Band of the Week: Mandala, Plurals, & more!

Well, would you look at that? I actually remembered Band of the Week for a change. Considered renaming it "Band of the indeterminate time period" but it just sounded silly... Anyhoos, onwards.

First up we have English instrumental duo Mandala. Scrummy proggy, metally brilliance. Seriously good. Here's new single Wind Secular:


Next up, more instrumental prog metal stuff! Woo! This time from Belgian project Plurals. Have a listen to the Inner Planets EP, which is currently a free download:


Then we'll have the new (ish) track from Aamir al-Loki because I only remembered it existed last week. New EP should be coming soon, so that's also pretty awesome.


Next, I think we'll have Harlequin Jones. Dark cabaret loveliness. Yum. Check out The Bad Beginning:


Finally, not really a band, but I just had to share because they're absolutely brilliant - the re-issue label Dust-to-Digital. They take old recordings, digitise them, then release them as CDs and I have found some most delicious stuff on their BandCamp. For the purposes of this post, let's have this, which is the first disc of an album of upright bass tracks:

Randomness: Random bits

Firstly, a piece of brilliance:


NERVOUS96 from Bill Domonkos on Vimeo.

This is a new short from Bill Domonkos who mixes old archive footage with animations (2D and 3D). The reason I'm posting it is because Jill Tracy had a hand in composing the score. It's a beautiful piece of music and it's available HERE.

A piece of not so much brilliance:

I love Cobra Starship. They're fun and silly and cheesy as hell. But this... like McFly's Party Girl, I'm hoping it grows on me, but really, I can't see it happening. I'm all up for change, but this isn't the Cobra I love. After the rather mediocre effort that was Hot Mess, I was hoping for something more like While The City Sleeps or Viva La Cobra. Evidently, that hasn't happened. So I'm now drowning my ears in old Cobra to make me feel better. Ugh.