets & Friends. Now where are my headphones…

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Update: The album is good. Not sure if it’s as good as Let there be love.

More from The Hot Puppies

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I’ve written about The Hot Puppies before. They’re excellent. They have some new stuff out and a new album forthcoming. The new stuff isn’t on iTMS yet but there are 4 new tracks on their MySpace site. Well worth a listen. I love a lot about their music. The vocals are exquisite. But the good thing is that the rest of the music complements the singing really well. I see they are playing a gig in Cardiff on May 10th. I’ll be in that general area working. I might stay for the Saturday and go see them. Here there are live performing Shoot em in the head –

New finds: CSS and The Bastard Fairies

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I discovered two new bands in the last few days.

CSS – first seen performing Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above on Later with Jools Holland filler on the BBC HD channel. They are very good. From Brazil but the vocals remind me a lot of the music coming out of Scandinavian countries recently. Such as The Knife, Nina Kinert, Victoria Bergsman, The Concretes, and others. Excellent stuff.

The Bastard Fairies – first seen via a Youtube link to their We’re all going to hell video. Good fun 🙂 Their album is good as well. Check out the ukulele group version of Brand New Key.

Mini-review: Sennheiser PXC 450 NoiseGard headphones

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I picked up a set of Sennheiser PXC 450 NoiseGard headphones a few months ago in East Midlands airport. I’d been looking for a set of comfortable external headphones that I could use on longer flights. I finally got to try them out in anger on a flight to San Francisco on Friday.

They are very good. When you turn them on (they are powered by a small battery) the ambient noise in your surroundings just disappears. There is a very noticeable difference. The audio quality when using them is superb. I was able to hear very subtle background effects and vocals in the music I was listening to on the flight. The noise of the engines and wind were almost completely cancelled when using the headphones. When someone comes to talk to you, cabin staff for example, you just push a button on the right headphone and the music is cut and passthrough microphones allow you to have a normal conversation without taking the headphones off. I still have to get used to this and was constantly taking them off to talk to people.

They fold up flat and reasonably small and come in a nice carry case. This can be attached to a laptop bag handle and carried onto the flight as part of your hand baggage. Highly recommended. One note. If you adjust the volume when in voice passthrough mode it sets the music volume and ambient sound cancelling settings. If you do this you might think that these headphones are crap and don’t cancel external sound at all. I did this a while back by accident. If you have a set and you think they don’t work then this might be the reason. Get the manual out and reset them following the instructions. Then you’ll see they do work and are wonderful.

New toy: Roland electronic drum kit

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I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a set of electronic drums for a while. For use with EZDrummer Midi samples and also as a form of aerobic exercise. Not sure how good drumming is as a form of exercise, but I’ll find out.

Click Picture for larger view

Queen Rock Montreal on Blu-ray Disc

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Queen Rock Montreal on Blu-ray Disc is unbelievable! The quality of the visuals, and the audio, are brilliant. The concerts were recorded on film originally and not the more conventional video. As a result the transfer to Blu-ray retains the full resolution. This is a must buy if you have a Blu-ray player and a HD TV. It’s worth it for I’m in love with my car on its own. Brilliant camera angles of Roger Taylor singing the song whilst drumming.

Song of the Day: Sometime World – Wishbone Ash

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This is a bit of a blast from the past. First released in 1972 on the Argus album by Wishbone Ash. The whole album is stunningly good. I could have picked several of the tracks for the Song of the Day, but Sometime World was chosen as it is very, very good indeed. Wishbone Ash were one of the first bands to use 2 lead guitarists. The guitar parts are multi-layered, complex and, most importantly, sound wonderful. Sometime World has a guitar section that reminds me of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird . If you liked that you’ll love Sometime World.

My advice? Buy Argus 🙂

Song of the Day: In a Broken Dream – Python Lee Jackson with Rod Stewart

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I haven’t heard this song for ages. Several years, until it came up on random play in iTunes today. I was working from home writing stuff for work with the music as background. I did something I very rarely do these days and just let iTunes play songs at random from the whole library of between 4 & 5 thousand tracks. That’s just under 20 days of music if I let it play through the whole library.

Anyway it threw up In a Broken Dream by Python Lee Jackson with Rod Stewart as guest vocalist. This is a truly wonderful piece of music. The vocals are fantastic. The guitar is blistering. The bass guitar is stunningly good, and the drumming is a perfect rhythmic complement to the whole thing. It’s tracks like this that remind me what a truly wonderful thing music is. Brilliant.

I can’t find it on iTMS to link to it. There is a YouTube video of about 3 minutes 30 seconds of the track. It’s a video of a vinyl copy being played 🙂

It’ll let you get a good feel for the song. I have it on the best Rock Album in the world…ever. Vol 1.

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