Music

While checking the link to United abominations in my previous post, I came across a link to a "rebuttal" from the UN to the title track of the album.

The UN blogger, Mark Leon Goldberg, takes the song apart and exposes all of Mustaine's drivel for what it is. An excerpt:

Poverty in their kitchens
Held hostage by oil-for-food
Yet their own plates are full off the fat of their lands
There's no blood on their hands, right Kojo?
They promised to tell the truth
Without leaving a fingerprint, but
They will lose the UN one way or another
The victim, I fear will be us, sisters and brothers.

Assuming the antecedent to the pronoun "they" refers to the UN Secretariat, lead singer and guitarist Dave Mustaine (whose voice we now hear) seems to be implying that UN staffers are enriching themselves while the poor in their country suffer. His evidence is the alleged corruption in the Oil-for-Food program, which allowed Saddam Hussein's government to sell oil in exchange for humanitarian items. The rarely stated truth about the Oil-for-Food program is that it did what is was intended to do -- prevent a humanitarian crisis in Iraq while exerting economic pressure on Saddam Hussein and keeping weapons of mass destruction out of his hands.

Today's song of the day is Megadeth's Black Swan, a bonus track from their last album, United Abominations. The song, even though it didn't make it to the album per sé, is one of its strongest tracks and reeks of some vintage Megadeth class.

Today's song of the day is Tsukiakari (moonlight) by a Japanese singer / songwrite named Rie Fu. The song is also the ED for the anime Darker Than Black which is how I came across it.

Today's Song Of The Day is an instrumental from the OST of the anime Kenichi. I'm not sure of the artist's name, but what a killer riff! I've been listening to it non-stop for the past couple of hours and I'm still not tired of it!

I've been listening to Steve Vai's latest album - Sound Theories and have fallen in love with the song Brandos Costumes (Gentle Ways), one that I first heard in his Alive in an Ultra World release. The first time I heard it, I thought that it was a good song, but sounded a little flat or even artificial (with respect to the general ambience in the song).

A hilarious piece on Pachelbel's Canon in D.

If you haven't already done so, check out Frets on Fire, an open source clone of the guitar hero franchise. Instead of a toy guitar, you are to hold your keyboard upside down and use the function keys as frets while "strumming" via the return key.

There are also a bunch of communities who add frets-on-fire files for a growing library of commercial songs as well.

Good shit.

Today's Song of the Day is the aussie band Wolfmother's big hit - Woman. It and much of the other Wolfmother songs harken back to the glory days of the 70s and they are apparently heavily inspired by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Moreover, for a three-piece band, they sound fucking tight, and the vocalist, though he looks like a nutter, has a very Plant-sy voice.

The all knowing Oracles at Google revealed today that the song in the Motorola Razr ad (with the chick and dude fighting alá The Matrix) is Le Disko by Shiny Toy Guns. Another (more innovative) google revealed that I could legally download this (and two other songs by Shiny Toy Guns, besides other artists) song for free at spokane7.com's download site which states explicitly:

Today's Song Of The Day is Stillwater's Fever Dog. Stillwater is the name of the fictional band from the movie Almost Famous (or IOW, the Wikipedia link above isn't terribly relevant :P) and one of their popular songs is this track Fever Dog, a very 70's growly track.