One of my occasional music posts

First things first, the following is brilliant and should be downloaded immediately:

Johan Heltne - Hjärta. Instinkt. Principer. [courtesy of It's A Trap! Scandinavian Music Journal]

If you haven't done that already- and let's face it, why should you have done - I guess I should probably try to explain what's so brilliant about it. Which is a bloody nuisance, quite frankly... but anyway, re being brilliant, it just is - in a Swedish chamber-pop, Andrew Bird mixed with Joseph Arthur and lots of lovely strings and plinky things kind of a way. If it were a person he/she would put you at ease immediately with his/her gentle warmth, openness, enthusiasm and charm, inspire you, make you look at things anew, then unexpectedly and wisely leave before all that became, frankly, just a little bit wearisome - whether you might see him/her again, you'll have no idea but, in a way, that won't even matter, they made you feel good for a while and you'll settle for that; that's better than most chance encounters go.

Of course, this is where music has the advantage over people, you can press play again and bask in that feeling as many times as you like. Ha, beat that 'people'!

Erm, anyway, there are three more free tracks to download on his website, plus an album to buy here (or at iTunes), and the inevitable MySpace page. He's with a different set of musicians on each track, apparently, so don't expect them all to be like that one. But do expect them all to be excellent, especially Din alkoholism är ingen alkoholism - a walk along a breezy, deserted beach in late-October, just as dusk's falling, except in song form. Wonderful.

In other news: some naughty techie types have worked out how to download any song from MySpace. The tracks you'll get are only 96kbps bit rate, but you could always just buy them instead, couldn't you? Except when you actually can't, because they're unavailable as far as you can tell, which is when that link really does come in handy.