Midnight Rider

I usually try to have my weekly podcast available for download before midnight on Saturday. Sometime I cut it quite close but this week I've somehow managed to get it done earlier than I have in recent weeks. Perhaps it's because it's Ġuze' Stagno and Gabriella Cilia wedding night today.

The 70th edition of the Mużika Mod Ieħor series has a healthy blend of rock styles. Jean Claude Vancell is a young singer-songwriter who contacted me through MySpace a few days ago. I must admit that I was quite happy to hear from him because I had never heard of him before and his music really deserves better exposure. I sometime forget how overbearing mainstream media can be, so I'm sure that Far Away, which Vancell has released as a single, is not receiving the airtime it deserves.

Oddly enough, the same could be said for the second song on this week's podcast, High Alert! As a Ray Agius composition sung by Claudia Faniello you'd think it would have been played to death on Maltese radio stations, especially since it was her debut song at the Malta Song for Europe in 2006. Surprisingly this is a great pop rock song. It is a much better song than I Do and I wonder how it would have done at last year's Eurovision Song Contest, but I really don't want to go there again. Listen to it closely and see if, like me, you think that this is the sort of song that would work well on the playlist of any one of the many classic rock bands like Frenzy Mono, Fire, and White Crimson.

This is actually a natural way to segue into playing a live recording from White Crimson of their song Julia. I've been wanting to include something by this band for several months, but their recordings are very elusive. So I was very pleased when I discovered this live recording through a YouTube video from a recent TV show. I'm really looking forward to hearing studio recordings from White Crimson because even though their songs are very derivative I can hear a clear attempt at finding a band trying to find its own voice and style.

As my regular podcast listeners know, I love to take it to the max whenever I can. The return of Lithomancy after a two-year hiatus gives me the perfect opportunity to do this. On Friday the 13th of July they will be appearing with old-school thrashers X-Vandals at Remedy. I'll probably bring this up again closer to the date but I can never pass up the chance to mention Xtruppaw, especially seeing that the drummer and bassist in Lithomancy are no other than Dino and Rex from that greatest Maltese band ever.

Incidentally, from this week I've started using the Internet Archive a repository for the MP3 files of the podcast. This has multiple advantages for me but I'd like to hear from any listeners who experience anything different in how they access my podcasts.

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.