Hello everyone, I'm reporting in from currently not-so-sunny Niceville, FL where I'm visiting my folks on the break.

As always, I shall do my best to expose you to interesting and eclectic sounds.

First up, representing the realm of heavy metal is a curios of a band hailing from Germany. Haggard is a special band, not least because they feature in their number a full-sized orchestra, which pushes the size of their band to the 30s range (so much for the hard-rocking quartets of yore). This yields an impressive range of sounds in their music but it also limits their opportunities to tour and travel--just imagine their poor manager, trying to arrange accommodations for thirty-plus musicians. Even a bus ride to a nearby town in Germany would be a nightmare, let alone a North American tour. 

The song I'm offering up now comes from their magnum opus, Eppur Si Muove, named after the famous (probably a-historical) line uttered by Galileo after his heresy trial ("And yet it moves..."). The album is a concept album celebrating the great scientist's life, work, and legacy, and this particular song, "Of a Might Divine," concerns his hardships while in the care of the oh-so friendly and gentle Spanish inquisition, represented by the guttural vocals that pronounce the warning "Suppressed, by a might divine, your science of the dark! Revoke what has been told, or at the break of dawn, you will feel the holy spark--of a might divine!"

So if I bring up the band Incubus and someone says they don't like them, I'm immediately suspicious that they enjoy any music. There's something unplaceable about Incubus's appeal to me. It's a band that can range from mellow ballads (such as "Stellar," "11 AM," "Here in My Room,") to up-tempo, dischordant thrashers such "Megalomaniac." Brandon Boyd's vocals effortlessly cross over between crooning and screaming depending on the song. This number, "Echo," is from their (in my opinion) best album, Morningview, and features a guitar melody composed by the legendary Steve Vai.

What do I really need to say about this next one other than Uno, dos, tres, it's on, you ever think a pimp rock the microphone?

This is Bombs over Baghdad by the incomparable, unstoppable, unreplicable Outkast:

Muddy Waters. Now there's a name. To early rock acts like the Rolling Stones, he was a living god. If you were forced to list the five greatest blues acts/artists ever, Muddy Waters would certainly have to be one of them. The song I'm featuring now, They Call Me Muddy Waters, is of the slow, brooding, self-reflective strain of blues music that seems to have faded from the popular consciousness in more recent days as modern "blues" seems more concerned with the instrumentation than on the substance behind the music. The part that always gives me chills from this song is when Muddy reflects "And I was the most bluest man, in this whole Chicago town."

For this last one, get ready to get up and dance. This is "Pogo" by the German duo Digitalism. Just tell me where the night is...