“The xx” – the brand new shit from London

“Don’t believe the hype – it’s all the same!! That’s what one is usually thinking when a new and cutting-edge band from London emerges and is recommended by big music magazines, but apart from hype or not, these guys are worth listening to.

The XX  are four 19-year-old guys, who do not embody all the hype- and indie-like clichés like wearing Ray Ban glasses and skinny jeans. They are normal young people from a suburb in the south-west of London and have just released their début album. It is their inconspicuousness and aloofness that makes them so special and that has aroused my curiosity.

Their music is vulnerable, personal and nostalgic, which arises in the song  “Islands”. Right from the start, I loved the composition of the voices of Romy and Oliver, which resonate so perfectly together, with a discreet use of guitars, drums, keyboard and synthesizer sounds. For me, this song, reflects safety, hope and arriving wherever this might be.

I’ve heard the whole album and every single track on this album tells its own unique story. In my opinion, it is a very well produced album.

I made my two crosses at: X audio-licious and X definitely worth listening to.

If you want to purchase the album on amazon, click here!

How greedy are we?

Greed is an enormous word and mostly tainted with a negative association, but the truth is, that we all embody greed in one way or a another. Why does a catastrophe have to happen, that we learn to share again?

The reason why I write about this issue was a talk show on ARD “Hart aber fair” hosted by Frank Blasberg. The topic was “Sufficient is still too little. Why does greed dominate us?” It was so interesting, that I thought about greed in my life and how greedy I am. That’s why I dedicate my weekly blog to this topic and want to present to you some voices in that panel discussion.

Get melancholic with Cortney Tidwell’s “La La”

As this blog has emerged as my personal new music blog where I can present new artists, I will stick to that and present to you the latest music voices. Today: Cortney Tidwell.

I fell in love with her song “La La”, which doesn’t go out of my head. I heard it this week on radioeins and is worth presenting to you. As an analysis of song lyrics is always a matter of how you see the things and which mood you are in, I just let you interpret this for yourselves. But I perceive this song as very melancholic in the first place, written in a pessimistic and sad tone. It could symbolize a goodbye, break-up, an identity crisis or just a change in life. But then this song embodies confidence and hope and turns out to be encouraging and positive, that’s why I really love the composition of this song. But as I said watch this video and make your own opinion.

In order to tell you some facts about Cortney Tidwell, she was born 1972 in Nashville, Tennessee. Her mother was diagnosed with manic depression and Cortney’s music ambition was derailed. Cortney’s musical genes emerged again after the passing of her mother many years later. She attended two years of college before she dropped out to pursue art.

To read more about Cortney Tidwell or listen to more music, visit her site.

Rapante, rapante!

You know that situation certainly… you sit together with friends and watch funny you tube videos like e.g. the hilarious skit of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” with Justin Timberlake, Joko’s and Claas’ “Ping Pong Porno” contest or Kurt Krömer’s famous “Pummelfee” or “Komm’ von den Damm runter!!!”

In one of these get-togethers, a friend of mine showed me a clip by René Marik, a German degreed puppet player, I didn’t even know that you can study that. In his plays appear love-sick cloths in “Liebesleben der Lappen” or the slightly chavy ice bear who speaks in a Berliner accent and comments on the sinking of the titanic in “Titanic”, which is one of my favourites. His most famous puppet is a mole, who wears an armband for the visually impaired and is characterized by a speech defect, whereby legendary sayings are born like “Jemand ze hage?” (“Jemand zu Hause”), Autsch’n, Schneewante (Schneewittchen) or “Rapante” (Rapunzel).

Voices on New Year’s Day

Hey everybody, I wish you all a happy new year, may all our wishes and hopes in 2010 come true. Let us live another passionate year, take some risks, have fun and see whether we’re  still on the right track.

A year has ended, a new one has started. That’s normally the time, when we reflect on last year. Where have we been? Who have we met? Was it a good one? I had a quite excited year. I saw new places:  Amsterdam, Rome, Budapest, I’ve started studying, met a bunch of new interesting people and had great fun. And at the end, I realised what grief and the farewell of a beloved person mean and how other things just lose importance.

Finally, I still don’t know what I really want, but found more answers to the question what I do not want, which in the end will lead me to the final solution and complete happiness.

There is no other band that can express the feeling I have on New Year’s Day so well as U2 in the song “New Year’s Day”.  It is the third track from their 1983 album War and it was released as the album’s lead single in January 1983, written about the Polish Solidarity movement. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine placed the single at #427 on their list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time“, at least! For me it has become tradition to hear that on the first day of the year. The melancholic atmosphere in that song is just overwhelming and fits to the atrabiliousness on New Year’s Day and it has one of the greatest and saddest guitar solos I know.

In Bono’s words “Let’s begin again!”

How was your 2009? A new year always makes room for new expectations and resolutions. What are yours?

The Pakistanis in Barcelona

Barcelona has the largest Pakistani community in Spain with officially more than 13,000 residents, 90% of whom are men. Outside Britain, Barcelona is the city with the most concentrated population of Pakistanis in Europe.

That are the facts, but lately I have asked myself why are they in Barcelona? There aren’t no strong cultural, economical, social or linguistic links between Pakistan and Spain, and concretely Barcelona. For instance, the high concentration of Pakistanis in London leads back to the fact that Pakistan is a member of the British Commonwealth. But why then Barcelona? I began investigating.

Voices of Barcelona

I’ve chosen last weekend for a short trip to Barcelona.  And due to this happening I want to tell you something worth knowing with regards to Barcelona.

I have read in the newspaper abc.es and on the homepage vozbcn.com (voices of Barcelona) that law-breakers concerning traffic abuses do not have to pay the fine if the traffic sign was just written in Catalan and not additionally in Castellano (Spanish), which is almost 100% of all cases.

I’ve touched Beth Ditto

Beth Ditto is my voice of the week.  I think or hope I don’t need to introduce her. For those who don’t know yet she’s the singer of “The Gossip”, a three-piece American indie rock band. Their style has been described as “a soul or gospel” voice with “a sort of funky punk soundtrack”.

You can be sure that if “The Gossip” is playing live in Berlin I will be there. And on Thursday the time had come again. Due to illness I felt a little weak, but as far as Beth Ditto entered the stage, I felt a flush of endorphins running through my blood and I was awake and couldn’t stop jumping til the end.

Ryan Gosling’s band “Dead man’s bones”

This Friday I heard a cool song on my favourite radio station MotorFM. It is the band of Ryan Gosling, the famous actor, who embodies Noah in the movie “The notebook” (“Wie ein einziger Tag”), based on the novel of Nicholas Sparks. In that movie he has already attracted my attention, since I have appreciated him as a very talented actor and artist. He played in other movies like “United states of Leland”, “Fracture” beside Anthony Hopkins or “Lars and the real girl”, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award.

Although “The notebook” was the typically Hollywood cliché love story, more likely you see him as a dark and tense character. He uses to play all what’s far away from the mainstream. Therefore, it is not surprising to see him in that strange independent band called “Dead man’s bones”. It is hard to characterize that kind of music, it would be the perfect soundtrack for Halloween. The Rolling Stone describes his music as  a “demon spawn of the Misfits, Bauhaus and the Zombies”.

Voices that made the Berlin wall fall – Wir sind das Volk!

Due to actuality this blog is going to be about the demonstrators who peacefully fought for a reformed state in autumn 1989.  Being only 5 years when the Berlin wall fell I have not too many memories of the 9th of November in 1989.

I just remember that we saw the event on television, as my mom preferred not go to the wall with her 5 year-old daughter. On top of that, she has a great sense of duty and knew that she had to be at work the next day. As a result of the parties that took place everywhere in Berlin, only 6 out of 80 workers went to work on the 10th of November 1989, one of them my mom of course. On the other side, I think she would not have gone if she hadn’t had me or hadn’t had to work. Because she was quite happy in the GDR, she felt secure, had her job, all was well organised, the kids had their place in the kindergarten. Well, we could not eat many bananas, but my mom always used to flirt with the fruit seller, so we knew how bananas taste. So all in all my mom was the perfect GDR inhabitant. It’s like with the things you don’t have you can’t miss.