So, what are you listening to these days?

Welcome to Wondercafe2!

A community where we discuss, share, and have some fun together. Join today and become a part of it!

Register Log in
Just discovered this wonderful singer. Ekaterina Shelehova was born in Russia and raised here in Ontario, studying voice and piano at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto. She then went to a conservatory in Milan, Italy for her bachelor's and master's degrees in music and appeared on Italia's Got Talent while living there. Since then, she has travelled extensively to perform, including returning to Russia and spending time working in China. This new song from Ekaterina came out a few days ago. Not sure how I have missed hearing her before, but glad I finally did.

 
More Ekaterina. I have long loved Howard Blake's "Walking On The Air", originally written for the film The Snowman. I first heard it sung by Aled Jones back in the eighties, then rediscovered it just a few years ago through Nightwish's cover of it. It's a beautiful song and this arrangement by Panos Topalidis combined with Ekaterina's performance really captures that beauty well.

 
Kimmio Laughterlove said:
We know what this person’s been secretly listening to lol.

vancouversun.com

B.C. camper heard yelling in the woods not in distress, just singing Nickelback

A search and rescue call in Kelowna's Boulderfields area turned out to be a lone camper singing to himself in the woods.
vancouversun.com vancouversun.com
Click to expand...
No wonder they thought he was in distress. You'd only hear me singing Nickelback if I was in distress. ;)

(to be fair, I do like a couple Nickelback songs, they just aren't my cuppa otherwise)
 
Laufey's new single is musically beautiful, but lyrically it's a bit on the dark side, expressing her feelings about how society wants its women to look a certain way. She doesn't hold back, either, and gives one of her best vocal performances so far in this album cycle. In a comment, someone quoted an interview where she apparently said she deliberately made some technical errors in the vocals to avoid being too perfect, an interesting artistic choice for this song.

 
Mendalla said:
No wonder they thought he was in distress. You'd only hear me singing Nickelback if I was in distress. ;)

(to be fair, I do like a couple Nickelback songs, they just aren't my cuppa otherwise)
Click to expand...

Good thing they didn’t mention his name. He’s obviously not ready to come out as a fan.

(Actually poor guy. He’s getting roasted on Reddit. I hope he has a good sense of humour! Personally, that story made my day. Thank you to whoever he is, for the laugh.)
 
Singer-songwriter Malinda has not achieved Laufey's fame, but it's not a lack of talent or skill. She packs a fantastic voice and uses it beautifully on both covers and her originals. Here she takes on a Sara Bareilles song from the musical Waitress. A stage actress as well as a singer, Malinda recently starred in a production of the show in Maryland and it shows here. It's a powerful, very emotional performance of what has to be one of Bareilles' best songs.

 
Mendalla said:
Singer-songwriter Malinda has not achieved Laufey's fame, but it's not a lack of talent or skill. She packs a fantastic voice and uses it beautifully on both covers and her originals. Here she takes on a Sara Bareilles song from the musical Waitress. A stage actress as well as a singer, Malinda recently starred in a production of the show in Maryland and it shows here. It's a powerful, very emotional performance of what has to be one of Bareilles' best songs.

Click to expand...
Beautiful voice.
 
Mendalla said:
Indeed. She's quite the multitalented creative, too. For her last album she wrote and directed a feature-length film that she called a "visual album", using the songs from the album to tell the story. It was kind of a midway point between long form music videos and an actual musical.
Click to expand...
I’ll check it out. Thanks.
 
III - Candles & Beginnings is one of my favourite album titles of 2025 and the latest album from Auri, about whom I have talked upthread. Short version is that it's two members (Tuomas and Troy) from my favourite metal band, Nightwish, with the wife (Johanna Kurkela) of one of them joining in on vocals. The album is terrific as far as I have gone in it (listening to it in the car going to work so only got about six songs in). This is also the first time they've been able to tour. Between two of them being in another band and the pandemic, there's been no opportunity for them to tour the first two albums.

 
RIght now, the 2025 edition of the Summer Breeze Open Air festival in Germany. The acts I want to see are on later, but current is Irish-influenced German folk-rockers Fiddler's Green who are always a fun band to watch and listen to. I am really here for some later acts, including former Nightwish members Tarja and Marko Hietala, who patched up and started working together again a couple years ago. They even released a new original duet for Marko's last solo album, their first time recording together since Tarja left Nightwish in 2005.
 
Taylor Momsen first came to fame as an actress, appearing in movies (How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Spy Kids 2) and TV (she was a regular on Gossip Girl). However, Momsen had been singing and writing music for most of her life, e.g. she sang in "How the Grinch..." at seven years old and apparently wrote her first song at eight. In 2009, she co-founded the rock band The Pretty Reckless. Her acting career ended shortly after that (she left Gossip Girl in 2011 save for a cameo in one scene in 2012) as Taylor shifted her focus to music.

The Pretty Reckless isn't quite metal, but certainly skirts the line between heavy metal and hard rock, much as Halestorm does (the two bands have toured together). They opened for AC/DC on their tour last year, another band that fits in that "not quite heavy metal" space (in fact, AC/DC pretty much created it).

This is the latest from The Pretty Reckless.

 
One of my favourite musicals is Little Shot of Horrors. It started as an off-Broadway show adapted from Roger Corman's quickie B-movie horror-comedy of the same name. Later, it went full circle, with a big screen version of the musical directed by Frank Oz. In both the original stage production and the movie, the character of Audrey was played by actress-singer Ellen Greene. And her performance in the role has kind of dominated the history of it. So it's great to hear a marvellous version of Audrey's big solo, "Somewhere That's Green", where a new actress takes the song and makes it her own. The new actress is Joy Woods, who played the role a couple years ago, and here she performs accompanied by none other than Alan Mencken, the composer of the music for the show. Lyrics are by the late Howard Ashman, who was Mencken's writing partner until his untimely passing.

 
From her actual stage performance, Woods with Matt Doyle as Seymore Krelborn with their show-stopping duet "Suddenly Seymour".


One thing I love about the show is that while it certainly is a somewhat goofy comedy about a nerdy guy raising a monster plant, there's also a real romantic heart to the story of Seymour and Audrey, which we see in these two songs.
 
So I knew that pop-rock violinist and dancer Lindsay Stirling had a new video out but somehow missed that the guest singer (Lindsay doesn't generally sing herself but brings in guest vocalists) was Chrissty Costanza of Against The Current. Chrissy is a wonderful young singer (she just turned 30 last weekend) who has been spreading her wings and doing some solo work of late, though apparently ATC is still a going concern as well.

 
The French soprano Clementine Delauney is best known as a metal singer, serving as female vocalist in the band Visions of Atlantis since 2013 as well as being one of the members of the all-female metal vocal supergroup Exit Eden since 2017. She has a gorgeous voice and while I love her work in her bands, she does have her own YouTube channel where she has posted a couple solo covers of songs from media. It's nice to hear her doing some non-metal material. Even in Visions, I love the power ballads she sings, usually one or two per album.


 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top