A Band That Actually Lives Up To Messageboard Hype?

To offer up a correction, what I meant to say in the last post was that the correct music cue was “ki ki ki… ma ma ma”. My bad, peeps.

The copy of that song I found wasn’t of the best quality, but it’s the best I could find. I used to have a good copy of it, but I downloaded it years ago on another computer and I don’t know what happened to it. However, on YouTube, of all places, you can listen to a much better copy of the full song. It can be found here. The video has some groovy memorabilia from that movie, also.

Anyway, the main thing I’m going to do here is talk about something I thought I wrote about here earlier, but I can’t find it here, so I’ll just do it again and add something to it.

For awhile now I had heard of a band being plugged heavily on certain messageboards. They’re a Finnish metal band with symphonic overtones known as Nightwish. Finally, one day I decided to check out some of their songs, and I wish that I would have done so earlier. I’m real picky (I’d say “selective”, but I’m sure others would use “picky” instead) when it comes to new music that’s “popular”, either amongst the public or the underground, so keep that in mind. From what I heard from this band, they’re pretty awesome. It’s the type of music I dig.

The first song I’m putting up is from a 2001 EP (with their former singer, Tarja Turunen); it’s the title song to the Over the Hills And Far Away album. No, it’s not the Led Zeppelin song. Rather, it’s a cover of an old 80’s song originally done by Gary Moore, an old UK guitarist who isn’t that well known in the States. Soon I’ll upload the original, as it sounds much like the cover. Anyway, when I heard the cover, it sounded very familiar; I swear that I heard it once in a store a few years ago, dug it a lot and I never found out who did it. Well, I guess I know now.

Nightwish-Over the Hills And Far Away (7.87 MB, 216 Kbits/second)

The second song is from their latest album, Dark Passion Play. During that time, Ms. Turunen and her unique operatic vocals left the band and was replaced by Anette Olzon. Now, I know that some Nightwish fans don’t like the new girl but I have no problems with her. Yeah, her singing style is more traditional, but it sounds good to me. Lord knows, I’m VERY selective when it comes to liking more modern singers that for some reason, people slobber over but I find to be akin to fingernails on a blackboard (::coughcoughJackWhitecoughcough:;), but I enjoy both lead singers and their different styles. It’s not easy for a famous band to replace a lead singer and still remain popular. Even with Van Halen, while they were still popular, you rarely hear the “Van Hager” songs on the radio, but rather the older stuff with David Lee Roth. But, from what I can see, Nightwish is still doing fine.

But back to my point, the second song is called Amaranth and it’s pretty catchy.

Nightwish-Amaranth (6.4 MB, 230Kbits/second)

The third song-Bye Bye Beautiful-is also from the newest album and it’s at least different in that it has both a female and male vocal. Also interesting is that the male wrote the song and it was a diss towards the old lead singer. Again, it’s a pretty catchy tune.

Nightwish-Bye Bye Beautiful (4.65 MB, 152 Kbits/second)

So hey, there’s proof that there are somewhat popular current bands that I dig, and I’m not biased towards the older popular bands or the more obscure current bands that I seem to favor here. Eventually, I’ll spend more times trying to find songs from this band, but for now, I can see why they have a cult following in some circles of the Internet.

I’ll be back a week from now, unless I decide to post something else before then…

Chi chi chi... ah ah ah...

Or technically, ki ki ki, ha ha ha, as it's officially supposed to be.

Yep, I'm referring to the Friday the 13th series and the newest one to come out, which I saw at a midnight screening last night. I went in with low expectations, given that Platinum Dunes was involved, and they're the ones responsible for God-awful stuff like the "reimagining" of The Hitcher or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre reimaginings. I also heard from some people that saw the new movie beforehand that they didn't care for it... so yep, I went in there with low expectations, and I was pleasantly surprised. I'll be brief here, but I'll mention that I saw it with a great audience that applauded at times, and the people in front of me were rowdy guys, and the people behind me went "RRAAAHHHH!" whenever a scary moment happened, as if they had just soiled their pants; a lot of it may be that, but I had a lot of fun with it; sure, it's technically all that great, but it's a Jason movie, so you should never have high expectations for it as if it was an actual film. Who knows, you may like it if you go yourself.

Anyway, earlier in the month I finally got the 3-D version of Friday the 13th Part III, which for the first time was released on DVD. I haven't watched it yet but hope to soon. I plan on watching another one of the sequels on HDNet later tonight. But, right now the song I'm presenting you is the theme from Friday the 13th Part III. The score to the movie was done by Harry Manfredini (who came up with the ki ki ki, ha ha ha sound that even today is used to identify Jason Voorhees), but I see online that Michael Zager was also involved with it. While I can't confirm it, I must believe that he was the one who did this glorious theme, due to the fact that it's a damn disco theme, and Zager was responsible for the glorious disco classic Let's All Chant and he did it under the name Hot Ice. No matter who's involved, it may be ridiculous for a serious horror movie to have a disco theme song, but then again, it is a 3-D movie... but anyway, enjoy.


Hot Ice-Theme from Friday the 13th Part III (8.46 MB, 320Kbits/second)

I'll be back a week from today with a new tune.

Variety Is The Spice Of Life

I’ll be doing something a little different here; this go-around, I will present you with several links that will present music that most of you have probably never heard of before; hell, I haven’t really heard of any of it myself.

As it usually happens, I stumbled upon it while looking at something else. I found out about a prog-rock band from Hungary (!) that was around in the 70’s called Skorpio. I can’t find much info on them at all anywhere, but I stumbled upon this blog entry, which provided some info. There, you can download two entire albums from them; for those of you that like that kind of music, you should dig this. At times on the latter album presented, they got pretty funky, so if you like that too…

That blog, if you go through it, has a bunch of obscure progressive rock (although at times they do other obscure albums that are involved in some way with the rock genre), usually from foreign artists.

To the right of the page is a blogroll of many other sites; I haven’t really visited any of them yet, but if you want to, you should find sites that’ll occupy hours upon hours of your time. You’ll probably also learn some new things; for example, I had no clue there was a genre like Czechlovakian prog-rock!

One of these days I’ll have to go through many of those links to find what gems they hold. The regular Prog Not Frog site has a huge variety of music links for you to digest, no matter what genre it is. You should find something for your fancy with all that variety.

I'll be back a week from tonight, probably around this time, with something new, and yeah, it'll be related to what next Friday is.