duggup

Artist: Katie Melua
Website: www.myspace.com/katiemelua and www.katiemelua.com
Track Name: If the lights Go Out
Playback: flash excerpts only on both sites.
Download?: Yes

Katie has a voice that reminds me a little of what the singer Melanie’s older sister might have sounded like. Pretty voice and pretty songs. Gentle pop love songs, worth having a listen to if just for [...]

Artist: Saturday Sample – Bruce Springsteen
Website: www.brucespringsteen.org
Album: Magic – Samples and Lyrics
Playback: streaming samples
Download?: No

The music of Bruce Springsteen has made up a big part of the soundtrack of my adulthood. I’ve loved the twangy guitars, and the even twangier keyboards, the plaintive notes blown by the big black man called Clarence, the songs about [...]

Artist: Brian McNeill
Website: www.brianmcneill.co.uk
Track Name: Hamlet
Playback: wav
Download?: Yes

This guy is Scottish and he is a mean (and I don’t mean penny pinching) songwriter. He played fiddle with the Battlefield Band from 1969 until 1990. Battlefield were one of the best damn Scottish traditional folk bands that ever there was. Brian McNeill was brought to [...]

Artist: Off Kilter
Website: www.offkilter.net
Track Name: The Roving Dies Hard
Playback: flash
Download?: No

Kilted and electric, my, these boys are fun. They play the standard celtic fare with a rock sensibility touched by a smattering of country. Their albums, of which there are three, also feature some of their own material.
They play permanently at the Epcot Canadian [...]

Artist: Yilila
Website: http://www.yilila.com
Track Name: Jamajama
Playback: mov
Download?: Yes – samples, both video and audio.

Gosh, not had a Saturday Sample for a while. For all the downsides of MySpace, one thing it has done is encourage more performers to put up whole songs and even videos for people to listen to. This is no bad thing from [...]

Artist: La Venexiana
Website: www.singers.com/choral/venexiana.html
Track Name: Rosa del ciel
Playback: stream – samples

Hailed by some as the best Italian madrigal choir of their generation. Their interpretation of the madrigal form is expressive and refined.
The word madrigal unavoidably conjures to mind 16th and 17th century Italy, scene of the development of one of the most fascinating musical [...]

Artist: Loreena McKennitt
Website: http://www.quinlanroad.com/
Playback: mp3/flash
Nothing for NINE years and then two albums in what seems like an eye blink. Loreena McKennitt is one of those interesting musicians who tend to polarise an audience. You rarely find anyone who has heard her music that doesn’t have an opinion.
Now you can put me in the “I [...]