This weekend–for the first time in more than a month–I finally got around to catching up on blogs through my feed reader. I’ve missed a lot and have more catching up to do in other areas (e.g. finding out what besides the more popular singles & albums have come out recently) but all will be taken care of in due time.
This also means I’ve finally gotten around to listen to some new (and old) Korean music, but the first half of the week was still very much about Swedish music. I continued repeating my Lars Winnerbäck playlist, suddenly felt the urge to listen to some old Weeping Willows and select solo material from vocalist Magnus Carlson, then spent a few hours with Kent‘s entire discography on shuffle for good measure.
Half-way through the week my husband took me out to see First Aid Kit as one of his contacts surprised us with VIP tickets (including access to what for me was an awkward after-party). I haven’t really listened much to them myself before, but have of course noticed the hype in recent years. And did listen to a few songs after rumors surfaced that K-pop cover singer MoA is the older of the two sisters a couple of years ago (something that was confirmed in a Swedish radio interview [37:00] a few days ago). The concert was beautiful and the girls very charming. The audience responded really well, the acoustics in the venue were great and all was recorded for Swedish radio. Listening more at home the feeling isn’t quite the same, but even so First Aid Kit’s new album Stay Gold seems like one of the best releases so far this year.
Onto Korean music! Thanks to weiv I’ve been listening a lot to Jung Jaeil these past couple of days–enough to have a full post on him coming up next week. Via Seoulbeats I found out that Cherry Filter has returned with new single Andromeda. It reminded me of how much I used to love Youjeen‘s vocals, though to be honest the song as a whole is not all that appealing to me. Regardless I’m very happy that there’s new material coming from Cherry Filter as it has been almost five years since the previous album.
This week I went through all I Am A Singer 2 commentary posts, uploading all images to this site as they will soon be removed from koreanindie. While doing so I found myself missing Kim Kyung Ho‘s performances from the first season, which is why it was extra delightful to find that Korean rock is real had posted his performance from the first episode of Mnet’s 100 Seconds War (100초전). Starting out with him singing ABBA‘s “Gimme Gimme Gimme”, the main part of it is a cover of Crayon Pop‘s trot infused “Uh-ee (어이)”–complete with dance and all. While I can’t say he really did the ABBA song justice, the Crayon Pop part was a lot of fun.
Other than that, the best news I managed to pick up lately came via Sangha: There should be a 3rd full-length album from Mot released before the end of this year! I used to be a huge fan. non-linear places very high up on my list of favorite albums. I can still recall my excitement from interviewing Mot 7 years ago (and consequently my happiness from finding out that we’ve all studied engineering). To me it’s always tricky when favorite artists return with new music, especially after such a long hiatus, as I tend to always prefer the album that made me a fan, but I did come around to enjoying Mot’s second album in spite of some initial hesitation and eAeon‘s solo debut was gorgeous so I have good hope for this one.
Blog plans for the coming week, in addition to the Jung Jaeil post already mentioned above, primarily focus on the Jambinai Europe tour. It needs to happen. This week.
soooooo excited for mot’s third album!!!