Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Alphabet Soup (I)

Hello, Alphabet Soup, meets the I , which doesnt offer the widest of choice but these next albums have it in them nevertheless. 77 was a busy year for Iggy Pop , he released no less then 3 albums that year, Kill City , rapped up his Stooges time. Bowie acted again as a real buddy for the Jean Genie, they wrote and recorded two albums together, ive posted The Idiot in Rhotation 6 , but Iggy never stays introverted for long and with Lust For Life he blew anyone away after the droning of Massproduction (finaltrack the idiot). The passenger turned out to become another classic ( oops how about that for a B-side).....Irish' Into Paradise loved Echo & The Bunnymen, maybe thats why they asked initial labelmates The Sound-frontman Adrian Borland to produce their first and second album. The result a cross between U2 and the Sound , though at the time U2 had moved on soundwise.. Well they left some great music but by 93 dissolved, however they did score some great points...Finally Interpol...Why is it that the lemming musicpress always drools over bands from New York, five years ago i saw them perform and i wondered is this for real..the Joy Division touch, but the guys didnt even look a band, i got the impression there were four bands on stage that jammed..most odd, too my surprise none of the reviews i've read mentions 9/11, this event -to me at least- lies at the basis of the density and gloom of Turn on the Bright Lights, sublimated aggression.....

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Iggy Pop - Lust For Life (77 ^ 99mb)

James Newell Osterberg, Jr. (born April 21, 1947), better known by his stage name Iggy Pop. Iggy Pop began his music career as a drummer in different high school bands in Ann Arbor, Michigan. One band was the Iguanas, where he acquired the name Iggy.After he dropped out of the University of Michigan James moved to Chicago to learn more about blues. Inspired by Chicago blues as well as bands like The Sonics and The MC5, he formed the Psychedelic Stooges and began calling himself Iggy. The seeds of Pop's stage persona were sown when Pop saw The Doors perform in 1967 at the University of Michigan. Pop was amazed by the stage antics and antagonism displayed by singer Jim Morrison, who's extreme behavior inspired the young Pop to push the boundaries of stage performance. Later, while inventing the stage-dive in Detroit,rolling around in broken glass, exposing himself to the crowd, and vomiting on stage, among many other exploits, Iggy himself would inspire others. The Stooges' first two albums, The Stooges, produced by John Cale, and Fun House, sold poorly. Iggy meanwhile got hooked on heroin and the band collapsed.

David Bowie helped to rejuvenate Iggy Pop's career by producing an album with him. The recording sessions produced the punk rock landmark Raw Power, in 1973. Still Iggy's drug problem persisted. The Stooges' last show ended in a fight between the band and a group of bikers, documented on the album Metallic K.O.. Drug abuse put his career on hold for a couple of years. After the second breakup of the Stooges, Iggy Pop made some recordings with James Williamson, but these were not released until 1977 (as Kill City). Iggy was unable to control his drug use and checked himself into a mental institution to try to clean up. Bowie was one of his few visitors there, and he continued to support his friend and collaborator. In 1976, Bowie took him along as his companion on the Station to Station tour. Bowie and Iggy Pop relocated to West Berlin to wean themselves off their addictions.

Although issued after Low, the opening installment of Bowie's so-called "Berlin Trilogy", the pair began writing and recording songs for The Idiot in mid-1976, before Bowie started work on his own album. As such, The Idiot has been claimed as heralding the unofficial beginning of Bowie's Berlin period, being compared particularly to Low and "Heroes" in its electronic effects, treated instrument sounds, introspective lyrics and overall mood. A departure from the hard rock of his former band The Stooges, The Idiot is regarded by critics as one of Pop’s best works, to lessen the confusion Pop quickly released a follow up..again with Bowie's writing in the wings, Lust For Life, it spawned two of his biggest hits, the titletrack and The Passenger.

The Lust for Life sessions took place soon after the completion of a concert tour in support of the The Idiot album, the tour ending on 16 April 1977.[Pop has stated, "David and I had determined that we would record that album very quickly, which we wrote, recorded, and mixed in eight days, and because we had done it so quickly, we had a lot of money left over from the advance, which we split." The singer slept little during its making. Lust for Life is generally considered to be more of an Iggy Pop record than the Bowie-dominated The Idiot, being less experimental musically and having more of a rock and roll flavor. However some of its themes were similarly dark, as in "The Passenger", one of Pop’s "most haunting" tracks, inspired by a Jim Morrison poem that saw "modern life as a journey by car". It has been covered by Nick Cave, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Michael Hutchence. Ultimately Iggy Pop managed to channel the aggressive power of his work with the Stooges with the intelligence and perception of The Idiot, and the result was the best of both worlds; smart, funny, edgy, and hard-rocking....



01 - Lust For Life (5:07)
02 - Sixteen (2:22)
03 - Some Weird Sin (3:36)
04 - The Passenger (4:37)
05 - Tonight (3:33)

06 - Success (4:20)
07 - Turn Blue (6:48)
08 - Neighborhood Threat (3:21)
09 - Fall In Love With Me (6:24)

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Into Paradise - Churchtown (91 ^ 99mb)

Into Paradise were a group from Dublin, Ireland whose influences included Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen. They formed in 1986 as 'Backwards into Paradise', and released their debut EP 'Blue Light' in 1989 on the independent label Setanta. Soon after came the EP 'Change' and the band's first full-length album, 'Under the Water'. During this period they became notorious for gigs which often ended with fighting between bandmembers.

The group's debut, released in 1990 and produced by ex-Sound frontman Adrian Borland, found Into Paradise--singer/guitarist Dave Long, guitarist/keyboardist James Eadie, bassist Rachel Tighe and drummer Ronan Clarke--owing a heavy debt to the Bunnymen's landmark 1980 LP, Crocodiles. The shame was that a few genuinely good tracks got buried in the band's attempt at homage. However, someone kicked Into Paradise firmly in the collective rear just in time for the release of Churchtown the following year--the group sounded newly-energized on uptempo, "Churchtown" is just a straight forward rock album - nothing really fancy with this one however the songs are just incredible. Singer Dave Long spills his heart out over the 12 tracks , "Rain Comes Down" blasts your bloody speakers off the wall. Produced again by Borland, Churchtown showed off a large-scale dramatic sweep, augmented by consistently strong, attractive melodies.

The band followed that triumph with a pair of U.K.-only EPs--Down All The Days (1992) and For No One (1993)--before disappearing from view shortly afterwards.
The eight-song, 33-minute Down All the Days is by far Into Paradise's best and most consistent effort. The tighter format is a big plus, letting the quartet avoid the filler that dotted its first two releases. "Sleep," the invitingly atmospheric centerpiece, continues the band's tradition of hooking plaintively beautiful tunes to the direst of lyrics — in this case, Long's self-doubt over a hopeless affair. The seven-track For No One covers no new ground ("Letting Go," "Don't Let Me Down," "Move Over," "Move Up, Move Out")



01 - Rain Come Down (3:48)
02 - Burns My Skin (3:45)
03 - Yesterday's Men (3:55)
04 - I'm Still Waiting (3:07)
05 - Winter (4:32)
06 - Bring Me Up (3:12)
07 - All Down From Here (2:52)
08 - Angel (4:04)
09 - Dreaming (3:23)
10 - Dive (3:24)
11 - Tears In Your Eyes (2:57)
12 - Gently Falls (4:32)

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Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights (02 ^ 99mb)

The roots of the band stem from New York University, where all of the original line-up were students. Guitarist Daniel Kessler, eager to start a band, met drummer Greg Drudy on campus, Carlos Dengler ( bass) in a history class and ran into Paul Banks, remembered them meeting in Paris and asked him to become lead singer. In 2000, after releasing the Fukd I.D. #3 EP, Greg Drudy left the band, and Kessler recruited Sam Fogarino, whom he knew through Fogarino’s job at a local vintage clothing store. After self-releasing several EPs between 1998 - 2001, in early 2002 the band signed to indie label Matador, an independent label famous for breaking highly respected bands such as Pavement. The first release, a self-titled EP containing rerecorded versions of PDA and NYC was released June 2002 to widespread critical acclaim in the indie music scene, which built anticipation for the full-length album.

They didnt have to wait long, 11 weeks later Turn on the Bright Lights was released in August, again on Matador, and is widely considered one of the best albums of that year, it even became Pitchfork Media's "Album of the Year." Though much of Turn on the Bright Lights plays on the heady solemnity of post-punk-meets-modern-isolation, there are songs that toy with other influences. The gripping "PDA", burns with the intelligent rage so characteristic of The Fall; "The New" has the bruising emotion of Echo & the Bunnymen. And the album ends with "Leif Erikson", which, like its Viking namesake, sails the album toward the serene potential of another world. The album turned out to be what modern followers of post-punk have been waiting for. It is the album that makes all the hub-bub about the New York City music scene justified; it is the album that makes the time we're living through feel like an era rather than a haphazard, disconnected series of events. Interpol absorbed several decades of great music and produced something familiar, yet fresh and new.

The band regrouped in late 2003 to begin sessions for the follow-up album, again decamping to Tarquin Studios to record. On September 28, 2004, Antics was released on Matador. The album achieved far greater commercial success than Turn on the Bright Lights, perhaps due to the lighter, more accessible arrangements and bigger hooks. Though Interpol couldn't be expected to surpass their previous heights, the band has wisely ignored a shortsighted perception of their career which dictates that where Bright Lights was an audacious plunge from a great height, Antics is the crucial landing. And so Antics garnered much critical acclaim again and was once more a popular choice on critics' Top 10 lists for 2004 Interpol toured once again after the release of the album, playing more dates than ever before and at bigger venues, the tour stretched on for almost 18 months..

Interpols third album arrives belatedly on the back of persistent rumours of a split and a reportedly 'tempestuous genesis'. In the interim, drummer Sam Fogarino started a new band, the Setting Suns, with Adam Franklin of Nineties shoegazing outfit Swervedriver, while newly mustachioed bassist Carlos D was recently seen on a Guardian website blog rhapsodising about the 'gorgeous and irresistible power' of symphony orchestras. All of which could have made for a distracted-sounding major label debut from a band verging on the kind of superstardom you feel should have been theirs years ago. Our Love to Admire was recorded at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village and The Magic Shop Studios in New York City and released July 10, 2007 on Capitol Records.

Happily, that 'tempestuous genesis' sounds like a storm in a teacup - Our Love to Admire fleshes out the dark edges of Interpol's sound to create a polished, muscular-sounding record that teems with life and bristling potency. It was the first time they have included keyboards in the arrangements from the start of the songwriting process. As a result, the album is more atmospheric and diverse than its predecessors. That might come as a disappointment to those who enjoyed the brittle existentialism of the first record, but it makes for an electrifying listen in its own right. Still the reviews turned out a mixed bag.



01 - Untitled (3:56)
02 - Obstacle 1 (4:11)
03 - NYC (4:19)
04 - PDA (4:59)
05 - Say Hello To the Angels (4:28)
06 - Hands Away (3:05)
07 - Obstacle 2 (3:47)
08 - Stella Was A Diver And She Was Always Down (6:27)
09 - Roland (3:35)
10 - The New (6:07)
11 - Leif Erikson (4:00)

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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 !

3 comments:

  1. hi, good post but Into Paradise - Churchtown the file is corrupt please fixed

    sorry for my bad english

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    Replies
    1. Into Paradise - Churchtown is corrupt fix it tk

      Delete