Wednesday, October 1, 2008

These Just In

We have been received some new CDs for possible review. We only trash sickeningly famous Rolling Stone best-album-list darlings, so we can already warmly endorse these independent artists. My former ukulele teacher Alex Smith from Bloomington-Normal, IL, has released a new CD with his band Constant Velocity: Muttonhead.

The enigmatic (as in: who the hell is this?) Coco Coca (and why is she called "Coco Coca"?) has sent us a CD called Black, Black, Black. Coco Coca appears to be a solo Seattle-Champaign artist, but we are wonderfully unburdened with any preconception of who they are that might interfere with our raw experience of the music. I do know that cacao is the agricultural commodity from which cocoa is derived, and Coca-Cola is of course a popular softdrink that once featured coca and cola as key ingredients to provide that extra-special zing, but this trivia tells me very little. Does the music sound like cola, chocolate, and cocaine? Sounds like a tour bus.

Our friends at Parasol have given us a couple of new releases: Homesick by the Tractor Kings, and Love at Thirty by Beaujolais. Cristy should review the second one. I don't suppose either of us are too homesick.

Lastly, and most intriguingly, Paul Kotheimer of the Hand-Made Record Label has released a CD called "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," which is an astonishing variety of musical settings of poems by other people. Until the copyright issues are cleared, this is only available as a hand-made CD given to people by hand.

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