Music Review: Rockers Glass City Walls, Argentina's Punk band HaShiSh and MySpace Records

Music Review: Glass City Walls rocks and breaks through the Noise. MySpace Records offers up some great groups. Argentina gives us a Punk HaShiSh with lots of Pop!

A UK Rock Band new/old to the MySpace Scene, a Punk group I can’t understand but Love to listen to and MySpace Records is likely a label with an ‘in’ or pay to play but it still picks some hot ones.

Last week I was down with a virus, so no posting. Any posts would have been nightmares of inane rambling and disconnected thoughts anyway. Yes, yes, yes, MORE disconnected and rambling than normal…but hey, be nice. I’m still feeling like I got tongued by a halitosis-ridden, incontinent Crocodile with a penchant for liver and garlic pizza—or a Presidential candidate. Take your pick. Wait. No. That’s an insult to the crocodile!

Anyway, quickly, a few things on the agenda today. A rock band out of the UK and very new or perhaps very longterm to MySpace, but with a great sound. (They’ve got a new MySpace page. So it’s unclear what their base was earlier. I suspect, like me, they’ve been battling messed up pages and non-working functionality. I’m now on month 6 of no ability to add friends and the usual MySpace ‘please be patient’ customer complaint response.)

Glass City Walls doesn’t have much to pick from on the MySpace page yet, but what is there is wonderful to hear. While the downloads seemed a bit weak on robustness or fullness of sound---you know, that sense of an explosion of music all around you rather than a tinny feel, I expect that could be fixed by a good producer during a professional demo session.

What Amer, Dave, Kieran and John do have are nice vocals, interesting lyrics and amazing technical, virtuoso guitar skills. Those guitar riffs grabbed my attention and held it. With a fuller, more developed sound, these fellows could bring down those glass houses easily. I hope they get signed soon to a label and do just that.

Check them out at http://www.myspace.com/glasscitywallsrock

Another thing I’m going to point out is the MySpace Records page. I didn’t know MySpace had its own label and of course that means a MySpace page to promote itself. With over a million and a half friends, it’s definitely known and kicking to others that it’s been inviting to join. Then again, unlike the rest of us, I’m sure it doesn’t have problems with getting any Add Friends or download problems fixed, nor would it have any restrictions on the number of invitations it can send out to up it friend count, nor would it have to worry about paying for any advertising in order to make the MySpace community more aware of it.

Then again, MySpace has the right to promote itself any way it wants. It gives most of us free pages, and in return, we have to deal with lesser service and being served up to advertisers as an entrée. Such is the way of the web now. No free lunch.

It does showcase a number of great musical groups on its page. I somehow doubt they are up there just because MySpace likes them. After, all it’s a label—right? It’s hard to say whether it picks them or just promotes bands that come to it for help. So, unlike this blog, you probably won’t find the great groups that don’t have great cash backing up there. Then again to be fair…I really don’t know, you decide for yourself.

Still, it’s a start and at least MySpace is taking an interest, beyond just making free pages available and allowing you to try to search through the millions up on millions of pages trying to find that one little gem.

So that makes their page worth a look as well, just look with a critical eye and a handful of salt until it's more clear whether they are a real label or just pay-to-play.

And watch out for free lunches being offered in general, as a reminder about identity theft and phishing…free lunches or free iPods or iPhones or Wii’s…you get the drift, I hope. Or is that I hype? ;)

In particular, check out Sherwood’s Middle of the Night and Kate Voegele’s Only Fooling Myself (Kate’s vocals are amazing.)

You can find MySpace Records as http://www.myspace.com/myspacerecords

On a final note, I haven’t done a full review of them. One, I don’t speak Spanish, but they look interesting and sound VERY interesting, too. Check out HaShiSh, a power punk group out of Buenos Aires, Argentina. They’ve got a great sound, and good sounding vocals...even if I can’t understand the lyrics. Very high energy though and that got my attention, and kept me listening even with the language barrier.

Their page is at http://www.myspace.com/hashishpunk

Hope you all survived Friday the 13^th OK. Personally, I think it followed me to this week!

CG Anderson
Little Dogs Media
Aha! Blogolicious! Musings and Meanings of Non-Sensical Events …and Canada

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CG Anderson is a 10 year new media provocateur involved in media, art, tech, science and the online world. Also a writer, blogger and novelist. CG's comments are personal and opinionated and solely the responsibility of the author, so there. Don't like the opinions, disagree, agree, don't know? Great, make a comment—clean ones will be allowed, netiquette-challenged ones will be ignored!
MySpace site: http://www.myspace.com/ahablogolicious (help me reach 1 million friends, add yourself as my friend now! Especially since my ability to add you is broken—still---and no eta from MySpace on a fix.)
Blog site: http://ahablogolicious.blogspot.com/
URL: http://home.myuw.net/cganders/