(no subject)

[miko2]

Today's Song: Nothing Else Matters
I'm going to give you a two-for-one deal today. Two amazing covers of the Metallica song Nothing Else Matters. The first cover is by the band Apocalyptica, which is an all-cello heavy metal band. Yes, that's right. The band is made up of four classically-trained cello players who love heavy metal and spend their time making albums of heavy metal covers... on cello. They do run their cello sound through some distortion to achieve a more metallic sound, but basically, it's heavy metal played as chamber orchestra music... by people who fully appreciate that heavy metal is meant to be energetic and intense. Great, great stuff.

Possibly Nothing Else Matters is not the best song choice with which to introduce this band, but it's their most popular track on iTunes so it can't be too far off. It also allows me to point to another cover of the same song that I like quite a bit... Nothing Else Matters by Iron Horse. Iron Horse is a bluegrass band from Alabama with a penchant for doing covers and tribute cds as well. I own their Fade To Bluegrass: A Metallica Tribute cd, which is where their cover of Nothing Else Matters comes from. Mind you, you have to search on the cd/album title "Fade To Bluegrass" to find this on iTunes, because they list the performer as "Pickin' On Series" which is wrong. There is a long string of bluegrass tribute cds of various rock groups, all done by studio bluegrass musicians -- I own the ones for U2, Aerosmith, and one other one I think, Eagles maybe -- but Iron Horse is an actual band (as you can see from the web site I linked to). One difference is that Iron Horse sing (all of the Pickin' On series are instrumentals as far as I know). In fact, they sing really well. Nothing Else Matters is one of my favorites from the cd I own.

I see that they now have an Ozzy tribute cd. I might have to pick that up. I already own a bluegrass cover of Crazy Train, done by the Canadian band Jughead -- but after all, can you ever have enough bluegrass covers of heavy metal songs? ^_^

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As to why I've picked these two songs for today, that's easy. I was at Half-Price Books and bought the Metallica Tribute cd by Apocalyptica. It's much older than their current cd Inquisition Symphony, which is where the song found on iTunes comes from. The new cd is better! ^_^ But this older cd has a cover of Enter Sandman that I've long liked (I admit I've owned a "not very legal" copy of it for a year or so), and so I was listening to that cd on the way home and decided to make one of their songs my pick for the day.

Other stuff I picked up: Fallen by Evanesence, and a Blondie tribute album by Germ Attack, which is apparently a punk band from Germany. They do a credible, if very short, tribute cd -- 6 songs total, two of which are "Heart of Glass in English, and then at the end, Heart of Glass done again, this time in... Turkish.

When I left the house I wasn't actually thinking I'd like to find a copy of Blondie's Heart of Glass sung in Turkish. But then, you never know what to expect when you set out on an adventure.

My adventure took me first to Frye's, which completely failed to have one of the Tivoli iPals that I so desperately want. Then I headed down to CompUSA in Southcenter, which also didn't have it, in part because they're closing and liquidating everything, only, you know, not actually liquidating at prices enticing enough for me to want to buy.

So I avoided spending money on an electronics toy. So far. I will buy it eventually.

After that I stopped at Waldenbooks. I was looking specifically for volume 2 of The Day of Revolution, a manga I like (although this is also the last volume). But I also briefly considered picking up Boy Princess volume 4. What stopped me was that I haven't even read volume 3 yet, and while beautiful and interesting, the manga is also confusing... I have a hard time telling the characters apart (they're all quite beautiful, it's shojo manga after all) and the word balloons never indicate who's speaking, so that makes it more difficult to follow... and it also has a way of telling the story that seems to leave out a lot of information, or something isn't making it through the translation, because I simply can't always tell what's going on.

Makes you wonder why I'm still trying to follow it....

THe other thing that stopped me was money -- I found something else to buy, and I couldn't really afford to buy both. This other thing is Inverloch by Sarah Ellerton, which looks like a very cool all-ages fantasy story -- reminds me of the stuff I like best, Bone, Akiko, Usagi, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Like some of those, this is a beautifully drawn fantasy comic (with an anthropomorphic main character). Unlike those others, Inverloch is a web comic -- but the artwork is so beautiful that I decided to buy the books anyway. And you know what? I was going to tell you to visit the link and check it out for yourself -- and don't let me stop you from doing that -- but having just done that, I see that the first pages (at least) of the story have been completely redrawn for the book version. The web versions still look pretty good, but the book is much, much better. ^_^

So, that was my new find for the day! Other than the Blondie song sung in Turkish, of course....