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.

I am trying for some time to find a nice bookstore in Romania, preferably one that also has a good online store so that I can quickly search for what I want and order online – but I find it very hard to find one.

Recently I decided to try buybooks.ro, a site which appears listed in usor.ro as the second best in its category. I open the site, looks pretty good and simple. So I decide to browse and search for some business boks.

Browsing: The closest category I could find related to business books is called “Management, marketing, sales”. Ok, fair enough, let’s look. The first thing that strikes me is that the books are listed in an apparently random order…the criteria is not popularity, nor the author name. After browsing through some pages, I got it – their are ranked by price, from the most expensive to the cheapest ! Wow, this is an interesting ranking. Probably they thought that if they list the most expensive ones first people will buy those, so that they make more profit… but it’s so stupid ! Never in a bookstore I found this ranking, it’s just so unfriendly to usability.

Ok, could not find many interesting things in here, just a lot of mistakes – for example, the book of Ferdinand F Fournies – Employee’s psichology has as picture the cover of a Peter Drucker book. So, if I order it, what would I get ?? Fournies or Drucker :)
Search: Ok, browsing did not work, so let’s search for what I was interested in – “Gene Zelazny – Say it with charts“. As I expected the title of the book had been translated in Romanian in some stupid manner, I decided not to risk anything and search by the author. Search for Zelazny did not return any results, so browsing by author might have been better. Ups, another surprise – there is no letter Z in the authors list ! This is quite strange, but let’s see maybe it is starting with G, so I opened the list of authors starting with G. Well, here I really lost it. The list is fully messed up, the authors are falling into the G section sometimes by their first name – like George Bacovia, sometimes by their last name, like Goleman Daniel and sometimes their appear under various names, like having both G. Liiceanu and Gabriel Liiceanu !

Now, an online library is the last place where I would expect this to happen. I used to go to libraries pretty often and I know how strict they are with putting a book on the right shelf – in the right section and in the right author order. How could someone find something in this chaos?

Madalin, all due respect for usor.ro, but please take this site out of the 2nd place in Libraries, because there is nothing “usor” about this buying experience.

Seems that it’s too hard to find a decent bookstore in Romania, so I get back to Amazon. Just as a comparison, here is what they would return on a Gene Zelazny search.

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

I told you this is the year of the great comebacks… Recently Iron Maiden, a band which has had numerous ups and downs in the recent times, released a new album – A Matter of Life and Death.

With Bruce Dickinson again on the vocals, the album gives a feeling of continuity to the initial Iron Maiden style – pure rock and metal style, excellent colaboration between all the members of the band and a clear message of the album.

As a sample, some videos are here, here and here.

I posted the “The Roots – The Seed 2.0” track some while ago, after dicsovering it in VV, together with a friend. We loved the track since then, and I still listen to it with great pleasure.

In the same time, quite a lot of people downloaded it and listen to it, but most of them came back with the same reaction – “Man, those lyrics are so obscene!“. So I decided to put some clarity into it :)

At the first listening, yes, they sound quite strange. Lyrics like ” I only wanna fertilize another behind my lover’s back”, ” I push my seed in her push for life” or ” I lick the opposition cuz she don’t take no pill” may seem just out of line. But wait a second ! What if all this song is really about something else and the message is just hidden ?

Actually, the song has nothing to do with sex, but it desguises the message in those strange lyrics for a certain reason. Actually, the story is about this guy – the singer – who is just fed up with the popularity of rap and hip-hop and being pushed to sing that when he is actually a fan of rock-and-roll and this would be his dream – to sing rock-n-roll. Let’s look up closely.

Background: The Roots are quite a rap band, most of the songs would fall into this genre. Still, this song – The Seed 2.0 – is only one of the few that is more rockish. Why the sudden change?

The lyrics: Here is how the lyrics should be interpreted and their actual meaning

“She want neo-soul, this hip-hop is old
She don’t want no rock-n-roll
She want platinum or ice or gold”
“She” is actually the substitute for the audience, the record label or such. These lyrics show that the interest is mostly focused on neo-soul and not on rock-n-roll.
“And we can make money to burn
If you allow me the latest game
I don’t ask for much, but enough room to spread my wings
And the world finna know my name”
Talking about the potential success of this experiment. He just wants some liberty in choosing what to sing and he is sure that fame will follow.
“I don’t ask, for much these days
And I don’t bitch, and whine, if I don’t get my way
I only wanna fertilize another behind my lover’s back”
This is actually about how he will make the experiment of singing rock-and-roll even without the support from the “partner”.
“If Mary drops my baby girl tonight
I would name her Rock-N-Roll”
This is actually revealing that the “baby” of his experiment is going to be a rock-and-roll track.

So, actually The Seed should be regarded more as of a poetical license and not a song about sex and “behind the back” fertilizing :) It is actually a song about following your dreams and creating the music you like, not just the one that sells.