If You Don't Know Me By Now

It's been another busy week but at least I had enough time to blog a couple of times since my last podcast. As we get closer to the one year anniversary since the Mużika Mod Ieħor series started, I'm pushing towards having a nice list of music releases from Maltese singers and musicians from 2006 for you, my gentle readers and listeners, to vote on.

This week's podcast features four acts who appear on the list because they have new releases. In some cases they are new to the scene, or at least I had never heard of them before now, which is all the same anyway.

One such artist is Carrie. A young singer who recently captured my attention through a small number of remarkable demos on her MySpace page. I was surprised and impressed when she replied that she has to consult her management team when I asked her to tell me more about her upcoming debut album. I chose to play her song That Star as the first track on this week's podcast. I am looking forward to more from her. Her voice and style are quite unusual for a Maltese singer.

Another wonderful new singer on the scene is Melissa Portelli, who sings with Chasing Pandora. She writes most of her songs with Keith Anthony and I played a demo for their song Divine a few weeks ago. Now that they've released their debut EP, featuring their radio-friendly "single" Feel the Rain, I'm playing the released version of Divine - this makes it the first song I've ever played twice on my Mużika Mod Ieħor series. Yes, I like Chasing Pandora. If I were in Malta towards the end of this month I would most certainly attend one of their two intimate gigs at the St James' Cavalier Music Room.

As the old saying goes, when it rains it pours. A new band called Rising Sunset will be releasing their debut EP Rhema very soon. The word Rhema is derived from the Greek term for the part of a sentence that expresses an idea. I received an advance copy of it a few days ago so I'm playing you one of the four tracks on this CD, Journey Into the Woods. This band has wonderful potential and I'm sure that fans of Melodic Metal will welcome them to the local music scene with open arms.

The Maltese metal scene has flourished into various shades and sub-genres over the last couple of decades. At one far end of the metal spectrum are hardcore bands like Slit, who have just released their second album. Of Serpents is a strong track from Ode to Silence, recently issued by Anticulture Records, which is also behind the upcoming Eternal Anger Tour bringing Slit for a series of gigs in the UK in mid-October. Details of that tour can be found on the band's MySpace page, of course, among other places.

The RSS feed for the Mużika Mod Ieħor podcast is available here or you can simply click here to subscribe directly with iTunes. You can also add the latest episodes to your My Yahoo! page.