Hey hey hey. Time for another edition of my weekly music series.
On Saturday I attended a heavy metal show at the Revolution Live in Ft. Lauderdale, and so I thought it would be ideal to start this edition with one of the songs played at that concert. I believe I've posted an Insomnium song not long ago, but they're a good enough band to show up twice in a one-month period. This song features a nice mix of brutal instrumentation and vocals with a soulful, semi-acoustic breakdown in the very middle that serves to offer a respite to your ears before plunging you back into the heaviness. This song is called "While We Sleep." (Music begins at 0:25)
Next is another band that's appeared before in this series (multiple times in fact), but because they've just dropped a kickass new album I feel beholden to showcase them yet again. I first encountered Hundred Waters in 2014 when they opened for Interpol in Miami Beach. Not knowing what to expect of them, I was blown away by both the quality of instrumentation and the buoyant charms of lead singer Nicole Miglis's vocals. While their overall sound--a rich blend of electronica, pop, and indie rock--hasn't changed much with their newest album Communicating, their beats and instrumentals have become bolder and more complex, while Nicole Miglis has explored new potentials for her vocals. In this song from Communicating, "Wave to Anchor," Miglis reminds us that while she might be most comfortable hitting the higher notes, she can also bless us with something lower, smokier, and huskier.
Next up we have a song from the FIFA 16 soundtrack by Tiggs da Author of Jamaica. This is "Run." Don't have much to say about it, other than I like it a lot.
Last up we're going to take a little step back in time, and by little I mean about two centuries, to the Napoleonic Wars, arguably the first true World War (or maybe the second depending on how you see the Seven Years' War). The song "O'er the Hills and Far Away" is a very old British composition with numerous variations. This particular variant was created by John Tams in the 1990s to accompany the Sean Bean-centered series of British war films called Sharpe. This is "Over the Hills and Far Away."
