Big in Belgium : Arno

Arno (Hintjens), once the frontman of Belgian rock stars T.C. Matic, has been enjoying a lot of respect from musicians all over Europe (and perhaps beyond?). He has worked with many great artists, covered many great songs (including some unusual suspects like Salvatore Adamo's Les filles du bord de mer). Actually, he's probably the biggest living legend in Belgian music, always performing for crowds of crazy fans...

Enjoy these songs :

• It's all over now (mp3) : a Womack & Womack cover, originally played with all star band Charles et Les Lulus
• I'm not myself (mp3) : featuring Tom Barman from dEUS and Stef Kamil Carlens from Zita Swoon
• Les yeux de ma mère (mp3)
• Putain putain (mp3) : orginally a T.C. Matic song

You can buy the album Give me the gift, which features all above songs, here

Big in Belgium : Bobbejaan

Bobbejaan Schoepen is one of those old time stars from the fifties and sixties, who got very famous in Belgium. I wrote about him once in my post about Dead Man Ray and its lead singer Daan.

Earlier this year, after a long, long silence (35 years!), he released a new record, which got a sort of American recordings treatment, albeit on a smaller scale. With some help from Daan and Elko Blijweert (from Dead Man Ray), Nathalie Delcroix (from Laïs), Geike Arnaert (from Hooverphonic) and Axelle Red, as well as from his song Tom and his wife Josée, he recorded 12 new songs (well, actually one of them is a sort of remake of one of his most famous songs in Dutch, De lichtjes van de Schelde). The record sounds a bit like the Rick Rubin produced Johnny Cash songs, but it also sounds very Flemish and the songs certainly do a lot of justice to the singing voice and whistling by Bobbejaan.

Also, the records is a musical hommage to aged men. It's about getting older and viewing your life in retrospect, and about the experience one gathers throughout one's life, about losing your youth, strength and fysical ability.

Enjoy these songs :

• Je me suis souvent demandé (mp3) : singing in French, together with Axelle Red, Bobbejaan wonders about the bigger and smaller questions of life...
• Flower of Shanghai (mp3) : Daan sings most of this song, about the long-distance love of a sailor in a far away port...
• On a carousel (mp3) : mostly instrumental, with a lot of whistling (something Bobbejaan was famous for in his oldest songs), and with a spoken (Dutch) introduction...
• Verankerd (mp3) : this song is probably the best of the whole record : it's about being old and sick (cancer), but still wanting to live, it's the song which offers the rich palet of Bobbejaan's singing (the voice of an old and experienced singer, a lot of country influences, but at the same time it sounds about as provincial as it can get) and it hits the mood of the lyrics so right on that's impossible to resist to the beauty of it, even if it is sung in Dutch... Of course, as Dutch is my mother language, I cannot judge it, but I wonder if you hear the richess of this even if you're unfamiliar with the language (I would guess so). So please give it a try (and feel free to leave a comment about it...)

You can buy the record Bobbejaan here

Free download : new Sigur Ros single

Sigur Ros are giving away their new single for free (here). Enjoy it !

The Clement Peerens Explosition

The Clement Peerens Explosition started as a joke by the men who made a hilarious radio comedy show, Het leugenpaleis, on Studio Brussel. And then they became so popular that they made some more songs, and after a lot of years in which petitions were being initiated for them to have a reunion, they did indeed return to stage earlier this year.
Their band leader, so-called Antwerp pop and rock expert Clement Peerens (his real name is Hugo Matthysen), claims after all they do no more play some AC/DC riffs in reverse order, adding lyrics in the Antwerp dialect.
Enjoy :

• Vinde gij mijn gat (niet te dik in deze rok)? (mp3)
• Dikke Lu (mp3)

You can also watch them at their reunion concert, singing probably their biggest hit (Vinde gij mijn gat..., which means something like "You don't think my butt's too big in this dress, do you ?")

It seems impossible to buy their music on the internet, but keep searching, maybe you'll have some more luck...

Rewind the video : Music for life

Belgian radio station Studio Brussel will be hosting the second edition of Music for life, an action to support the Flemish Red Cross and its water campaign in Namibia. Three DJ's will be living in a glass house, eating nothing and drinking only water, for 6 days. Dutch and Swiss collegues will do something similar in The Hague (The Netherlands) and Genève (Switzerland).
You can support the action by buying a song on the radio, or by buying this song from Fixkes and Axelle Red : Over 't water



You can buy the song here

Rewind the video : Andreas Dorau

Eighties pop to the extreme : that would be the only good way to describe how this song sounds. Andreas Dorau's Fred vom Jupiter (mp3), a German song which you don't have to understand to enjoy, is as eighties as it could be. In fact, this could as well have been posted in my 80's theme...

This video breathes amateurism, which is exactly which makes it so irresistable ! I wonder whose children have painted the background and made the rocket for Fred...

Cem Karaça

Music blogs have set me on the trail of numerous artists I had never even heard of, and I consider myself someone who knows quite a bit what's around in music though...
One of the discoveries I made through such a blog, was the Turkish artist Cem Karaça. He fled Turkey about a year before the 1980 military coup and it wasn't until 1987 that he could return under strict conditions about not doing any political actions. He had lived in Germany as an exile and he died in Istanbul in 2004. In the video to the song I like best of this artist, he looks a bit like a Zappa-esque bohemian, and his gesticulating is really intruiging...



Enjoy these tracks :

• Namus belasi - Cem Karaça (mp3)
• Suya giden alli gelin - Cem Karaça & Apaslar (mp3) : it starts a bit like California über alles by Dead Kennedys

You can buy Cem Karaça music here

Lazy Monday : Daniël Lohues

It must be over a year now since I got acquainted with Daniel Lohues, a Dutch singer-songwriter who sings in his own language, which is a Dutch dialect ( Drenthes ), over the fantastic internet radio of Kink FM, a radio station that got no spot on the FM band in The Netherlands and which can only be heard on the internet and through cable.

I really love this simple song, which comes as a love story at first, but which really tells the tale of nostalgia and of how you change from being a young lad starting to discover the world to a grown-up who's been around...

Enjoy it yourself : Annelie (mp3)

You can listen to fragments of each song on the album Allennig here

You can buy the album Allennig here