Coldplay
COVER ARTWORK COURTESY OF THE RECORD COMPANIES
A Rush of Blood to the Head
Capitol
While the manner in which Brit-pop act Coldplay's 2000 debut album, Parachutes, led to the band's unexpected rise to super-stardom has been compared to that of Brit-pop pioneers, Oasis, there the similarity thankfully ends. There is no trace of Beatles wannabe-ness surrounding Coldplay's brand of whiney hypnotic Brit-pop. Instead the four members seem contented to follow in the wake of less headline-making UK acts such as Travis and Echo and the Bunnymen.
Not that Coldplay is solely a UK phenomenon. After being nominated for the Mercury Music Prize for its debut album, Coldplay inadvertently went on to conquer the US after ABC opted to use the track Yellow as the theme tune for all of its promo spots.
After two years, countless rumors of a break-up and extensive tours of Europe and the US, Coldplay makes a welcome return to music store shelves this month with its second, and even more emotionally powerful piece of plastic, A Rush of Blood to the Head.
Picking up from where Parachutes left off, the new album and its 11 mellow and mesmerizing melodies is a wee bit rockier than their debut. The multitude of rumors surrounding a split appears to have encouraged the band to rediscover itself.
Be it the smooth flowing number In My Place., the piano-driven swell of The Scientist. or the mind-blowing number God Put a Smile upon Your Face, Coldplay might bare the scars of the post-punk indie scene but has somehow managed to distance itself from it in a most refreshing, melodic and moving manner.
With A Rush of Blood to the Head already entrenched in the UK album charts it won't be long before Coldplay are repeating this chart-topping success in the US.
Electric Soft Parade
Holes in the Wall
DB
There may only be two of them, but the Electric Soft Parade -- comprising of two late-teenage English brothers, Tom and Alex White -- has the clout and posses the songwriting abilities of an entire orchestra.
Although hailed as one of the greatest debut albums of all time by the ever-fickle music press, the Electric Soft Parade's Holes in the Wall is, while containing an earful of well-penned tunes, not on par with groundbreaking debuts such as The Clash's eponymous release or Oasis' Definitely Maybe.
Hailing from the UK's infamous southern beach resort city of Brighton, the two-piece band's music has been described as neo-psychedelic. Which, in layman's terms, makes the 12 tunes on the Electric Soft Parade's debut Weezer-ish with a bit of Grandaddy and a pinch of the Beach Boys thrown in and then blended with a few rock riffs ala Ash to appease the masses.
All this makes Holes in the Wall an album with two faces. Tunes such as Something's Got to Give as well as the title track ooze downbeat mellowness, while numbers like the scorching Silent in the Dark and Why Do Try so Hard to Hate Me see the band shifting up a couple of gears and hitting listeners with catchy rock-orientated choruses.
The Electric Soft Parade has produced a fine debut. While it may not be a masterpiece, it certainly creates anticipation for their next release.
Catatonia
Greatest Hits
Blanco Y Negro
When the Welsh five-piece gang of upstarts who once so eloquently threatened to come to Londinium and "storm the palace" split up late last year, the tiny nation lost one of its most underrated assets.
Led by vocalist Cerys Matthews and guitarist/vocalist, Mark Robots, Catatonia's blend of low-fi indie guitar rock and jingling anthem-esque late 80s alternative rock made its first impact on the release of the band's second album, 1998's International Velvet, the album that spawned the hits, I am the Mob and Mulder and Scully. The success of the band's 1998 album proved a one off, however. And while the band went on to play sellout tours of the UK and headline at some of Europe's leading outdoor festivals sales of 2000's Equally Caused and Blessed and last year's Paper, Scissors, Stone remained moderate at best.
The lack of Catatonia's album successes, however, doesn't tell the whole story and should by no means be misinterpreted. Catatonia was a great band that had a lot of original and tuneful ideas. The band simply weren't an album band. For every couple of corking tunes there was always a guaranteed dud, which, although sounding pretty negative, is actually what makes this Best Of such a gem.
There's no need to reach for the FF button. From the album's opening tune, the hit Mulder and Scully, to the very last, Bleed, Matthews' slightly off-key bubble voiced vocals and Robots' jangling guitar make the sound system hum.
The album also includes the band's lounge-loaded ode to Wales's first man of music, Ballad of Tom Jones, as well as the fantastic, almost kitsch disco tune Karaoke Queen. Also included are the mellow alternative rock-styled tunes Lost Cat, Dead from the Waist, Strange Glue and the rocking self-parody, Sweet Catatonia. All of which just goes to prove that while Catatonia was cursed, it thankfully blessed the rest of us with some great music in its short lifetime.
Urna
Hodood
TMCD
Though born into a family of peasant farmers in the Ordos region of Inner Mongolia, Urna and her voice have traveled far. Her haunting vocal and percussion-styled music has been allowing armchair travelers to conjure up images of the Mongolian Steppes from the sanctuary of their own homes since her debut album, Tal Nutag, hit record store shelves almost seven years ago.
Since then the Mongolian singer/songwriter has become one of the most in-demand world music artists around, performing at many of Europe's larger outdoor world music festivals as well appearing at some of the world's most renowned concert halls.
Local label Trees Music has recently re-released Hodood to coincide with the Mongolian songster's upcoming Taiwan gig set to take place at Taipei's Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in October.
She might have become somewhat of an international celebrity, but Urna remains lyrically close to home. All of her tunes tell of life on the Steppes with high-spirited shepherds, milking cattle, flowers of the Steppe and life beyond the Chiwga Hills just a few of the topics tackled by Mongolia's only new age star.
Although you may not understanding a word Urna is singing, the material on the album is absorbing. It's when the CD is played on a kick-ass stereo system, however, that the album's mind-blowing atmospherics really come into play.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS