Funk Babblings

On a recent edition of "Coverville", I heard the best, most haunting rendition ever of "Don't Fear The Reaper". (Makes me want to go watch a fun Peter Jackson film....)

The album seems to be available from CDBaby, but in this case having downloadable samples hurts them -- the other songs don't sound nearly as interesting to me. The band seems to have morphed into something else, with more songs to hear.


I'm listening to this on my new toy, an RCA Lyra RD2012 flash-based MP3 player. It has 256MB built-in capacity, but the best part is that it's expandable with SD/MMC cards, so at some point I'll add a gig to it. The bad news is that even with the latest firmware, which required Windows to install :-(, there are some display glitches, like the 3-line screen often blanking out less than a minute into a song with no apparent way to get it back other than a reboot. So I guess it's sorta like an iPod Shuffle that sometimes has a display and isn't dependent on iTunes (or even compatible with it, for that matter).
Update: I exchanged the Lyra for another one, which seems to behave much better. The display doesn't disappear or otherwise flake out on me like the first one did. It's still not my ideal player, but it works pretty well.


Oh, I also finally have my own copy of U2's third album, War, from 1983. I'd forgotten how awesome side 2 of that album is. Sure, the album has some big hits ("Sunday Bloody Sunday", "New Year's Day", "Two Hearts Beat As One"), but the more obscure songs (e.g. "The Refugee", "Red Light") are far from filler.