I had been listening to some of Voxtrot’s earlier songs, but never had the time (or the nerves) to fully explore what has become one of the biggest new names in the American indiepop world. It’s never too late for a second chance, so their Raised by Wolves EP (on Cult Hero) ended up on my mp3-player and over the last few days the words to their songs have been bouncing inside my head like a pinball game. It shows the nature of the songs, with a lot of words rhyming to the next one, making the songs very catchy and easy to sing –and smile– along. Okay, I must add the songs are a bit too rock at times and yes, I would prefer it if they stayed closer to their pop-roots, which for some reason they do when I resing them in my head. For the time being their songs are good enough to forgive them. Let’s do that.

Also, I hope this answers the question many have been asking if I will continue writing about new music.

You might have a granddad or an uncle who spends his days collecting stamps. Does he really send out more letters than the average person?

Welcome (back) to my blog. A new version, but still the same bloke, with the same interests and probably the same style of writing. But this time in a more honest way: not just doing the ‘I heard this band before you’-trick, not just writing about music when there might be other, more important, things to say. A blog that should be much closer to who I am. Let’s hope you’ll like it.

Okay, let’s say I’ll put the thing online tomorrow, so now it’s time for some final testing. It works well on Explorer and Firefox, the latter for both Linux and Windows, while it does some weird things in Konquerror – but who uses that anyway? I do not have access to Opera and Safari from here, so if you use one of these browsers and experience some weird things, I’d like to hear about them. After all, while I tried to keep they lay-out as basic as possible (if only everyone else did …), the site has its geeky parts, of which the cross-browser functionality might be bit doubtful.

Speaking of that lay-out, it is basically done by myself, though I have been supervised by the girlfriend, who helped me to distinguish the right decisions from the wrong ones (in a much broader context, actually). The site runs on WordPress, which seemed to fulfil about all my wishes for a blog tool. The geeky plugin that allows you to preview your comments while you write them, I found here. Also, did you see this site offers you rss feed now?

And in case you hadn’t found out yourself, all of the old contents – both in Dutch and English – are still available through the menu (guess where), while I’ve written some content here already.

Apparently, even two months of hardly posting anything did not do harm to my reputation of a pop nerd and emails kept arriving from people telling me about new bands and records. Really, keeping up with the new things in indiepop is highly overrated.
This does not mean I don’t appreciate those emails, as some do tell me worthwhile news. I got an email from Dan, who was in Ambassadeurs, who told me that the band has changed their name to Double Dan (I leave it up to you to guess the other band member’s name). Now that makes sense, as their was always the risk of confusion with other Swedish bands The Embassy and Sambassadeur, but also their sound has changed towards a more quiet, more mellow one. Three new songs on their site, as well as a couple of old ones, and I like them.

‘Efcharisto’ (ευχαριστώ) is Greek for thank you, while ‘signomi’ (συγγνώμη) means sorry. It should try not to confuse them anymore. Now the woman who bumped into me in the supermarket the other day must have some strange ideas about me.

We were at the university today; the girlfriend to show her ability to learn ancient Greek history by heart, me to work a bit on the laptop while enjoying some late afternoon sun. But when the girlfriend had left for the exam I suddenly realised the hand that had been holding the laptop-case all day was empty. [Include some swear words here that would put me higher up in the Google ranks.] I hurried back to the place where I remebered to have had it fifteen minutes before. It still was lying there, visible for hundreds of students passing by, but apparently untouched. I love Greece. In the Netherlands, until three years ago the thing would have found a new happy owner within a minute; these days the whole area would have been evacuated and the bag exploded by the police’s special forces. In England they would have blown me up too, probably.