Standing in the Way of Control

I still can't get over the relatively large number of new acts releasing recordings from Malta these days. Not all the recordings are created equal but even some of the less sophisticated ones show the amazing talent some of the recording artists really have.

Now that September is here it's also time to start thinking about nominations for the 2007 picks from my Mużika Mod Ieħor podcast. There will be a couple of minor changes from last year's poll but I'll tell you all about that next week.

For this week's podcast I wanted to do two things relating to these two points and they both amount to one thing: play as many tracks as possible from the backlog I've accumulated over the past few weeks. The first of these is a song from a new band called Beige. They made their debut in the recent XFM contest which saw Ann de Gaetano's Slur voted a virtual rockstar, landing her in a UK recording studio with Richard Rodgers...obviously not the one from The Sound of Music cause he died in 1979. Beige appear to have great plans for the near future but for now all we have is a YouTube video for their song Anything.

Listening to Beige I was oddly reminded of the Flying Alligators. I've been wanting to play a track from their 2000 album Been there...Done that... for a long time. I bumped into Ronnie Busuttil on Facebook a few days ago, so this week I give you Liberty by the Flying Alligators.

Moving on to more new acts, the rest of this week's podcast features two new singers who are connected in one way or another with acts that have already appeared on previous editions of MMI. Marilyn Mifsud is a law student at the University of Malta who has recently released a song called Evicted. She has been gigging with her own band, which features Jean Claude Vancell who regular podcast listeners may remember from a song of his I played a few weeks ago.

Dean Saviour has released a small number of original songs he recorded at home on his MySpace page. Dean is a member of Christian band Salt who continue to delight their ever-growing fan base with songs from the 2006 album Hello Truth. These new solo recordings show a different side of this young musician. I particularly like the delicate and quasi-whimsical Marshmallow Girl, which is unlike any recent song I've heard from Malta.

And with that it feels like the summer has come to an unofficial end. From next week I'll be buckling up for a mini-tour of my own related to my research in Second Life. I hope to blog a little bit about that before the next podcast. In any case, you can most certainly count on the next MMI podcast to introduce the first nominations for the 2007 listeners' picks.

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