Say, the local TV-station decides to start a reality-soap, and you’re in it! With your new Nike/Lacoste/Puma/Adidas/<fill-in-famous-clothing-brand-here> T-Shirt! Oh wait. That’s not going to happen, is it… What do you do?

Be smart, be ahead!

Kele Okereke and the rest of Bloc Party are working on their second album: after they remixed their succesful debut Silent Alarm, it’s time for a follow-up. So here we are: One, two, three, four, five and six live recordings of their new material.

Pie, I demand a new paintjob for the office here! The current beige-with-pink one depresses me! And to make it easier for you, the only thing you have to do is call this guy!

There’s different ways of creating a sort of timeline or map of the history of music in general. The person who made this one probably lives in London.

Mirror

Everyone who likes homegrown music here in Holland should at least have one record from Excelsior Recordings in his collection, and probably more than one too. This label is home to many talented Dutch acts: for example, Spinvis, Hallo Venray, Johan, and of course, Solo. Michael Flamman started this band in 2004, creating an album full of modest, small, acoustic songs, called Songs and Sounds.

The follow-up is coming out end of this month, and you can pre-listen 3 songs from SoloPeople here!

Last year brought us a lot of underrated records. Since everyone deserves a second chance, especially when it’s a good record, here’s a shameless plug for Little Barrie. Little Barrie is a London-based trio whose sound is an exciting blend of hard rock, blues, soul, and funk that calls to mind classic bands of the ’60s like Traffic and Cream, and whose loose and groovy earthiness earns it a place near the front of the jam band class.

Demonoid

Continue reading ‘Little Barrie – We Are Little Barrie’

The best band of The Netherlands, at least at this moment (bite me!), continued its victory lap (which has been going on for quite some time now) in Eindhoven last thursday. Project Another Day has been very succesful, since a substantial part of the Dutch population is now infected by a virus called Racoon… The audience had to work its way towards the gig though, since support act Born wasn’t what they came for.

Finally, at nine thirty, the lights go down. Bart, lead singer, steps up, gets out his harmonica to play an intro, and the band blows us away with their opening track Autumn Tunes. His voice needs some warming up, but after a couple of songs they’re really hitting hard. Party anthems and pretty love songs follow: Blue Days, Happy Family, Smoothly, Feels Like Flying, Got To Get Out. It doesn’t seem like the quartet is suffering from a lack of self-confidence, playing all the tracks from their latest album.

They sound mature. We all get saturday night fever from Eric’s Bar (”Watskeburt?!”-edit!) and the whole venue sings along with mega-hit Love You More, which shows how Racoon has returned onto the scene this year. While hardcore fans tend to know every lyric to every song, with this song it’s different. The entire audience yells along, from intro to applause. Every single person feels a shiver going down his or her spine. At that moment you realise the Effenaar really is something special, like your local pub, but with incredible acoustics. Too bad the show only lasted for one-and-a-half hour…

Richard Burns. Not because of trees on roads, but because of a brain tumor.