Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Alphabet Soup II (D)

Hello, its D Day at Alphabet Soup II no that doesnt spell out a list of D jays. First of a band who's main man got OD by his careless girlfriend and who did the same a few years later, leaving her parents with the money still generated from sales that have a dozen indiebands dont generate. Jim Morrison has been dead for almost 37 years now but Mr Mojo Risin's myth lives on. And so here today the first compilation released after his death, digitized. The Dears maybe a little pun on The Doors name wise. However, these Canadians raise their internal combustion with their moody and intense music, this musical therapy specially takes it s toll in their live shows. Hardly surprising then that A many musicians passed thru the band and B main man, Murray Lightburn ended up marrying the keyboard woman,Natalia Yanchak....Then there are Dresden Dolls, again with a The infront (that's 3D) they too share an intangible madness, rage and love with their audience, perhaps they need to be seen to be believed, but even then, it is the unseeable which makes this band magic. As for the music its hard to pigeonhole, cabaret-tinged punk, the wild twenties in Berlin..


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The origins of The Doors lay in a chance meeting between acquaintances and fellow UCLA film school alumni Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek on Venice Beach California in July 1965. Morrison told Manzarek he had been writing songs and, at Manzarek's encouragement, sang "Moonlight Drive". Impressed by Morrison's lyrics, Manzarek suggested they form a band. Robby Krieger and John Densmore were playing with The Psychedelic Rangers and knew Manzarek from yoga and meditation classes. In August, Densmore joined the group and in september Krieger did. The group never added a bass player, and their sound was dominated by Manzarek's electric organ work and Morrison's deep, sonorous voice, with which he sang and intoned his highly poetic lyrics. The group signed to Elektra Records in 1966 and released its first album, The Doors, featuring the hit "Light My Fire," in 1967.

Like "Light My Fire," the debut album was a massive hit, and endures as one of the most exciting, groundbreaking recordings of the psychedelic era. Blending blues, classical, Eastern music, and pop into sinister but beguiling melodies, the band sounded like no other. With his rich, chilling vocals and somber poetic visions, Morrison explored the depths of the darkest and most thrilling aspects of the psychedelic experience. Their first effort was so stellar, in fact, that the Doors were hard-pressed to match it, and although their next few albums Strange Days, Waiting For The Sun contained a wealth of first-rate material, the group also began running up against the limitations of their recklessly disturbing visions. The infamous Miami concert march 69, derailed the tour and saw Morrison arrested for loosing 'coherance' on stage. The next album The Soft Parade, saw the group experimenting, with mixed results. Accused (without much merit) by much of the rock underground as pop sellouts, the group charged back hard with the final two albums they recorded with Morrison, on which they drew upon stone-cold blues for much of their inspiration, especially on 1971's L.A. Woman.

From the start, the Doors' focus was the charismatic Morrison, who proved increasingly unstable over the group's brief career. In 1969, Morrison was arrested for indecent exposure during a concert in Miami, an incident that nearly derailed the band. Nevertheless, the Doors managed to turn out a series of successful albums and singles through 1971. Following the recording of L.A. Woman, Morrison decided to take some time off and moved to Paris with girlfriend, Pamela Courson, in March. He died there the 3rd of July, apparently of a drug overdose administered by his girlfriend. Pamela ended up enheriting his estate, three years later she died of a drug overdose. The three surviving Doors tried to carry on without him, but ultimately disbanded. Yet the Doors' music and Morrison's legend continued to fascinate succeeding generations of rock fans: In the mid-'80s, Morrison was as big a star as he'd been in the mid-'60s, and Elektra has sold numerous quantities of the Doors' original albums plus reissues and releases of live material over the years, while publishers have flooded bookstores with Doors and Morrison biographies. In 1991, director Oliver Stone made The Doors, a feature film about the group starring Val Kilmer as Morrison. They have sold over 45 million albums in the US alone, and still sell approximately 1 million annually.

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The Doors - Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mine ( 72, 97min ^ 198mb)

Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine contained the first album release of two B-sides, Willie Dixon's "(You Need Meat) Don't Go No Further," sung by Ray Manzarek, and the beautiful "Who Scared You," with Jim Morrison on vocals from a session in 1969. This compilation is a strange amalgam of their music, the LP title taken from a line in the song "The End," which concludes side two. Five of the 22 songs are from the L.A. Woman sessions, nothing from Absolutely Live is included, and surprisingly, the classic "Waiting for the Sun" is not here. The cover art pastiche by Bill Hoffman is worth the price of admission if you already have all this material, while the inside gatefold picture looks like an outtake from the first album. Bruce Harris' liner notes are truly the '60s merging with the '70s; he calls Jim Morrison "merely the index of our possibilities" and states that Morrison didn't want to be an idol "because he believed all idols were hollow."



The Doors - Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mine ( 99mb)

01 - Break On Through (2:23)
02 - Strange Days (3:02)
03 - Shaman's Blues (4:42)
04 - Love Street (2:46)
05 - Peace Frog / Blue Sunday (4:53)
06 - The Wasp (Texas Radio & The Big Beat) (4:07)
07 - End Of The Night (2:48)

08 - Love Her Madly (3:12)
09 - Spanish Caravan (2:53)
10 - Ship Of Fools (3:02)
11 - The Spy (4:10)
12 - The End (11:25)

The Doors - Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mine (99mb)

13 - Take It As It Comes (2:25)
14 - Running Blue (2:23)
15 - L.A. Woman (7:42)
16 - Five To One (4:20)
17 - Who Scared You (3:48)
18 - (You Need Meat) Don't Go No Further (3:35)

19 - Riders On The Storm (6:55)
20 - Maggie McGill (4:14)
21 - Horse Latitudes (1:32)
22 - When The Music's Over (10:44)

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The Dears - No Cities Left (03 ^ 154mb)

The Dears, a loose collective of Montreal-area musicians formed in 1995, are led by the charismatic Murray Lightburn. Citing Serge Gainsbourg as a major influence, the band combines cabaret-style vocals with a moody, intense brand of orchestral pop/rock. Lightburn's vision for the band is to create music out of real emotions, often giving his performances the feel of a musical therapy session. They released their debut, End of a Hollywood Bedtime Story in 2000 to critical acclaim. Their orchestral, dark pop sound and dramatic live shows cemented The Dears at the foundation of the then-pre-pubescent Canadian Indie Renaissance . In early 2001, the band entered the studio to record the follow-up, tentatively titled Deuxième Partie, but they released the EPs Orchestral Pop Noir Romantique and Protest, respectively, as well as a collection of unreleased songs, Nor the Dahlias. Then in 2003 they released their second full-length album No Cities Left in Canada, and a string of highly anticipated shows at SXSW '04 launched their international career.

After The Dears toured extensively across Canada, USA, UK, Europe, Japan and Australia supporting the international release of No Cities Left and they returned to the studio to record in 2005.That year Lightburn and longtime Dears keyboardist Natalia Yanchak were married, and in 2006 the band's Gang of Losers came out, and was well-received by the press. As of November 20, 2007, The Dears are currently working on their fourth album, as stated by Lightburn in a MySpace blog entry. The album is scheduled to be completed April, 2008.



01 - We Can Have It (5:42)
02 - Who Are You, Defenders Of The Universe (3:41)
03 - Lost In The Plot (4:48)
04 - The Second Part (5:42)
05 - Don't Lose The Faith (3:10)
06 - Expect The Worst/'Cos She's A Tourist (7:52)
07 - Pinned Together, Falling Apart (6:00)
08 - Never Destroy Us (4:27)
09 - Warm And Sunny Days (5:47)
10 - 22: The Death Of All The Romance (5:52)
11 - Postcard From Purgatory (7:53)
12 - No Cities Left (4:23)

The Dears - No Cities Left (03 * 99mb)

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The Dresden Dolls - I ( 03 ^ 99mb)

Rock bands are pigeonholed into ever-increasingly minuscule sub-categorizations, but The Dresden Dolls continue to defy explanation and classification. While some have called it theatrical rock, punk cabaret, manic-musical, neo-glam-torch,…eventually even the most clever and creative describers shrug and say: “You just have to hear it to believe it.”

The duo of The Dresden Dolls make music based around arrangements of drums (by Brian), piano and vocals (by Amanda), which they call their style of music "Brechtian Punk Cabaret". The Dolls thrive on their inherent juxtapositions. The musical-theater and New-Wave background of writer/singer/pianist Amanda Palmer mixes with drummer Brian Viglione's Heavy Metal roots to create a sonic smear of unclassifiable rock.They started in mid-2000 in Boston, Massachusetts, releasing a compilation of live tracks, then their self-titled debut album. In spring 2005, they got set up as the opening band for Nine Inch Nails', even without Reznor attending of their live shows beforehand. Dresden Dolls are dolls made from a delecate porcelain from the German city of Dresden; then there's Dresden's history of being firebombed on Churcills orders, at the end of World War II in 1945.

The Dolls’ self-titled debut has been selling strong and steady. Initially released on Palmer's own Eight Foot Records in the fall of 2003, the album was subsequently re-released upon the band's signing with Roadrunner. The release of two wildly different singles, the manic-punk “Girl Anachronism” and the cabaret-tinged and bittersweet “Coin-Operated Boy,” which debuted on KCRW via the influential DJ Nic Harcourt, swiftly went on to be the most-requested singles on a handful of stations nationwide. Both songs were showcased in wonderfully twisted videos shot and edited by Michael Pope. Airtime on MTV2 and the Internet immediately began to win the band thousands of admirers for their innovative style and “Coin-Operated Boy” received

Produced by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie (Radiohead, The Pixies, Hole) and recorded over several weeks at Allaire Studios, Yes, Virginia their second studioalbum is a rich tapestry that showcases the band’s road-sharpened musical chemistry and digs deep into recesses of the human heart usually considered taboo. The Dolls have not lost their sense of the absurd, however. The artwork for Yes, Virginia was culled from over 600 submissions from fans, painters and designers from around the globe. Each panel of the booklet includes original images directly inspired by the songs. It's an example of the on-going artistic collaborations between the band and their fans. Additionally, a flood of home–made films, burlesque numbers, sculptures and animations to complete plays and musicals based around the band’s songs have created a constant dialogue between band and audience. The same spirit exists at live shows, as manifested in the so-called “Brigade”, where the Dolls collaborated with hundreds of performing artists ranging from high school drama troupes to top-shelf actors and professional circus artists, including members of Montreal’s celebrated Cirque Eloize and San Fransiciso’s Vau de Vire Society. Earlier this year their third album No Virginia saw the light of day.



01 - Good Day (5:27)
02 - Girl Anachronism (2:58)
03 - Missed Me (4:51)
04 - Half Jack (5:56)
05 - 672 (1:24)
06 - Coin-Operated Boy (4:46)
07 - Gravity (4:17)
08 - Bad Habit (2:59)
09 - The Perfect Fit (5:44)
10 - The Jeep Song (4:47)
11 - Slide (4:30)
12 - Truce (8:34)

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All downloads are in * ogg-7 (224k) or ^ ogg-9(320k), artwork is included , if in need get the nifty ogg encoder/decoder here !

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