I’ve been following blogs for quite some years now – both personal and business / tematic oriented blogs. Each of them with the individual “personality”, style and subjects to write about.

Still, I cannot help to notice how some trends just appear in this communities and are quickly followed up by everybody. Why is that? Most likely, noticing a subject that might generate some popularity will quickly inspire fellow bloggers to write about it, in the same quest for more readers, more comments and more appreciation.

For example, some of the trends which are or have been present in blogs (i will reffer mostly to Romanian blogs or Music blogs):

- indie – All the music blogs suddently started posting about indie bands, indie culture and such since about half a year ago. Now they kind of stopped, they are turning back to the old school.

- emo -  If you look carefully, in most of the Romanian blogs you will find the “emo” word mentioned at least once every 5 posts. What the hell is emo after all and why is it important ??

- uber – this was a trend some 6 months ago or such in Romanian blogs – everybody was using “uber” instead of “super” of “very”. Damn, this was weird. Good that they stopped now.

Also, another thing which annoys me is the type of people who tend to post about anything that happens to them on their blog, in search of sympathy or whatever. I think this started somewhere with Scoble’s style of blogging and just spread out – why on earth would people like to read about everything which happens to someone most of the times they never ever met ??
Maybe it’s just me not understanding much of this blogging culture, or maybe some of these things are really being weird….

Back to the old purpose of this blog, some of the constant trend-fighters were Rage Against the Machine. Being one of the first bands to combine rock sound with rapped lyrics, they carried on a constant fight against politics and various social issues.

Even though they did not last very long as a band – from 1996 till 2000 -, they managed to produce some excelent tracks. One of them, featuring an awesome guitar solo, is “Bulls of Parade” – [mp3] or [video].

Edwin (or Edvin) Marton is one of the top Hungarian violonists, mostly known for his performances for the skaing championships.

The guy sounds trully amazing, he is playing a Stradivarius and looks very proud of it :) And even better, he is comming in Romania, the concert is tommorow, 28.09, at Polivalenta. Hopefully I can make it !

Listening to him reminded me of one of the best concert experience I ever had – going to a violin concert of one of my friends, while he was playing Khatchaturian. While I am not a great fan of classical music, that was trully an amazing performance and that kind of music is definetely worth attending to.

Some samples of Edwin Marton here and here.

I recently heard the new single of Robbie Williams – Lovelight. I must say he did a much better impression with his usual / natural voice, not with this too balladesque one. I don’t know why, it just doesn’t sound like his real him.

I tend to like his performances a lot, I think his a great artist, specialy on live. But this single….well, maybe for the most romantic of his fans would go fine, but I think I’ll pass.

The video is here.

While he is not really a new-comer, i first found him some days ago via some music blogs. Michael Dickes is nothing of a popular star, or maybe he is in his own community – but nevertheless his music is trully worth listening to.

The style is a mix of pop, blues and rock-and-roll, with an up-front guitar and the voice of Michael. The lyrics are also quite witty and they go along fine with the music.

You can listen to most of his tracks over http://www.michaeldickes.net as well as the lyrics. Some ar also for download, like After All This Time. My personal favourite track is Small Town Song. Enjoy !

…to eleven every night. Yes, this is quite how this last two weeks have felt like and it’s not about to end.

But coming back to that phrase – it actually is the first verse of one of my all-time-favourite tracks – Led Zeppelin – Since I’ve been loving you. A great track with some dull but marvelously interpreted lyrics and an extraordinary guitar solo.

The track starts slowly with some of the most sharp guitar chordes I’ve ever heard. It then builds up to an over a minute long solo by Jimmy Page, but this is just the beginning.

Then, one of the things I love most about this song is the passion Robert Plant put behind the lyrics. While I could not say that they are extremely inspired, they are sang with a true passion that makes them excellent. The way he sings parts like “Everybody trying to tell me that you didn’t mean me no good” and “Lord, yeah, that ain’t right… no no” is trully amazing. I rarely heard someone put so much passion behind some words, mostly in studio recordings.

In the middle of the track then follows an amazing guitar solo, which Jimmy Page performed several times also on stage, in various versions. I think one of the best is the album one, along with the Madison Square Garden one in 73. This part can easily go into any of the top-guitar solos ever.

The song then continues with an even more dedicated Plant’s voice and his famous screams .. “Just one more“.

But this is enough of a description, here is the real thing – the video of the live performance from 73 and the studio version (remastered). Enjoy !

I am not sure that this is legal – actually, I am pretty sure it is not – but anyways it deserves posting.

A nice way of searching and, most important, actually easily finding MP3s of your favourite band over the web is nothing easier than a simple search on Google. This way, using Google’s algorithm of searching over the web you can easily find full albums to download via http.

Here is the general search string. Just replace the “band” in the beginning of the string (in Google’s search field) with the name of the band you are actually looking for. And press Enter again.
Enjoy ! Still, remember that buying the legal albums is a good thing to do. Really.

Google just released what can become a flickr killer – Picasa over the web. This new Picasa web space – 250 Mb available to any Google-registered user – allows you to upload and manage photos over the web and then share them with your friends.

The application has some nice functionality, all in the Google-old-style of keeping it simple and convenient. Still, what I think is missing is the ability to comment on other users pictures or to search for pictures among Picasa users. But this should follow in later versions
Meanwhile, here are some snapshots of this summer – things I did and places I visited.

I wrote previously about the Pheonix performance at Stufstock 2006 and Tandarica‘s awsome solo – now you have the chance to see a sample of it here. Not very high quality audio, but still you can get a feeling how it was like.

Now this is great news – EMusic comes to Europe. Finally, I’ve been searching so long for a nice pay-to-download site…

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This weekend someone introduced me to a Macedonian band called Foltin. Quite interesting combination of jazz, ambiental, etno and funk music – too bad we only had one track and I could not find much over the web.

Still, I managed to find another Macedonian Jazz album which is quite ensightful and could easily be added to the Guide of World Music which I wrote about previously.

Here is the tracklisting and links to each of the tracks. What do you think ?

1. Gora – Big Band MRT & Ilija Pejovski
2. Lonely woman – Toni Kitanovski
3. You promised – Toni Kitanovski & Zoran Madzirov
4. Pretty child – Labish
5. Bel dedo – Beneventan Trio
6. Modern society – Set
7. Hon-Shi – Foltin
8. Ne si go prodavaj – Big Band MRT & Ilija Pejovski
9. Wounded knee – Toni Kitanovski