But a tribute CD had caught my attention one day and after listening or watching it, I had a thought about to where have I been to all these years. If you throw me a Bob Dylan record, some days I would surely prefer to play Leonard Cohen on my cellphone-cum-mp3 player-cum alarm clock. 

One thing is for sure, he is Canadian. Now that I know.

And he'd been playing music since Dylan did in his 60's heydays. I wonder now why he'd been so widely-unknown, really amazes me, what with the silvery folksy music that he croons to, its unimaginable to a great extent.

Mr. Cohen in fact had to change his music style a bit just to garner interest in popular music, and one of them song is "Closing Time", featuring vibrant and dancy beat, complete with a polished and ultra-sleek music video released along with it. And the result, same gem music he often produces, telling and poetic, for he is also a published poet, and novelist as well as essayist.

So listen to this, "Closing Time"; Although I assure you, his best work does not make you dance at all.

When I was just new to being a music lover, like really being into music, sometime just after my high school days, I had a thought then that I didn’t have much interest in dance music. Not that I were just being typical of most rock music lovers, who shows no restraint at all in showing (off) their contempt for “dance” music, like it was only for sissies and phonies. In fact I could like them so well in the past. When I was a very young kid, like somewhere between 8 or 10 years old, I had often jibed and feel the beat of songs like “Brother Louie” or “Tarzan Boy” being played in game arcades that I had frequented then.

Perhaps, it was my great leaning to New Wave that had somehow made Petshop Boys reasonably chic and modish.

Or perhaps, Depeche Mode was really a dance band when they started making music in the mid-80’s that we countless millions of soul who had loved them in their early days really and actually had loved dance music, without us knowing it.

One day, about several months ago, I passed by my favorite video rental store and got hold of the tribute concert video to Leonard Cohen titled “I’m Your Man” , and I just got blown by it. It was a very good concert video/musical, and could be just second to U2’s “Rattle and Hum”. There was this fat guy in that show who just appeared on stage and sang Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will” and I thought it was a fabulous number, the way the fat guy sang it was so terrifyingly haunting that I kept on watching that part of the concert over and over again.

The thing is - I never knew the name of the fat guy even if I had gotten so interested with his so enchanting voice. But I tried searching in the net and I later found out that his name was in fact Antony Hegarty. I thought that I liked to hear most of his song and wondered if ever he had some works before and truth to be told, indeed he was in a band, two of them in fact, Antony Johnson and the Aeons and Hercules and Love Affair.

This was how I discovered the sumptuous and wonderfully-crafted album Hercules and Love Affair, the self-titled debut album from the band with the same name.

The album is a dance album that’s why I was having some soliloquy about dance music in the beginning part of this post.
Now I wonder if finally, dance music is just as pleasurable as rock music. I wonder even if dance music is finally making a huge comeback, back to its heydays in the 80’s.

And for a dance band, Hercules and Love Affair’s album is so seriously wonderful and lyrically emotional that it was not like any other dance album that I’ve got ever known of.

In the beginning song “Time Will”, Antony Hegarty sang “Don’t Lie to me. Don’t Make it Up… I cannot hold half a life.” Now that’s just an emotional outbreak that just got me so wedged with this album.

In “Blind”, the band showed exceptional liveliness with a very jibing bass intro that makes the body move effortlessly and being so caught up by the ever so melodic vocals of Antony, making it one of the most original pieces of music that I have heard so recently.

And as if this wasn’t enough, the album moves on to higher ground in the extremely vigorous “Raise Me Up” with meandering lyrics that sang “They put you down. They pushed your face down. You kissed the ground.”

Naomi Ruiz also maintain vocal duties in this band and she is sometimes called “Fabulous Naomi” and the first time you hear her sing, it would be no surprise why she is called that way. Her voice is smooth and flowing like a crystal afloat an ice field, that in “Iris” and “Athene” she just turned the songs into full bloom naturally. She immediately reminds the listener of EBTG’s Tracy Thorn, so confident in voice and one who needs no vocal acrobatics whatsoever.

Almost every song in the album is as catchy as a fresh rainbow, almost all. It’s a being rare that way. Every song in it could actually be played on FM radio and that’s ultimate radio-friendliness that doesn’t happen every day.

Rating : 9/10

Keane is back with a reverberating album in “Perfect Symmetry” now topping the Billboards Album Chart at No. 7 and I expect it to remain somewhere within that sphere for many weeks to come.

In 2004, this English band gained worldwide accolade for the catchy and ultra-melodic “Everybody’s Changing” and from that moment on, the band never looked back and gained more and more success.

Honestly, I thought so little at first about this band from East Sussex, relegating them merely and probably as one of those one-hit wonders that had just got lucky with one very inspired composition. I even thought then that Tom Chaplin’s voice was just one of those Bono wanna-be’s that tries to imitate the inimitable voice of the U2 frontman.

But lately, things have changed. I am greatly engrossed by Keane and the music they permeate, sounding so proficient and deep like they’ve been out there for decades among the great rock bands of all time. And Tom Chaplin’s exudes that forceful confidence that’s definitive throughout “Perfect Symmetry”, a kind of feel-good exuberance that becomes imbibing to the listeners, especially when most of the songs in the album embark upon the subject of love and emotion, piano-driven love songs as they are called, and probably Keane could be forgiven for being silly almost all the time, as they could be just among a few modern rock bands that is able to extrapolate on those silly topics so extraneously and then be excused afterwards.

In “The Lovers Are Losing”, Keane sings a winning melody that could rack up admiration all over again, just like it did in “Everybody’s Changing”, serenading the listeners with a wicked keyboards intro that’s leaves a very good mark. Another promising song is “Better Than This’, very catchy and inspiring.

And listening to the whole album is like being in one very enjoyable ride, through desert highways and immaculate interstate avenues, as the wind kisses the sunlit horizon so silently.

I just thought Keane’s new album is just perfect for the car stereo, when I never really thought before that there is some kind of music that is just perfect while one is driving or riding in a car.

In the latest single “Spiralling”, Keane introduces itself so loudly and so eloquently and the song itself has just that, a very enticing intro that make the heart stomp and the feet move in lively rhythm.

Listen to Keane’s “Spiralling”:

Keane's Album : "Perfect Symmetry" -
Rating: 8 out of 1o.

There’s a good song and then there’s a good song. What I mean is that, some song is just so good that I just feel triumphant about it. Like Nick Cave’s “Where the Wild Roses Grow” which he sang with Australian pop diva Kylie Minogue, a song I’ve heard on TV, in a music video some years ago and never heard about till now. The thing is Nick Cave is so popular worldwide but he ain’t as such in our territory that not even a shadow of any of his albums was seen in any local music store. That way, I forgot about Mr. Cave, even if I liked him the first time I’ve heard his voice, singing “There Is A Light” in the soundtrack of Batman Forever movie.

Maybe Nick Cave sounded so much like Jim Morrison of The Doors that I could not help but feel so enamored by his voice as Jim remains the most iconic of all musicians for me, just like Bono and Bob Dylan, and since he is now gone, Nick Cave and his songs just felt so fulfilling to me, so in time, truly wondrous and celebratory.

I don’t know specifically, but I thought this song “Where the Wild Roses Grow” is just a very good song, while Nick Cave is just a very clever musician. And mind you, the music video that goes with the song is classic to the sight, like a critically-acclaimed movie from Akira Kurosawa, such as “Dreams” and reminds me so much of a dream I had some years back, one that was so vivid and most memorable of all, to which I have written about as “The Pond” and truly, if I could picture that very memorable dream in a movie, it would most probably have this kind of look and feel, so meaningful and yet so silent, like words have no meaning at all, for no words is necessary, and everything is animated and heavy with meaningful thoughts.

At the beginning of the song, there’s the entrance of violins, and then came the piano, and I thought if Mozart were alive today, this was his own masterpiece. And the lyrics is pure poetry, such as Shakespeare or Dickinson, and Nick Cave should have won a Nobel Prize for this. Sadly, they don’t give that damn award to rock musicians.

Without further adieu, this is Nick Cave’s “Where The Wild Roses Grow”: